2024-04-11 20:46

ADNOC considered buying all of BP or large stake ADNOC decided BP was not the right fit Move highlights ADNOC's global ambitions And it also highlights BP's vulnerability, analysts said April 11 (Reuters) - The United Arab Emirates' state-owned oil company recently considered buying Britain's BP (BP.L) New Tab, opens new tab but the deliberations did not progress beyond preliminary discussions, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) ultimately decided BP would not be the right fit for its strategy, three people said. Political considerations also weighed on the potential move, one of the people said. The 88 billion-pound ($110.3 billion) company has underperformed its competitors for years, which investors and analysts say has made the British firm a potential takeover target. U.S. oil giants are in the midst of the industry's biggest consolidation for decades, but European oil majors have to date not been involved. Investors have penalized BP's plan to reduce fossil fuel production and its faster shift toward renewables than rivals such as Shell, Exxon and Chevron. In February 2023, BP rowed back on its more aggressive energy transition plans. ADNOC, in contrast, has increased oil and gas production capacity and CEO Sultan al-Jaber is seeking to reshape the state giant in the image of a global oil major. The company, which is not publicly traded, is big enough to consider acquiring the smaller of the oil majors, BP. ADNOC and BP spoke directly in recent months and ADNOC also sought advice from investment banks on a potential deal, two of the people said. The Emirati giant considered all options when looking at BP, including buying a big stake, a fourth person said. Large companies typically evaluate the market value and strategic worth of rivals for potential acquisitions. BP was one of many companies ADNOC has looked at, the person added. "It didn't go far," the person said of the considerations over buying BP. ADNOC has also looked at other international companies to give it access to a bigger gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) portfolio, the person added. ADNOC declined to comment for this story. A BP spokesman and a spokesman for Britain's business ministry also declined to comment. BP's UK shares rose by as much as 2.5% in early trade Friday to 533.9 pence per share, their highest level since October, outperforming a 0.8% rise in the broader FTSE 100 and a 1.3% rise in competitor Shell(SHEL.L) New Tab, opens new tab BP'S VULNERABILITY The considerations underscore ADNOC's ambitions to expand internationally as part of the UAE's energy transition strategy. It also highlights BP's vulnerability as investors question its plans. ADNOC previously told Reuters it is pursuing investment opportunities in areas including renewable energy, gas, petrochemicals and liquefied natural gas as part of its international expansion. ADNOC sees those sectors as key future growth markets. ADNOC has been pursuing a series of European assets. Last year it made a non-binding bid of about 11.3 billion euros ($12.1 billion) to acquire German plastics and chemicals maker Covestro. It has also been in talks with Austria’s OMV to create a chemicals giant with combined annual sales of more than $20 billion. In December, it agreed to buy European chemical producer OCI's stake in ammonia and urea producer Fertiglobe for $3.6 billion. BP, which reported profits of $13.8 billion last year, is valued at the lowest multiple amongst the global oil majors when measured by market capitalisation versus cashflow. The gap between BP’s price-to-cashflow ratio on a 12-month forward basis and that of rival Shell has widened in recent months to levels not seen in years. Jefferies analyst Giacomo Romeo said that although BP's shares are trading at "a clear valuation discount relative to peers," the company has "an attractive set of assets including good growth opportunities in its upstream portfolio and a best-in-class trading business." BP Chief Executive Murray Auchincloss took the top job in January, succeeding Bernard Looney who was dismissed in December for lying to the board over personal relationships with colleagues. UBS analyst Joshua Stone said ADNOC's move highlights the view that the European oil and gas sector remains undervalued. "The key question now is if BP can convince the market of the growth still to come from their transition businesses," Stone told Reuters. BP and ADNOC have been working together for more than 50 years. In February, they announced a joint venture to develop gas assets in Egypt. The two also made a $2 billion offer to buy a 50% stake in Israeli gas producer NewMed last year, although the deal is on hold due to the conflict in the region. Britain’s National Security and Investment (NSI) Act came into force in 2022, giving the government power to intervene in acquisitions on national security grounds in industries including energy. UK governments have in the past told London-listed BP that they would block any takeover attempts by foreign entities given the company's strategic value, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. It is unclear whether the current government would take the same position. The UAE has expressed interest in investing in UK nuclear power infrastructure, sources told Reuters last month. The UK government last month in effect killed a UAE-led takeover of newspaper the Telegraph, and plans to ban foreign governments from owning newspapers. ($1 = 0.9314 euros) ($1 = 0.7977 pounds) https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/uaes-adnoc-recently-eyed-bp-takeover-target-sources-say-2024-04-11/

2024-04-11 20:32

April 11 (Reuters) - Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM.N) New Tab, opens new tab said on Thursday its division is expanding a recall to include 17 additional lots of chicken, swine and rabbit feed products due to elevated levels of magnesium, sodium, calcium and/or phosphorus that may harm the animals. ADM Animal Nutrition in late March had recalled select Pen Pals chicken feed, MoorMan's ShowTec swine feed, AMPT cattle feed and Seniorglo horse feed products. Elevated levels of sodium can cause reduced feed efficiency and egg production, among others, and can be fatal in chickens, while elevated levels of calcium and/or phosphorus can cause reduced feed intake and feed conversion in swine. Elevated levels of magnesium and sodium can cause reduced growth rate and weakness in rabbits. Shares of ADM closed nearly 2% down on Thursday. Get a look at the day ahead in U.S. and global markets with the Morning Bid U.S. newsletter. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/adm-division-expands-recall-include-additional-animal-feed-products-2024-04-11/

2024-04-11 20:20

April 11 (Reuters) - President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Russia had been obliged to launch strikes that have inflicted heavy damage on Ukrainian energy sites in response to Kyiv's attacks on Russian targets. The Kremlin leader, quoted by Russian news agencies, was speaking to his ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, after overnight attacks destroyed a large electricity plant near Kyiv and hit power facilities in several regions of Ukraine. The president said the strikes were part of the process of "demilitarisation" of Ukraine -- one of the objectives he cited when he sent Russian troops into Ukraine in February 2022. "Unfortunately, we observed a series of strikes on our energy sites recently and were obliged to respond," Putin was quoted as saying. "The strikes on energy are linked in part with solving one of the tasks we set for ourselves, and that is demilitarisation. We believe above all that in this way we will affect Ukraine's military industrial complex and in a very direct way." Russia, he said, had refrained from carrying out such attacks in winter "out of humanitarian considerations". "What I mean is that we didn't want to leave social institutions without power, hospitals and the like," he said. But he said the Ukrainian strikes -- mainly on oil refineries in many different Russian regions in recent weeks -- prompted Moscow to respond. In his comments to Lukashenko, Putin again dismissed any suggestion by Ukraine's Western allies that Russia had plans to attack any European countries beyond Ukraine. "That is nonsense. It is necessary for the ruling circles, as we used to say, to explain and justify their expenditure on the war in Ukraine," he said. Putin again rejected any notion of holding peace talks without Russia's participation -- Switzerland has said it will host a "world summit" on Ukraine in June but Russia said it would not take part. Both Putin and Lukashenko agreed that the best starting point for any settlement in Ukraine was the series of talks held in Turkey in 2022 in the early weeks of the war, which broke up with no agreement. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says talks on peace must be based on his plan which calls for withdrawal of Russian troops, restoration of Ukraine's 1991 post-Soviet borders and a mechanism to bring Russian to account for its actions. The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-russia-had-attack-ukraine-energy-sites-response-kyivs-strikes-2024-04-11/

2024-04-11 19:45

NEW YORK, April 11 (Reuters) - Sam Bankman-Fried, facing the prospect of spending much of his adult life behind bars, on Thursday appealed his conviction and 25-year prison sentence for stealing $8 billion from customers of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange he founded. Defense lawyer Marc Mukasey had announced plans for the appeal to the Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals during Bankman-Fried's March 28 sentencing hearing. The 32-year-old former billionaire crypto wunderkind was convicted in November on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy in what federal prosecutors have called one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history. Bankman-Fried's appeal could take years. He faces steep odds, with his lawyers needing to persuade the 2nd Circuit - and potentially the U.S. Supreme Court - that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan made significant errors that deprived Bankman-Fried of his legal rights and made the trial unfair. The sentence imposed by Kaplan was shorter than the 40- to 50-year term that prosecutors had recommended but longer than the 5-1/4 years or fewer that Mukasey had suggested. Bankman-Fried's sentencing put an exclamation point on his downfall from an entrepreneur whose meteoric rise prompted adulation, reverence and jealousy from some quarters into the biggest trophy for U.S. prosecutors in their crackdown on excesses in the cryptocurrency markets. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate rode a boom in the values of bitcoin and other digital assets to a $26 billion net worth before he turned 30, Forbes magazine estimated. Bankman-Fried also became a major political donor and an advocate of effective altruism, a movement that encourages talented young people to focus on earning money and giving it away to worthy causes. His wealth evaporated when Bahamas-based FTX declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022, following a wave of withdrawals by customers panicking over reports that Bankman-Fried commingled their assets with Alameda Research, a crypto-focused hedge fund he also controlled. The next month, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States. 'BAD DECISIONS' Three former close associates testified as prosecution witnesses against Bankman-Fried, saying he ordered them to use FTX funds to pay Alameda's debts, make political donations and buy luxury real estate in the Bahamas. They pleaded guilty to fraud and are awaiting sentencing. Bankman-Fried testified in his own defense, acknowledging he made mistakes managing risk but denying he stole money. "I made a series of bad decisions," Bankman-Fried said at his sentencing hearing. "They weren't selfish decisions. They weren't selfless decisions. They were bad decisions." His lawyers have complained that prosecutors worked too closely with FTX's bankruptcy estate, and asked it to hand over only information that would help their case. During the sentencing hearing, Mukasey told Kaplan that the judge should ignore the prosecution's claim that FTX customers had lost $8 billion because, he said, customers would likely be made whole eventually. Kaplan dismissed that as speculative, and said Bankman-Fried lied by testifying he did not know until shortly before FTX's collapse that Alameda had spent large sums of customer money. "He was viewing the cost of getting caught, discounted by probability or improbability, against the gain of getting away without getting caught, given the probabilities. That was the game," Kaplan said of Bankman-Fried. Earlier on Thursday, Bankman-Fried's former lawyer Mark Cohen questioned the disparity between Bankman-Fried's sentence and rival exchange Binance's founder Changpeng Zhao's maximum 18-month sentence for violating an anti-money laundering law. Zhao pleaded guilty in connection with a $4.3 billion settlement for Binance and is due to be sentenced on April 30. Authorities said Binance failed to report more than 100,000 suspicious transactions with U.S.-designated terrorist groups including Hamas, al Qaeda and Islamic State. "These are very different outcomes," Cohen, who represented Bankman-Fried at his trial, said at a conference hosted by the New York City Bar. "Can you square them from a policy point of view? I would suggest it's very hard." Nicolas Roos, one of prosecutors in the Bankman-Fried case, said at the conference that the two cases involved very different conduct. Zhao also acknowledged wrongdoing and traveled voluntarily to the United States to face the charges. Jumpstart your morning with the latest legal news delivered straight to your inbox from The Daily Docket newsletter. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/legal/bankman-fried-appeals-ftx-fraud-conviction-25-year-sentence-2024-04-11/

2024-04-11 19:17

Canadian dollar weakens 0.1% against the greenback Touches its weakest since Nov. 22 at 1.3725 Price of U.S. oil settles 1.4% lower 10-year yield climbs to a 5-month high TORONTO, April 11 (Reuters) - The Canadian dollar weakened to a near five-month low against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday as oil prices fell and U.S. inflation data suggested a delayed start to Federal Reserve interest rate cuts. The loonie edged 0.1% lower to 1.3685 per U.S. dollar, or 73.07 U.S. cents, after touching its weakest intraday level since Nov. 22 at 1.3725. "The greenback is powering higher against all rivals, overwhelming any domestic fundamentals," said Karl Schamotta, chief market strategist at Corpay. "That's on the back of yesterday's hotter-than-expected U.S. inflation print and today's firmer than anticipated rise in services inflation, all of which is setting the stage for a later start to the U.S. easing cycle and a shallower outcome." U.S. producer price data for March showed the cost of services rising 0.3% after climbing by the same margin in February. It follows the release on Wednesday of consumer price data that rattled investors. The loonie fell to a five-month low after the Bank of Canada said on Wednesday that a June interest rate cut was possible if a recent cooling trend in inflation is sustained. Money markets expect the Canadian central bank to ease by 58 basis points this year compared to 43 basis points by the Fed. <0#BOCWATCH< The price of oil , one of Canada's major exports, settled 1.4% lower at $85.02 a barrel following a major U.S. refinery outage. The Canadian 10-year yield rose 3.2 basis points to 3.728%, after touching its highest level since Nov. 16 at 3.763%. Keep up with the latest medical breakthroughs and healthcare trends with the Reuters Health Rounds newsletter. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/c-hits-5-month-low-us-inflation-data-underpins-greenback-2024-04-11/

2024-04-11 18:48

ECB insists it is not Fed dependent Analysts, policymakers worry about contagion FRANKFURT, April 11 (Reuters) - The European Central Bank may protest it is not "Fed-dependent" but it will likely find itself singing from a hymn sheet largely written by the U.S. Federal Reserve whether it wants to or not. The ECB is sticking to plans to reduce interest rates from record highs, likely at its next meeting in June, in light of a continued fall in inflation in the 20 countries that share the euro. This is in contrast to U.S. price growth, which has beaten analyst expectations for three months straight, and is now expected to keep the Fed from lowering its own borrowing costs until September. ECB President Christine Lagarde insisted her institution was "data-dependent, not Fed-dependent" on Thursday. But analysts and policymakers said high U.S. inflation and interest rates were bound to have an impact on the ECB's plans via financial markets and trade. "While we continue to believe that the ECB will be the first central bank to start cutting rates this year, the path beyond that will remain dictated by Fed action," Max Stainton, a senior global macro strategist at Fidelity International, said. In a sign of how closely interrelated central banks are at present, Sweden's Riksbank said on Thursday the main threat to a May interest rate cut would come from the postponement of the Fed's and the ECB's own easing cycles. Sources told Reuters after Thursday's meeting that ECB policymakers still expected to cut interest rates in June but some thought the case for pausing at their following meeting was becoming stronger given U.S. inflation. They argue the euro zone's central bank could skip a mid-summer rate reduction until it was comfortable with the path for U.S. borrowing costs. EXCHANGE RATE This is because lower interest rates in the euro zone than in the United States were bound to depress the euro's exchange rate, mechanically increasing the price of some goods priced in U.S. dollars, such as crude oil. This has already started to happen, with the euro down 1.3% against the U.S. dollar since the U.S. inflation reading on Wednesday to the lowest level since February. "We continue to think that the ECB will likely end up cutting rates ahead of the Fed, although the number of cuts will be restrained somewhat by the currency effect via a vis dollar," Andrew Lake, head of fixed income at Mirabaud Asset Management, said. Money markets price in three interest rate cuts by the ECB by December versus four only a few weeks ago . In addition, U.S. inflation has led that of the euro zone by a few months in this last cycle with surprising precision. While the reason for the price increases might have been different - with demand in the United States playing a much stronger role than in the euro zone, where higher fuel costs were the key driver - some still see scope for contagion given the regions' close financial and trade ties. "The ECB is independent of the Fed," Mohit Kumar, chief European economist at Jefferies, said. "But the Fed is also data dependent and if U.S. data continues to be strong, it may have an impact on European data as well." Some analysts cautioned the impact might be more mixed. The euro zone's own bond yields were likely to rise in tandem with their U.S. counterparts, tightening financial conditions and perhaps even requiring the ECB to cut its own interest rates even more. "It is not clear that the net effect would be a loosening of financial conditions that reduces the ECB’s appetite for rate cuts," Marco Valli, global head of research at UniCredit, said. Get a look at the day ahead in European and global markets with the Morning Bid Europe newsletter. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/solo-minded-ecb-may-find-itself-singing-feds-hymn-sheet-after-all-2024-04-11/