TOP NEWS: London Shares Decline Despite Bullish BT

LONDON (Alliance News) - The following is a summary of top news stories Friday.
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COMPANIES
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BT Group PLC raised its full-year expectations for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, as it saw revenue and pretax profit rise in its third quarter. BT now expects full-year EBITDA to meet the upper end of the GBP6.0 billion to GBP6.1 billion range. The company saw revenue rise 2% to GBP4.60 billion in the quarter ended December 31, 2013, up from GBP4.38 billion in the previous year. BT said growth had been boosted by growth in its BT Sport service. Third-quarter pretax profit rose to GBP617 million, up 6% from GBP583 million in the previous year.
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Domino's Pizza Group PLC said David Wild, a senior non-executive director, will be appointed interim chief executive with immediate effect. Wild will serve in the role for a temporary period of two months after a new chief executive is appointed and will work with current CEO Lance Batchelor until Batchelor leaves March 16. Stephen Hemsley, non-executive chairman, also will work with Wild until a permanent chief executive is appointed.
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Vedanta Resources PLC reported higher production of refined zinc at its Zinc India unit, record oil and gas production and a 3% rise in operating profits for its fiscal third quarter, although mined metal production fell 5% and revenues fell. The oil and metals company said earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation were USD294.2 million in the three months to end-December, compared with USD276.3 million a year earlier, even though revenues declined to USD546.6 million, from USD574.8 million.
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Premier Farnell PLC said group sales per day for the full year ending February 2 are expected to have grown 2.6% year on year, as all divisions delivered growth in the second half, though it warned its profit margins were under pressure. In a pre-close trading update ahead of its full year results announcement in March, the distributor of technology products and solutions for electronic system design, said it expects sales to grow 3.5% year on year in the second half, excluding sales of Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK. The firm said it expects full-year operating margin to be broadly in line with the first half.
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The Paragon Group of Companies PLC said trading in the first quarter of its financial year was in line with its expectations, as it unveiled plans to launch a UK retail deposit-taking banking subsidiary before the end of the second half. In a statement, the consumer finance lender and buy-to-let mortgage provider, which is fresh from raising more than GBP125 million from a retail bond issue earlier in January, said it expects to launch its bank in the second quarter of this year, with its application process with regulators at an advanced stage.
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The UK's consumer protection regulator said it has accepted formal commitments from hotels giant InterContinental Hotels Group PLC and online travel agents Booking.com and Expedia Inc that it hopes will clear the way for wider availability of discounted hotel rooms and greater competition between online travel agents for room-only bookings. The Office of Fair Trading had been investigating concerns that Booking.com and Expedia had each entered into separate agreements with Intercontinental which allegedly restricted each of the online agent's ability to discount the rates at which room-only hotel accommodation bookings are offered to consumers.
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MARKETS
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The UK's leading share index is trading in the red once again, led lower by Diageo and other stocks with high emerging market exposure, while defensive and small cap stocks perform better.
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FTSE 100: down 52.90 at 6,485.55
FTSE 250: down 27.00 at 15,674.80
AIM ALL-SHARE: up 1.24 at 856.93
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Eurozone inflation fell further and sent the the euro to a new weekly low against the dollar.
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GBP-USD: down at USD1.6450
EUR-USD: down at USD1.3535

GOLD: up at USD1,245.40 per ounce
OIL (Brent): down at USD107.25 a barrel

(changes since end of previous GMT day)
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ECONOMICS AND GENERAL
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A survey of consumer confidence in the UK showed a better than expected improvement last month. The consumer confidence index from the GfK NOP research firm rose in December to a seasonally adjusted minus-7. The reading was up from the previous month's minus-13 reading and slightly better than the minus-12 expected by most economists.
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The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria has been partially closed Friday after a monitor detected an elevated level of activity, the BBC reported. It quoted a spokesman saying that a decision had been taken to operate with a reduced workforce, but there was no risk to the public or staff. The readings are above normal but below anything that needs the company to take action, the spokesman is quoted as saying.
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Eurozone inflation slowed for the second consecutive month in January, flash estimate released by Eurostat showed. Another report showed that the jobless rate in the currency bloc remained unchanged in December. Inflation fell unexpectedly to 0.7% in January from 0.8% in December. Economists had forecast the rate to accelerate to 0.9%. Eurostat said the jobless rate remained unchanged at 12% in December. The rate was expected to rise to 12.1%.
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German retail turnover declined unexpectedly during Christmas season, provisional results from the Federal Statistical Office showed Friday. Retail turnover fell 2.5% in real terms from a month ago, reversing November's 0.9% rise. Sales were expected to increase by 0.2%. Similarly, retail sales, on a yearly basis, slipped 2.4% in December, in contrast to the 1.1% growth posted in November and 1.9% rise expected by economists.
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The European Central Bank cannot afford to be complacent, Executive Board member Benoit Coeure said at a dinner organized by the Centre for European Reform, in London. Coeure warned that the recovery is uneven. "Debt levels and unemployment are high and unevenly distributed, and the nascent recovery remains weak and uneven," he added. The currency bloc started to see the results of the actions taken during the crisis, he observed. The "decisive measures" taken by the ECB to ensure price stability helped to calm the crisis.
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Japanese housing starts growth accelerated unexpectedly in December, official data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism showed. Housing starts grew 18% year-on-year, faster than the 14.1% rise seen in November. The rate was forecast to slow to 13.6%. Likewise, the number of annualized housing starts increased to 1.055 million from 1.037 a month ago. The expected level was 1 million.
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Consumer prices in Japan climbed 0.4% in 2013 for the first full-year increase in five years amid aggressive monetary easing, the government said. The core consumer price index of inflation, which excludes fresh food, stood at 100.1 last year against a base of 100 for 2010, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said.
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Australia pledged to keep turning boats back to Indonesia in defiance of Jakarta's wishes after confirming that no asylum seekers had breached its naval cordon in six weeks. "This January is the first January where there've been no boats since 2008," Immigration Minister Scott Morrison told national broadcaster ABC.
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The first round of Syria peace talks are due to end in Geneva with little headway made on finding a political solution to the three-year-old war or delivering aid to the country's starving citizens. A week after negotiations began, international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said he was "disappointed" in the lack of progress on humanitarian aid, as the two rivals failed to find common ground on lifting the 600-day-old siege of Homs. The government and opposition delegations are scheduled to return for a second round of talks in February.
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Muslim Seleka fighters are preparing to launch a major offensive against Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, in a bid to topple the conflict-ridden nation's interim government. More than 500 members of the armed group, which has been clashing with Christian vigilante groups for months, were assembling Friday in the town of Sibut, 185 kilometres north of Bangui, ahead of a planned march southwards, residents of Sibut told dpa.
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The US will pursue the death penalty against Boston bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Justice Department said Thursday. "After consideration of the relevant facts, the applicable regulations and the submissions made by the defendant's counsel, I have determined that the US will seek the death penalty in this matter," Attorney General Eric Holder said. Tsarnaev, 20, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he carried out the bombings along with his brother on April 15, 2013, at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding more than 250.
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Amanda Knox's former Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, was apprehended by police near Italy's north-eastern border with Austria and Slovenia, news reports said. Officers caught him in the north-eastern village of Venzone, which is a few dozen kilometers away from crossings with Austria and Slovenia. He was in a hotel with his girlfriend, the ANSA news agency said. Sollecito was not arrested, but taken to a police station to enforce a court decision to strip him of his passport to prevent him from leaving the country. The decision was issued Thursday, as Sollecito was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher. Knox, who is now living in the US, was sentenced to 28 years and a half. The ruling is provisional, pending another appeal, so neither face immediate imprisonment.
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