When media baron Rupert Murdoch launched satellite television broadcast company Sky on a shoestring budget in 1989, many pundits believed it would never last. He proved them wrong, and in the process Sky swallowed its main rival, BSB. A decade later, BSkyB, after a tough marketing war, is the clear leader in the pay TV […]
Peter Leaver QC has joined Graham Kelly and Glenn Hoddle on the bench. John-Paul Flintoff discovers that the latest member of football’s ruling elite to be sent off still feels mightily aggrieved – and perhaps for good reason Until recently, Peter Leaver QC figured among the most important men in English football. As chief executive […]
In 1851, German-born immigrant Paul Julius Reuter opened an office in the City of London to transmit stock prices between London and Paris via the new Calais-Dover cable. Reuter’s innovative use of technology – two years earlier, he had been using carrier pigeons – has remained a core value of the global news and financial […]
Britain’s third largest mobile phone company has been a triumph for brand designers, and is one of the names that defines the corporate zeitgeist of the late 1990s. Launched in 1994 as a joint venture between British Aerospace and Hong Kong investment group Hutchison Whampoa, the company’s growth has been led by innovation and clever […]
British Telecom has one of the FTSE100’s largest and most dynamic in-house legal functions. The team comprises around 100 lawyers with diverse specialisms tailored towards serving a fiercely competitive international market. The team’s legal function has some unusual elements, not normally found in-house, but which are necessary for handling the diverse range of interests and […]
The London and Warsaw offices of Baker & McKenzie have acted in the largest domestic offering and listing of shares in Poland, doubling the market capitalisation of the Warsaw stock exchange. The u530m offering of shares and GDRs of Polish telecoms giant Telekomunikacja Polska SA (TPSA) also involved a London Stock Exchange offering and listing. […]
Osborne Clarke senior associate Andrew Gowans led a team advising on one of Thames Valley’s largest ever private company deals – John Madejski’s £260m sale of Hurst Publishing, the publisher of top-selling magazine Auto Trader. Gowans hailed the deal as vindication of the firm’s decision to open a Thames Valley office in Reading last January […]