Beautiful pay day beckons for U2 after sold-out Las Vegas residency

U2 is set for a record pay-day of more than €100 million from its Las Vegas residency, reports the Business Post.

All 297,500 tickets for the concert series sold out last week in a presale phase, with no general sale being held.

The U2: UV Achtung Baby performances will take place across 17 dates in the autumn at the 17,500-capacity MSG Sphere in the city’s Venetian Hotel, with the residency format resulting in lower costs and higher profits for the band’s first live shows in four years.

Tickets for the concerts start at $140 (€126), earning the group a minimum of €2 million a night, the newspaper estimates, assuming the standard fee of 90 per cent of the face value of the tickets. It adds that the real figure is likely to be much higher once higher-priced tickets and corporate packages are taken into account, with revenue also likely to be boosted by merchandising sales and media rights.

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Drummer Larry Mullen is not participating in the residency as he will be recovering from surgery.

DAA judicial review

Airport operator DAA is seeking a judicial review of Fingal’s new county development plan, reports the Sunday Independent.

The operator of Dublin and Cork airports claims the plan could impose additional costs of more than €1.8 billion on the airport, impinging its future development.

DAA has commenced action in the High Court claiming that two material alterations to the plan, relating to noise and the rezoning of strategic land, could impose a loss of value on the company as well as the State as its shareholder.

A spokesman for the operator said the aircraft noise material alteration had been adopted by Fingal councillors against the recommendations of both Fingal’s chief executive and the Office of the Planning Regulator (OPR) and was “an arbitrary requirement to expand the noise insulation schemes”.

Stamp duty loss

The exit of building materials group CRH and Paddy Power owner Flutter Entertainment from the Euronext Dublin Stock Exchange will cost the Government close to €250 million a year in lost stamp duty, according to the Sunday Times.

Fears are rising over the future of Ireland’s equity markets after CRH, the largest stock on the index, said it would quit it in favour of a primary listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Flutter is expected to follow suit.

Investors buying shares on Euronext Dublin pay a transaction tax of 1 per cent, compared with 0.5 per cent in London. The newspaper says it understands that executives from Euronext Dublin have asked the Government to introduce incentives to boost deal flows, including a possible reduction in the tax.

RTÉ's TG4 concerns

RTÉ told a consultancy process that it “assumed” that extra funding received by TG4 to launch its new children’s channel would not come at RTÉ's expense “in a scenario where there are competing demands for public funding for public service broadcasting”, reports the Sunday Independent.

The broadcaster also highlighted how TG4 had received a number of tranches of extra funding in recent years while RTÉ was still short of the additional financial boost that had been previously recommended by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.

It raised this in a submission to Communications Chambers, a consultancy firm analysing plans for the new €5.6 million a year Irish language children’s channel, Cúla4, and a time-shifted channel. The submission was released to the newspaper under the Freedom of Information Act.

Accenture’s Meta contract

More than a quarter of the jobs being cut at Accenture’s Dublin office are the result of Meta cancelling a contract with the global consulting firm, reports the Business Post, citing an internal company document.

In March, Accenture announced that it was cutting 400 of its staff in Ireland as part of a plan to lay off 19,000 of its more than 700,000 employees worldwide over the next 18 months.

The newspaper said 113 of the 404 roles being made redundant relate to an account Accenture holds with Meta, but the company has told employees that “this work is no longer being undertaken by Accenture for the client” and that the project “will no longer be in operation” as of the end of April.

Ires Reit meeting

Two heavyweight shareholders in Ires Reit, Ireland’s largest private landlord, have thrown their weight behind the board of the company in advance of a critical vote at the trust’s annual meeting next week, according to the Sunday Times.

The newspaper understands that US-based Fidelity Investments and Dutch giant APG Asset Management, which account for a combined 12 per cent of the register, will vote with the board at the May 4th meeting.

Vision Capital, which has about 5 per cent of Ires stock, has accused the trust’s board of mismanaging the company and wants to see the trust privatised.