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Getting back in the mortgage game; no reprieve on energy bills; and Google’s cost-cutting stunt

Business Today: the best news, analysis and comment from The Irish Times business desk

ICS Mortgages hopes to return to lending for owner occupiers after completing a €540m bond offering. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

Dominic Coyle's face
Dominic Coyle
Thu Apr 6 2023 - 06:33

Non-bank operator ICS Mortgages is looking to reopen lending to owner-occupiers and improve competition in the market with a bond offering by parent, Dilosk, that is pencilled to raise €540 million, writes Joe Brennan. ICS pulled back from the market last year as its borrowing costs surged.

Electricity suppliers remain tight-lipped on the prospect of cutting families’ bills despite likely further falls in wholesale prices as reports show that European natural gas stocks were at record levels last week. Barry O’Halloran reports.

Cuts in free massages, snacks and access to staplers at Google strike Karlin Lillington as a fairly trivial attempt to deflect from the far more serious business of 12,000 job losses across the group more than anything else.

Dublin City Council has refused permission for an Airbnb-style development that would have seen nine apartments in two buildings a short distance from Leinster House and across the road from the Shelbourne Hotel on Kildare Street made available for short-term letting. Gordon Deegan has the details.

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Separately, An Bord Pleanála has granted planning permission for 780 homes in north Dublin just a day after the approval of a separate 2,341 homes in the city was sanctioned. The latest approvals cover 348 apartments in Swords and 432 homes in Donabate, but a plan for 100 homes in Kinsealy was turned down.

With scammers becoming ever more sophisticated, Ciara O’Brien runs through some of the more popular approaches adopted to part unwary consumers from their cash and the steps they can take to defeat them.

Revolut says it has completed the process of giving Irish international bank account numbers (Ibans) to its base of more than two million customers in the Irish market, in a move that it hopes will persuade more customers to consider using the fintech as their main bank, writes Laura Slattery.

Another fintech, Irish-founded Stripe has forecast “meaningfully larger” growth this year after reporting that it processed more than $817 billion (€747 billion) in payments last year in line with the company’s modest projections, writes Ciara O’Brien.

Surging prices and poor customer care saw the number of complaints made to the energy watchdog almost doubling over the course of 2022, according to a new report. Conor Pope also reports that it is taking nearly twice as long to get complaints sorted.

Meanwhile a company, whose plans for a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal in Shannon have met widespread opposition, including from Minister for Environment Éamon Ryan, has won State contracts for two power plants on the same site which have yet to secure planning permission. Barry O’Halloran reports.

A founder of Altada Technology Solutions assured four people lending the business €500,000 shortly before its collapse late last year that additional funding of at least $160 million was being lined up to help plug gaps in the troubled group’s finances, an affidavit has claimed.

In Innovation, five years into the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s disruptive technologies innovation fund, Chris Horn asks what the State’s €500m investment in the area has achieved?

A US private equity owned business has paid up to €25 million for Dublin-based Total Polymer Solutions just over 20 years after it was founded by businessmen Ronan Kennedy and Eamonn Keane. Joe Brennan has the details.

Finally a Tesco deputy manager who said he was “singled out” and sacked for drinking three cans of Red Bull worth €9.45 without paying for them has lost his claim for unfair dismissal.

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