The Spanish Armada is coming: AL already captured!

The Spanish Armada is coming!! Only just a few years yet. We don't seem to have the
warriors of the calibre of Drake and Frobisher to fight back. I suppose it is nice to
have an open, transparent market but is it helpful for our economy for Banco Santander to pick up Abbey National and Alliance and Leicester, two British mortgage banks, on the cheap?

In reality, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) must be delighted that
Santander has come in with a rescue bid, just shares and no cash on the table.
If memory serves me correctly, Alliance and Leicester nearly hooked a French group
willing to pay £15 a share. But it all fizzled out unfortunately. The acting
A&L bod is reduced now to talking about "a good fit".

It is all fine and dandy having an open market but what happens if the Russians,
Chinese, foreign sovereign funds start piling in? Would it be good for UK PLC?

I think Banco Santander is a powerful bank and its UK representative performed well
during a Gordon Brown meeting with the main banks when the Santander guy spoke up
for the building societies. It looks like the building societies will have to
huddle together anyway. The Portman deal with the Nationwide showed the way.

As for the Spanish Armada, Telefonica, Iberdrola and Agbar have also acquired sizeable businesses in the United Kingdom. I think only Barclays has returned
the favour with Banco Zaragozano, although Taylor Wimpey is probably
losing its shirt in Spanish property.

St Albans accountants Gilberts looks at capital expenditure.

In its recent newsletter the accountancy firm Gilberts, which is based in the
picturesque English town of St Albans, has warned that "businesses must carefully
plan their capital expenditure programmes if they are to make best use of the new
£50,000 annual capital allowance (AIA)."
office@gilberts.co.uk
Gilberts notes that the maximum AIA entitlement for 2008 is not based on the calendar year but runs from the period April 1st to December 31st and amounts
to £37,000. In addition, "Companies that do not form a group, but are controlled by
the same person or persons, will also share just one AIA."

On a more serious note I am a bit worried that Ronaldo still wants
to play for Real Madrid but I suppose I cannot do anything about it. Why can't he fall for a Lancastrian lass rather than for some glamour model from Spain!!
www.searchaccountant.co.uk
I suppose that's football.

Ronaldo, Housing Market, Zimbabwe and Mark Hughes.

I can't get really excited about the current news in the British newspapers at the moment. Some of the running stories have an element of inevitableness about them.

www.searchaccountant.co.uk

I can't do much about Ronaldo going to Real Madrid. Obviously, I would like to see him diving in a Man Utd shirt but I suppose what concerns the Glazers is that they know Real Madrid is not the best buyer in town. Arsenal took ages to be paid for Anelka while the Beckham deal saw Man Utd factoring the operation with the
Royal Bank of Scotland (I think). £80m is never going to be £80m amd has been denied by Real Madrid president Ramon Calderon.

The British housing market is going down if the lenders can't be persuaded to lend. Chancellor Alistair Darling says he is prepared to bring in the Financial Services Authority (FSA) amid rumours that he is going to be sacked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. Apparently, Darling and his wife babysit Gordon's kids. Darling should spend more time on his day job and ensure that the British banks do not founder like
Northern Rock.

Zimbabwe is sad but with Mugabe, who had financed the education of South African leader Mbeki, will know that he has nothing to fear from his young charge.There is always the concern that South Africa will eventually go the way of Zimbabwe in terms of economic collapse. If the West averted its eyes with
Rwanda, then we could quite happily ignore Zimbabwe.
A friend of mine recently visited Zimbabwe and said he was really impressed by the can-do spirit of the people and how they helped each other out.

I don't lie awake thinking about Mark Hughes but I think he should improve Manchester City. He should do better than Paul Ince at his old club Blackburn, who upset a few people wearing a Man Utd shirt, when he was contractually still a West Ham player.

Nic Cicutti writes interesting article on housing market.

In Moneymarketing.co.uk, Nic Cicutti writes an interesting article saying that some parts of the media are feeding the sense of crisis about the UK housing market. However, in May the five main house price indices showed overall a 0.6 pct fall. Yet
all media organisations focused on the 2.5 per cent reduction in the Nationwide report, which grabbed the headlines.

I agree with Mr Cicutti that we can be talking ourselves into a crisis. However, the collapse of transactions and the problems of housebuilders show that there could be sufficient pain to come. I read the capital raising documentation of Bradford & Bingley and there was too many "synthetic" this and "synthetic" that.
This is going to impact on the UK mortgage bank's shareholders and borrowers. But let's hope that Mr Cicutti is right. He is very experienced and was writing about the UK housing crash in the early 1990s.

www.searchaccountant.co.uk.

The Spanish property dream revisited!!

Sorry to go on about Brits buying residential properties in Spain. I get twitchy about what do the words "escritura" and "mancomunidad" mean. Then, there is sometimes the lack of land register and the lack of transparency over prices. However, a few years ago with the peseta at 240 to the pound you could sell up in Blighty buy a better property and still have cash over. I remember a few years ago visiting the Costa Brava and being knocked by the coast's beauty. Who would not want to live there?

I am assured that the lunacy on the Spanish roads has got better and the UK health system has gone backwards in comparison with Spain. The UK has funded quite a few of the Spanish infrastructure improvements via European Union transfers. Spain is still a net beneficiary of Community funds but this should change with the increased investment in Eastern Europe.

Spain is a magical place but people should be aware of the problems. The country was always going to struggle with the euro. Inflation is at 4.7 pct and the current account deficit is over 10 pct of GDP. It is likely that Spanish housing and banking sectors will have to take quite a bit of the adjustment. Una cerveza anyone?

Don't get sucked in buying distressed properties, because they will just get more distressed. New buyers should try and rent and then make a measured decision. The possible increase in Eurozone interest rates by the ECB will strengthen the euro but the Spanish and Italian governments are already screaming at the central bank.
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Northern Rock revisited!!

I have been reading in the Daily Mail extracts of Alex Brummer's book on the collapse of Northern Rock. It was interesting that the British government did not really want to deal with Richard Branson, who it suspected would make pots of money from any acquisition. The nationalisation option has safeguarded Northern Rock but it is becoming a smaller bank and is no longer the flagship institution of the
north-east of England.
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I still wished I had not bought shares in the Northern Rock. I was dimly aware of the profit warning and I thought the shares were a buy, although they had come down sharply from a recent twelve quid high. However, nobody's fault but mine. I accepted there could be a loss. I don't rate the chances much of Northern Rock shareholders of getting significant compensation. Railtrack shareholders did not do at all well
with the government.
Alex Brummer says the £100bn liability of the Northern Rock rescue hits the government's fiscal rules while New Labour has allowed the economy to be
credit-fuelled.

Spanish property bust hits Brits looking for dolce vita.

I have been reading about the Spanish property bust hitting Brits looking for the
dolce vita (I know it is an Italian phrase). They have been hit by the pound falling against the euro, rising interest rates, illegal building practices and overbuilding.
The Brits have found their main market of selling to other Brits has fallen. The Costa developers have been running on high octane fuel during the last few years.
In the good times there has never been much of a second hand market in the coastal regions since it was quite easy to build new properties.
I saw a mate of mine who lives in Tenerife and he was telling me how cheap his water bills were. I said this situation was unsustainable. Higher water bills are needed to conserve water and I suppose the Sotogrande complex will be
rich enough to water its golf courses. However, I will doubt this will be true
for the rest of the south. I am surprised that the water shortage has not been priced in with the cost of houses and flats.
www.searchaccountant.co.uk
Unfortunately, a lot of people in Spain have been gorging themselves making money from unsuspecting Brits. They have been sold properties without proper planning permission. Then, you have regional governments such as Valencia changing the planning rules retrospectively by getting property owners to pay for infrastructure projects such as roads.
Quite a bit of residential property could be pulled down due to the Coastal Law (Ley de Costas), which is also going to affect quite a few
Spaniards.
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