In Short

A round up of today's other stories in brief...

Royal Liver subsidiary buys Cork firm

Citadel Financial Advice, a subsidiary of insurance firm Royal Liver, said yesterday that it has bought Cork-based McCarthy Investment Services, its third Irish acquisition.

Citadel is an independent broker network that provides life, pension and investment business to intermediaries.

McCarthy Investment Services managing director, Tadhg McCarthy, said the deal will allow the company to offer a broader range of products to its clients.

Neither side would reveal what Citadel paid for the firm.

Livestock exporter gets warning

Major livestock exporter, Purcell Brothers, has been listed to be struck off the companies register over its failure to file an annual return on time.

The company's directors are Patrick and Gerard Purcell and its latest abridged accounts show that it had a loss of €3.5 million in its profit and loss account at the end of December 2005, up from €3.06 million a year earlier. A strike-off notice is a formal warning that the company will be struck off the register if an updated annual return is not filed within two months.

Airtricity's green light for wind farm

The Scottish government has given the go-ahead to Airtricity to build Europe's biggest onshore wind farm in the south of the country.

The Irish-based, Scottish-owned company said yesterday that Scottish ministers have given permission for it to build a wind farm with the capacity to produce up to 450 mega watts of electricity between Biggar and Moffat in the Clyde region. The farm will cost about €500 million to build and will have 152 turbines.

Roche may raise bid for Genentech

Swiss drug maker Roche may need to raise its $43.7 billion (€27.5 billion) bid for the Genentech stock that it does not already own, but an eventual deal is likely, analysts and investors said yesterday.

Roche already holds a 56 per cent stake in Genentech, maker of top-selling cancer drugs including Avastin, Herceptin and Rituxan. - (Reuters)

Elan reviewing business divisions

Drug firm Elan said its businesses are being reviewed, after the Financial Times reported bankers have been hired for a possible sale of the drug technology division.

"The company continues to review its portfolio of businesses," a spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on the report saying Elan hired Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. The unit could fetch as much as $1.5 billion (€943 million), the newspaper reported. - (Bloomberg)

Domino's Pizza delivers on profits

Domino's Pizza said first-half pretax profits increased 33 per cent before exceptionals to £10.9 million (€13.7 million), compared with £8.2 million over the same period last year.

Overall sales grew by 19.5 per cent to £170.2 million in the period ending June 29th. Domino's has 37 stores in the Republic from its total of 526 outlets in Britain and Ireland.

Call for interest rate cut in Britain

Britain needs an immediate cut in interest rates to avoid a prolonged recession, David Blanchflower, who helps set interest rates on the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, has told the Guardian newspaper.