In Short

A round-up of other business stories in brief...

Porsche seeks to save stalled merger talks

The family owners of Porsche scrambled to bring the stalled merger talks with Volkswagen back to life yesterday, as thousands of workers at the debt-ridden sports carmaker gathered to protest against Volkswagen chairman Ferdinand Piëch.

The feuding Porsche and Piëch families are expected to talk this week about how to get the derailed negotiations back on track, people familiar with the situation said.

The move came after Volkswagen at the weekend suspended merger talks with Porsche. It said Porsche’s management had obstructed the talks by not being fully transparent about the sports carmaker’s financial situation.

The feuding Porsche and Piëch families this month decided on a sketchy agreement to integrate Porsche into Volkswagen as its 10th marque. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)

Buckley appointed to Aer Lingus board

Businessman Leslie Buckley has been appointed to the board of Aer Lingus as a non-executive director with immediate effect, the airline announced yesterday.

Mr Buckley is a founding director of Digicel and is currently chairman of Saongroup.com and Business Recovery Services.

He is also a director of a number of other Irish companies and was recently appointed to the board of Independent News Media.

Invest NI wants Nortel to repay £7m

THE NORTH’S leading economic development agency wants stricken Nortel Networks to repay more than £7 million (€7.9 million) in public money it received in grants for its Northern Ireland factory. Invest NI said Nortel’s decision to enter into administration in January resulted in it effectively breaching the terms of a financial assistance agreement it had signed with the agency in June 2006.

Invest NI said it had issued an invoice for £7.4 million for “restitution in cash” in relation to the grant deal.

Kentz executives’ pay tops $4.3m

Kentz executives’ pay topped $4.3 million (€3.2 million) in the group’s first year as a quoted company on the London stock market.

The Irish-Malaysian engineering and instrumentation group published its annual report yesterday. The document shows chief executive Hugh O’Donnell was paid a total of $2.665 million last year. Of this, $2 million was a performance bonus, while the balance was made up of basic pay and other benefits.

His colleague Ed Power received $1.226 million, of which $802,000 was performance related.

Shares in Minco rise by 28%

Shares in Irish natural resources group Minco rose by 28 per cent in London yesterday following positive results from its lead and zinc exploration project in Pallas Green, Limerick.

Minco said a hole located about 100m northwest of its previous drilling activities had shown zinc grades of 24.2 per cent and lead grades of 5.43 per cent.

Entrepreneurial activity still high

Despite the changed economic environment in Ireland in 2008, the level of entrepreneurial activity in Ireland remained high, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Gem) 2008 report, which was launched yesterday by Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan.

Petroceltic begins Algeria project

Oil and gas exploration company Petroceltic International announced yesterday that drilling has begun on its Isarene permit in Algeria. It plans to drill between five and seven wells on the permit.