After a tough year spent firefighting at the Dublin-based e-payments group Payzone, chief executive Mike Maloney was enjoying a holiday in Portugal until Bloomberg ran comments from the head of rival PayPoint.
Dominic Taylor told Bloomberg yesterday that PayPoint would not be buying its Irish rival. “Payzone is one of those competitors that we’ve danced around for a while,” the PayPoint chief executive said. “The answer is no, we are not in any discussion, nor are we particularly interested.”
This all came as news to Maloney, when I spoke to him yesterday. “I’ve not had any conversations [about a takeover] with anybody,” he told me.
“We’re in discussions with our banks about the company’s capital structure.”
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*Irish-backed Absolute Radio had a mixed 2008, judging by accounts just filed with the Companies Office in Britain.
As a group, Absolute Radio International, which is backed by property developer Paddy Shovlin and bought Virgin Radio in the middle of last year, improved its accumulated profits in the 12 months to the end of September 2008 by 23 per cent to £462,351.
But the accounts show that Passion Radio (Oxford) Ltd, which it acquired in June 2006, had a deficit of £1.1 million, almost three times the level of the previous year. Its loss for the year was £714,521, including the launch costs of Jack FM, also in Oxford.
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