CONSIGNIA has entered the home contents insurance market in a bid to cash in on the millions of pounds in business still untapped in the lower end of the sector.
The group, which has 12 per cent of the travel insurance market, has joined up with the broker Aon and the insurer Royal & Sun Alliance to offer the cover through its post office network.
Poste Italiane SpA is planning to launch its debut Eurobond, lead managers for the deal Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan said on Tuesday. The euro-denominated transaction will be offered from under the issuer’s Euro medium-term note programme which will be signed shortly, the leads said in a statement.
Read MoreFedEx Corp., the largest overnight shipping company, introduced an Internet service to calculate foreign taxes, duties and other charges to try to lure more international shipments.
The service will let shippers avoid estimating the charges manually for 42 countries, spokesman Jesse Bunn said. Customers who don’t have to ship through FedEx pay $5 for each transaction by using the option at fedex.com, the company said. Discounts are offered for frequent shipments.
Postal savings accounts are increasingly popular, but the prospect of post offices being able to offer loans to rural enterprises threatens to undermine one of the few solvent branches of China’s financial system.
By now, China watchers are well aware of the bad debt problems plaguing the country’s large state-owned banks, but other areas of the financial system are facing troubles of their own.
One especially vulnerable but poorly understood sector is China’s network of rural credit co-operatives (RCCs), which have traditionally supplied credit to farmers and township enterprises. Chinese financial officials, who are normally very cautious about disclosing information on the level of bad loans, admitted several years ago that the RCC sector as a whole had negative net worth, and the small size of individual RCCs has left them vulnerable to depositor panics.
President Keiji Aritomi on Tuesday criticized a letter delivery bill for tightening the government’s grip on the business.
Before a House of Representatives committee, Aritomi said the bill would restrict even the catalog delivery service, which is now open to the private sector.
Yamato Transport, Japan’s parcel delivery company, has made clear its intention of not joining the letter delivery service that will be open to the private sector if the bill clears parliament.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said Tuesday a set of four postal services deregulation bills being debated at the Diet mark a first step toward postal reforms.
“The reform bills mark a first step,” Koizumi told the House of Representatives Committee on Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications, reiterating his determination to privatize the state-run postal services.
The bills include one that would allow private firms to begin offering mail services under certain conditions and one to establish a new public corporation in 2003 to take over the three state-run postal services — mail, postal savings and “kampo” life insurance.
NORTHERN Ireland businesses were thrown into chaos yesterday following an illegal industrial action by postal workers.
Thousands of businesses in south, west and north Belfast said they were seriously hit by the walkout at the city’s main delivery centre in Tomb Street following allegations that a worker was assaulted by a manager.
Residential and business customers in the east of the city, which has its own delivery centre on the Beersbridge Road, were unaffected by the action.
According to unions Via Postal, the Spanish private postal operator, has given compulsory holidays to its 1,200 strong workforce, during which it will look at a voluntary redundancy plan. The company said yesterday that it is still in talks with various international groups which may provide finance. The company added in a statement that it does not need to file for protection from its creditors and that clients, suppliers and employees are aware of the negotiations.
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