THE DAILY BRIEFING
HACKING HIT Yahoo is taking a £281m hit on its sale to US telecoms giant Verizon after cyber attacks. Verizon had agreed to buy the internet firm for £3.6bn in July. But at the end of last year Yahoo revealed hackers had attacked it in 2013, stealing email addresses, passwords and dates of birth. It threw the deal into doubt and last week it was reported Yahoo would knock £200m off the asking price, but yesterday Verizon revealed it had struck a better deal. The two hacks on Yahoo affected 1.5bn accounts and were the two biggest security breaches in internet history.
FLASH SALE Toshiba will make £6bn by selling most of its flash memory chip business as a buffer for any fresh financial problems, sources claim. The beleaguered firm was pressured to abandon an initial plan to sell just under 20pc by its main creditor banks, which are worried about writedowns at its US nuclear unit.
QUARTER JOY Safestore, the secure storage operator, said revenue was up 9.4pc in the first quarter, thanks to UK expansion. It made £29.2m in the first three months of its financial year, up from £26.7m in the same period a year earlier. Shares fell 1.7pc or 6.5p to 382.4p.
POPEYES DEAL Burger King’s owner Restaurant Brands is closing on a deal to acquire fried chicken chain Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. This week Restaurant Brands shareholder 3G Capital failed in its attempt to mastermind a £115bn bid for Unilever by Kraft Heinz.
ENERGY BOSS A former executive at German multinational ThyssenKrupp is joining a UK-based waste-to- energy company. David Ryan, 55, has been appointed a nonexecutive director at AIM-listed PowerHouse Energy Group, which converts landfill and other household waste into electricity. ThyssenKrupp is in talks to merge with Tata Steel’s UK business.
BARREL AHEAD Eland Oil and Gas has produced more than 150,000 barrels of oil from its well in Nigeria over the latest three weeks. The firm has also shipped nearly 120,000 barrels from its Opuama Field in under two weeks after starting shipping to cope with disruption to pipelines.
EXPANSION PLANS Wolseley is expanding further into Switzerland. The Plumb Center owner has agreed to merge its Swiss plumbing and heating business Tobler with local rival Walter Meier.