Bouygues is prepared to cede assets worth up to €3 billion (which will also reduce its debt burden); a lot of them could go to Free.
Response to the challenges of public-land management is not to cede assets to private interests but to bring user fees and royalty collection on a par with those demanded by states and private land owners.Mary Winston Reno, NevadaShare and share alikeSIR – Your leader exhorting regulators to "Remove the roadblocks" (April 26th) to a sharing economy suffers from a case of petitio principii.
It was curious, then, that he mostly ceded that asset during selections from "For the Union Dead," a song cycle based on poems by Robert Lowell.
In interviews with the foreign press this month, a rich Chongqing businessman, now in hiding abroad, accused Mr Bo of using his anti-mafia campaign as a "red terror" tactic to force wealthy private entrepreneurs into ceding their assets to the government.
Presidents and vice presidents have, for decades, voluntarily sold off any active business holdings, if they had them, and ceded control over their assets to an independent trust to avoid conflicts of interest.
Bank of America's headline net profit of $6.2 billion was boosted mostly by accounting quirks and cash it has reaped from selling assets (it is now no longer America's biggest bank by assets, ceding that title to JPMorgan Chase).
As for Siemens ceding its transport assets to Alstom, the German firm commits itself only to examining possibilities later.A clutch of other things should worry Alstom too.
The most attractive swap between this pair is for Vodafone to cede its German assets, including Kabel Deutschland, for which it outbid Liberty a few years back, so it can get its hands on Virgin Media in the UK.
In the second quarter, it had only $59 billion of core equity capital (defined here as book equity less goodwill, tax assets and stock ceded to the state).
Already, Russia's richest man, Oleg V. Deripaska, the nuclear physicist turned post-Soviet corporate raider, has ceded more than a billion dollars in assets to jittery creditors as his aluminum-to-automobile empire reels.
The DEA and Department of Justice both denied extending him immunity and the case was resolved in 2013, when Vicentillo Zambada accepted a plea deal and ceded more than $1 billion worth of assets.
