Will a mystery suitor power up price of energy firm Drax

IS something in the works at power firm Drax? There are rumours circulating around the Square Mile that a takeover could be on the cards for the FTSE250 company which owns the Drax Power Station in North Yorkshire.

The word is that an unknown energy company has got its eye on Drax and could even be in earlystage talks with the firm about a potential deal.

Drax is on record as moving towards biomass and other renewable energy sources – and away from the old coal-fired power stations.

This is all part of its efforts to help create a much more environmentally friendly future. But like most companies, shares in Drax have come under pressure in recent months and the firm expects a hit to profits of about £60 million this year due to the pandemic.

Perhaps that recent fall has attracted the rumoured interested party. Drax declined to comment.

The chatter is that talks are focused on a price of around £3.40 per share, valuing Drax at £1.35 billion, which is pretty much near where the shares were trading in December.

That would power up the current price by around 50 per cent. An electrifying prospect.

MORE intrigue over at the British arm of Cantor Fitzgerald, the US investment bank.

As revealed by this column in April, Cantor was in talks to offload its corporate finance arm to AIM-listed rival WH Ireland. But the talks fell through and now the division is slowly unwinding, with staff leaving the stockbroker. Now I understand that the majority of Cantor’s market makers – who act as middlemen between buyers and sellers of shares – have resigned, unhappy at how things are going.

Sources say Howard Lutnick, the billionaire American boss of the entire company, is unlikely to be best pleased.

FORMER football star David Beckham’s investment in Guild Esports, a new online gaming business, caught people’s attention last week.

But one of Guild’s other investors, AIM-listed minnow Blue Star Capital, which has a stock market value of £8 million, seemed to fly under the radar.

Blue Star, which invests in start-ups with new technologies, has a 12 per cent stake in the company and has seen its own share price almost double in June in anticipation of some good news from its portfolio companies.

Blue Star’s share price barely moved after the Beckham news on Thursday, perhaps because it had already been booted higher in the previous weeks.