Current Account: It is indeed a pity that Jurys Doyle has no small shareholders to speak of, for Current Account believes it is time the board was brought to account. How shockingly remiss they have been in the sales of the Jurys Ballsbridge and Berkeley Court sites!
At €57 million per acre, was it a joke? Current Account could almost raise that by busking in the streets of Ballsbridge for an hour if he put his mind to it. They are, after all, paved with gold.
Yes, the board should have had their mind on the job this summer - on making more money, more loolah, more dosh for shareholders - rather than wrestling with pesky takeover bids.
The proof? Look no further than Ray Grehan of Glenkerrin Homes. He's paying a nice and chunky €84 million an acre for the vet college site which, need Current Account remind you, sits exactly alongside the Jurys hotel site.
In case the Jurys board can't do their sums, that's €27 million more per acre than they wangled from Sean Dunne. Current Account has to hand it to him, Sean's got an eye for a bargain.
Taiwan money could come in handy for DCC
The decision of a Taiwanese court to enforce judgment in a case where DCC is owed €10 million in damages and €2 million in costs will have been welcome news in the Irish group's Stillorgan HQ.
Ms Justice Mary Laffoy is to give her judgment later this month in the marathon DCC vs Fyffes case, where the industrial holding company and its founder and chief, Jim Flavin, are being accused by the fruit company of insider trading.
The combined haul from the Taiwan case is expected to be €14 million when interest is thrown in. That sum should be about equal to the legal costs that will have to be met by whichever side the honourable judge rules against.
With us or against us?
The National Consumer Agency is finally ready to unleash itself on the public. While its board may be varied - Eddie Hobbs and Celia Larkin are among the members - there is no shortage of contentious issues for the new body to tackle.
The public relations firm responsible for presenting the agency's views in public is Q4, which operates out of a plush office on St Stephen's Green. It will be interesting to see how Q4 advises the new agency.
Will it advise the agency to direct its fire at the lack of competition in the banking sector? How about a campaign about the low levels of account switching by customers in the Republic? Given that Q4 also advises the Irish Bankers' Federation, we may be waiting some time before we receive a copy of that particular press release.
FG's muddled maths
Worried about the Government's lack of competence in managing the national economy? Never fear, Fine Gael is here. The latest Quarterly National Household Survey reveals that 96,000 jobs were created in the economy in the 12 months to August of this year.
Understandably the figure was welcomed as a vindication of government policy by Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment Micheál Martin. But that didn't fool the opposition. Ever vigilant, Fine Gael's enterprise spokesman Phil Hogan found clear evidence of Government failure in the fact that, in spite of overall employment growth, the numbers working in "other production industries" (ie manufacturing) fell over the same period.
In a thundering denunciation of government incompetence, the party said: "The CSO [ Central Statistics Office] shows the number of people employed in production industries fell by 71,000 up to the third quarter of 2005, from 305,600 in the third quarter of 2004, to 294,600 in the third quarter of 2005. This represents an average loss of 3,000 jobs per month in the last year."
Now Current Account admits that its primary school math is a bit rusty. So we dug out a calculator and subtracted 294,600 from 305,600 and got 11,000, not 71,000. We wait with bated breath for Fine Gael's analysis of the budget.
