Anthony Matthew Leicester Two fools in the news on 1 April: the first sells off a 300-year-old national asset at nearly half price; the second lauds the deviousness, low cunning and total untrustworthiness of President Putin.
The family was terribly hungry, and Akhtar Muhammed had first sold off his few farm animals and then, as the months passed, traded away the family's few threadbare rugs and its metal cooking utensils and even the wooden beams that held up the roof of his hovel.
They have to disremember Mr Geneen's reputation (which he obviously thinks grossly unfair) as a control freak at ITT and also to disremember the way his successors first sold off many of his conglomerate's acquired assets and then, in 1995, split it into three separate entities.
Haunted by want, depleted from hunger, Akhtar Muhammad first sold off his few farm animals and then, as the months passed, bartered away the family's threadbare rugs and its metal cooking utensils and even some of the wooden beams that held up the hard-packed roof of his overcrowded hovel.
How sweet it must be for the war profiteers to see the U.S. treasury tapped yet again so they can profit from blowing up weapons and Humvees that ISIL now controls that they already profited from when they were first sold off and given to the Iraqi military.
It wants First to sell off the Greyhound coach business and spin off of the rest of its US operations, in favour of cutting debt and investing the funds in its UK bus and rail franchises, which include First Capital Connect.
To dismantle it, the company first must sell off its leased aircraft in favor of smaller planes.
Indeed it was the British government which was the first to sell off its entire water industry in the 1980s.
Twice in three months Wall Street has dumped the shares of Yahoo! and widened the gap (see chart).The first sell-off, in July, came after Mr Semel announced that Panama, an ambitious project to improve Yahoo!'s technology so that it can make more money on each of its users' searches, would be delayed until the end of this year.
Even though it was hastily withdrawn, the threat of another mass sell-off of state shares continues to spook the market.Four years after the first sell-off, a full two-thirds of the market's $460 billion capitalisation remains tied up in non-tradable or "legal person" shares held by state-controlled entities.
For the first year it can sell off any of its shares and in the second year is allowed to sell down more than half of its economic interest in BlackRock without BlackRock's consent.
