Ciarán Hancock:Setanta continues winning ways; Window shopping guzzles Petrogas profits; Is PayPoint peckish to pick up Payzone?; Ryanair keeps the legal eagles flying high
Setanta continues winning ways
IRISH PAY television broadcaster Setanta Sports continues to hoover up live rights to major English football events.
Earlier this week the Dublin-based broadcaster's North American division acquired the rights to show live English FA Cup and England internationals in the United States and Canada.
The four-year rights deal kicks off in August with coverage of the Community Shield and will include live cup matches, England home internationals and other FA-related programming.
Setanta teamed up with ITV last year to secure the same live rights for the UK in a £425 million deal that muscled out the BBC and Sky. The Irish station is coughing up about £150 million of that sum.
Adding on the rights to North America makes eminent sense for Setanta, although it is not clear how much it paid for the privilege.
The deal in the US sees Setanta team up with the Fox Sports Channel, which is part of Rupert Murdoch's broadcast empire.
The two companies will divide up coverage of games between them with both showing the FA Cup final live.
Such a deal would be unthinkable in the UK where Setanta and Murdoch's BSkyB are sworn rivals for live football rights and the millions of customers they attract.
Window shopping guzzles Petrogas profits
CORPORATE WINDOW shopping is an expensive business judging by the latest accounts filed by forecourt retailer Petrogas.
Results for the 12 months to the end of June 2007, filed recently with the Companies Office, show that Petrogas's unsuccessful bid for Statoil's network of filling stations in the Republic guzzled €408,000 of its €6 million operating profit in adviser fees.
Owned by Joe Barrett and Bob Etchingham, Petrogas operates about 50 filling stations, many of them under the Applegreen brand.
It was one of a number of underbidders for the Statoil chain of forecourts that went to Topaz, the company that had already acquired the Shell service stations here.
When interest, tax and other items are deducted, Petrogas was left with a profit of €2.7 million for the year.
A tidy sum, no doubt, but just a fraction of the €157 million that it recorded in turnover last year.
Petrogas has had better luck on the acquisition front in the current financial year, spending €26 million on three Irish-registered businesses - Trukar Ltd, Taciturn Trading Ltd and Reflare Ltd - and UK-based Linkside Estates.
Petrogas has seven forecourt operations in the southeast of England and chief executive Etchingham tells us that further expansion is in the pipeline.
"The scope for growing the business is much greater in the long term in the UK," he said.
"It's conceivable that over time the UK could be as big as the Irish one," Etchingham said.
PayPoint peckish to pick up Payzone?
AN INTERESTING CONTRAST this week in the fortunes of Dublin-based electronic payments group Payzone and its UK-based rival PayPoint.
While Payzone's new boss, Mike Maloney, estimated that the troubled company would lose €30 million in the current year and put his cap out for an additional €40 million in investor backing, PayPoint reported a 16 per cent rise in its operating profit to £29 million.
In addition to being one of the biggest players in the UK electronic payments market, PayPoint processes about €7.5 billion worth of payments in Ireland for a number of utility companies, including Eircom, NTL and Bord Gáis. It also has about 500 agents here and provides mobile top-up services.
PayPoint chief executive Dominic Taylor said the Irish business was doing well, without giving specific financial details.
Payzone's fall from grace has been both swift and spectacular.
The merger of Alphyra and Cardpoint has brought with it considerable merger pains, with chief executive John Nagle and chief financial officer John Williamson both removed from their posts and court cases pending.
Maloney is proposing to issue new shares at 20 pence each. We wish him luck.
For starters, he has to get this past shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting. This includes Nagle who owns about 10 per cent of the business and is unlikely to favour a rights issue at such a steep discount or a request to waive his pre-emption rights.
In December, at the time of the merger, Payzone's shares traded just above 70 pence each. They declined to 47.75 pence by the time of their suspension on January 17th, when the spat with Nagle was at its peak.
Then they more than halved in value on the resumption of trading on Wednesday.
They were changing hands in London yesterday at just above 10 pence, suggesting that Maloney has little chance of bagging any new money.
Speculation surrounding a bid by PayPoint for its Irish rival has mounted in recent times.
PayPoint has £27 million (€34 million) in cash on its balance sheet. Payzone is currently only valued at about £40 million.
There might never be a better time to do a deal, although Payzone's €276 million debt pile could prove a problem.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Taylor was coy about any possible move.
"We're always looking at opportunities," he said, adding that he was "not prepared to comment on any speculation" linking PayPoint with a bid for Payzone.
"It wouldn't be appropriate to comment on that," he said.
It's what you might call a non-denial denial.
Ryanair keeps the legal eagles flying high
RYANAIR BOSS Michael O'Leary clearly loves to have his day in court, although given the airline's patchy record in front of Irish judges, it's hard to fathom why.
On Tuesday, the High Court threw out its legal challenge to the aviation regulator's determination on airline charges.
To rub salt in its wounds, the High Court ruled that Ryanair should pay half the legal costs of the Commission for Aviation Regulation and the Dublin Airport Authority's full legal bill. The DAA was a notice party to the action.
It is understood the DAA's bill amounts to about €200,000, while the half share of the regulator's costs will be something similar.
This will leave Ryanair with a bill of €400,000 or more, in addition to the bill for its own legal eagles.
Yesterday, Ryanair notified the regulator of its intention to pursue a legal challenge to its recent decision to allow the DAA to increase the charge for check-in desks by 50 per cent to €25,000 a year. This is the sixth time in four years that O'Leary has gone legal with the regulator. His record is played five, won one - and that's under appeal to the Supreme Court.
The regulator has said its costs in relation to these cases amount to €2 million. It's no wonder O'Leary is jacking up his baggage and online priority boarding charges.
