David Parkin on the future of Yorkshire Bank and how to avoid indigestion
NAB announced a 1.1% drop in net profit to A$5.3bn and saw cash earnings fall 9.8% to $5.18bn in the year to September.
Chief executive Andrew Thorburn said there was a need for “greater urgency” in dealing with low returning assets.
“While our Australia and New Zealand franchises are in good shape, it is disappointing to record a full year result that includes $1.5bn after tax in UK conduct provisions and other impairments,” he said.
Would investing in those assets rather than hacking away at them leaving a shrunken, demoralised workforce, have improved things for NAB?
We don’t know.
But the timing doesn’t look great for a stock market float of the two banks.
Aldermore pulled its float this month following on from the aborted IPO of Co-operative Bank earlier this year, while speculation remains whether RBS will be able to divest part of its operations, which will be renamed Williams & Glyn, through a stock market flotation.
RBS itself and Lloyds are still part-owned by the taxpayer and Lloyds announced thousands of job losses earlier this week. It floated off TSB earlier this year and its shares haven’t exactly become a top performing stock.
So it doesn’t appear to be a great time to be thinking of floating a bank on the UK stock market.
But given the paucity of information provided by NAB yesterday, it doesn’t look like it really knows quite what it will do with Yorkshire and Clydesdale yet.
THE death of Yorkshire-based knee surgeon Stuart Calder who drowned in an accident off a Cornish beach at the weekend was shocking.
It appears that the 52-year-old father-of-four ran into the sea with two other people to try to help a group of teenage boys who were struggling in the waves.
All three perished but the youngsters managed to make it to the shore.
Stuart Calder was a well known and highly respected knee surgeon with the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust and the Yorkshire Knee Clinic.
Specialising in sports injuries and arthritis, there are plenty of people in the Yorkshire business community who he treated during his distinguished career.
I met him when he operated on my anterior cruciate ligament which I snapped in a football accident about a decade ago.
Highly intelligent, engagingly eccentric, he was as likeable as he was talented.
Before I was discharged from hospital he gave me a DVD of the operation. While my op was on the NHS, it made me feel like I’d gone private.
I never watched the film but wondered if well off patients used to throw a cheese and wine evening to show friends the DVD of their surgery in the way that families used to have slide shows of their summer holidays.
There are countless people who have Stuart Calder to thank for their successful surgery.
That is scant consolation to his grieving wife and four children.
But it is a legacy they can be proud of.
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WHAT was it that legendary comedian Groucho Marx said?
Well, plenty of great one liners.
But perhaps one of his best known was: “I don’t want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.”
I felt a bit like that when I attended the opening of a new Leeds restaurant and bar called Buca di Pizza last night.
Launched by the team behind the successful Epernay champagne bar, Pour House and Atlas bars, this new entrant to the burgeoning city centre eating scene has opened in the former cellar home of La Grillade on Wellington Street.
The cavern-like premises haven’t changed much and seeing it full of trendy young things slurping exotic drinks was like bumping into a dear friend who has had too much botox – you recognise them but you don’t like what they’ve become.
As well as authentic Italian cuisine and cocktails, the new pizzeria also boasts a mobile phone receiver to enable customers to get a signal on their mobile phone in the cellar premises.
I don’t know about anyone else, but one of the attractions of La Grillade was the fact that when you were there you couldn’t receive telephone calls.
I would wander back to the Yorkshire Post newsroom with the perfect excuse that I didn’t know anyone had called me.
That worked until the editor got his secretary to telephone the restaurant’s landline to check on my whereabouts.
The owner, Guy Martin-Laval, soon learned to tell them they had the wrong number and another bottle of Chateau Auris rouge would be cracked open.
So why the Groucho reference?
Well I don’t want to have lunch in a restaurant where anyone can call me.
Being confronted by the reality of work during lunch does not help the digestive process.
Have a great weekend.
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