UFO Info Week-End

Pinco has support from 20

Pinco has support from 20.3 per cent of Signature’s shareholders. This includes Mr Johnson and Mr Bassadone’s combined 5.3 per cent and the stake controlled by a mystery Virgin Island-based investor, Kintaro International. Jeremy King and Christopher Corbin, who set up The Ivy before selling out to Mr Johnson in 1998, are also backing the offer.Signature’s five-year stock market heritage began in 1998 when Mr Johnson acquired Belgo for less than £10m and reversed into Lonsdale Holdings, a shell company he controlled. That year also saw the £9.3m acquisition of a group of restaurants from Mogens Tholstrup and the £13.1m purchase of Caprice Holdings from the Ivy duo Signature shares closed up 13.25p at 59.25p.. WS Atkins, the troubled engineering consultancy and PFI contractor, yesterday ousted its chief executive, cut a further 400 jobs and warned profits this year would more than halve. One sector analyst described it as the worst profit warning he had ever seen.The company, one of Britain’s biggest PFI contractors, said that Robin Southwell, who joined as chief executive from BAE Systems 18 months ago, had stood down with immediate effect. Atkins’ chairman, Michael Jeffries, has taken over temporarily as chief executive while a successor is found.The company said it would report a loss of £5m for the half-year just ended and blamed problems with the introduction of a new IT system and a sudden and sharp fall in private-sector work in the UK and US.Full-year profits are now expected to be in the region of £15m, compared with analysts’ forecasts of £40m to £42m and a £34.3m profit for last year.

Atkins described its performance as “very disappointing”.The company also disclosed that net debts had more than doubled from £57m at the end of March to about £120m at the end of September.Atkins updated the market as recently as July about the difficulties it was experiencing introducing the new IT systems, which have caused particular problems with billing and credit control. It said that working capital requirements would be £20m to £30m higher but gave no hint of the huge impact on profits.Ric Piper, the group finance director, said yesterday that cost savings from the introduction of the new systems were not being realised as quickly as expected. In addition, there had been a dramatic fall in business in the US and UK, especially in areas such as quantity surveying.The bulk of the 400 job losses will be in the UK and will be concentrated mainly on its Epsom headquarters in Surrey. The job cuts will be compulsory.Atkins will take a £7.5m one-off charge to pay for the redundancies but expects the cost reductions to result in savings of £5m in the second half and £15m in a full year.The group, part of the Metronet consortium that has been selected to take over two-thirds of the London Underground network, said its public-sector work, which accounts for about two-thirds of total turnover, was unaffected and workload remained strong.The shares, which have underperformed the support services sector by 50 per cent this year, fell 137p to end at 52p.. After its bleakest month in four years, Wall Street kicked off the new one yesterday in style, as bargain hunters took the weapons inspection deal between Iraq and the United Nations to send all the main market indices sharply higher.

But briefly, the September slump was forgotten as the Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 347 points by the close to stand at 7,939, a gain of 4.6 per cent. The technology-loaded Nasdaq Composite index rose 42 points, more than 3 per cent, while the broader-based S&P 500 jumped 4 per cent.The big plus for the market was the Iraq agreement, after stocks had earlier drifted on a new government report that manufacturing output had contracted slightly in September. It was the first such fall in eight months, and further evidence that the recovery in the US may be running out of steam.But the decline was less steep than some analysts feared, and was accompanied by hints unemployment may be easing. That and renewed hopes that war in Iraq may be avoided was all that buyers needed to step in to take advantage of the bargains on offer.A few moderately encouraging corporate statements helped as well, as Pepsi Bottling Group jumped nearly 7 per cent to $24.95 on a statement foreshadowing higher third-quarter earnings despite slower-than-expected growth in sales.Sun Microsystems dispelled a little of the gloom in the hi-tech sector as the computer maker revised earnings for the latest quarter sharply higher, saying costs were lower than anticipated. Dell Computer stock also rose in after-hours trading, as the company raised sales projections slightly for its third fiscal quarter.Despite the Iraq news, oil prices rose toward 19-month highs as the threat of a severe storm disruption to Gulf of Mexico oil and gas operations plagued the market. Oil stocks moved higher in their wake, with ExxonMobil up more than 6 per cent at $33.92.