Mysterious twist to United Drug report:Without a doubt the most avidly awaited piece of information from any company's annual report is the amount of money being paid to its directors.
Having already been party to the company's financial performance through the preliminary results, a read through of the annual report should leave shareholders feeling like they know everything they are entitled to know about their company.
Unfortunately for some unlucky United Drug shareholders, this wasn't the case this week, as the annual report for 2006 was mysteriously missing pages 37-44. Conveniently for the company, the elusive pages were those showing that chief executive Liam Fitzgerald received a 20 per cent pay increase in the last financial year, a period when the company's operating profit gained only 14 per cent and its shares just 5 per cent.
Murray Consulting, which represents the company, said it received no complaints from other shareholders concerning missing pages, though with no sign of them being torn out from this particular copy, it does seem rather apt that if any pages were to be missing it was these ones.
Channel 6 finally has change of heart
Channel 6 tuned into the real world this week with its decision to cut a deal with Sky Ireland for carriage on its satellite platform.
Michael Murphy, its chief executive, said the move was a "major step forward" for Channel 6 and would increase its audience penetration and revenues. Indeed it will. Sky Ireland this week said it had 465,000 subscribers here and added almost 2,000 a week in the final three months of 2006.
Murphy made no mention, however, of the fact that Channel 6 could have joined the Sky family of channels for its launch on March 30th last. And he glossed over the fact that it was being placed at the opposite end of Sky's electronic programming guide to RTÉ, TV3 and TG4. Channel 6 will appear on either channel 221 or 223 when it goes on Sky from February 5th.
It's a place where few couch potatoes go and was one of the reasons cited by Channel 6 for not going on Sky at the time of its launch, along with the satellite broadcaster's perceived rural bias.
Instead they threw in their lot with NTL and Chorus, cable operators owned by UPC Ireland, with the help of a financial incentive for exclusivity. Disappointing advertising revenues and underwhelming TV ratings in the interim appear to have spurred their change of heart.
Stating the obvious
Ireland's obsession with property has ensured that practically every vested interest now feels compelled to produce regular "research" and "survey" evidence. Amid the dross and the partisan, it is possible at times to pick up some interesting information. It is also possible to come across some spectacularly useless, self-serving drivel - like the content of the most recent EBS/DKM Affordability Index.
This found that first-time buyers were using a smaller chunk of their income to pay their mortgage than previously. Good news, no? Still, Current Account was somewhat puzzled how this could be the case after a series of six quarter-point interest rate rises in the past year.
Looking again at the survey, it emerges that DKM and EBS are measuring affordability in January - when budget measures that doubled mortgage relief for first-time buyers came into effect - with December, ie before those measures came into effect. Talk about the stating the obvious. Hopefully EBS didn't fork out too much for this ground-breaking research.
EBS goes coy on SSIAs
Staying with EBS, it has opted for a high-profile campaign to push its product range to those savers whose SSIAs are maturing in the next few months. Strange, then, that the EBS has been so reticent in providing details of the performance of its equity-based SSIA funds. Consultants Hewitts have been compiling a table of each equity SSIA provider's performance over the past five years on funds that have matured - on the basis, presumably, that investors seeking a new home for their money would be looking for as much information on performance as possible. Investors will wonder then why EBS - and Bank of Ireland, which is also targeting SSIA savings but has yet to disclose its figures to the Hewitt study - has come over all coy.
