Business life: My finance news blog

Czech energy group CEZ will take out a one-year loan to finance the acquisition of a 7% stake in Hungarian oil and gas company MOL. According to Spokesperson Eva Novakova, CEZ is currently looking into financing requirements to determine the size of the loan, Czech commercial bank Ceska Sporitelna said in its daily report.

As reported earlier, CEZ and MOL have agreed to form a strategic alliance and build several power plants in cooperation with each other. The agreement specifies the terms on which CEZ is to acquire a 7% stake in MOL.

According to the latest news, CEZ is expected to finance the transaction with a loan extended by three commercial banks: ING Groep NV, Intesa Sanpaolo SpA and Ceskoslovenska Obchodni Banka no teletrak payday loans. –>. The interest on the one-year loan is Euribor+17bp, which is currently 4.8%.

The announcement is good news for investors as CEZ’s debt rate is very low compared with the industry average, thus the company may optimize its capital structure with a new loan. The size of the loan is not expected to exceed EUR 560 million.
Sourse

More than 27,000 Floridians are expected to get restitution checks from Ameriquest Mortgage Co. as part of a nationwide settlement, state officials said Thursday.

The California-based company signed the settlement with 49 states and the District of Columbia, agreeing to provide $295 million in consumer restitution and to make sweeping reforms of practices that the states say amounted to predatory lending.

Checks are being mailed this week. Claims forms were sent to eligible consumers in July.

Affected Floridians will each receive about $780, according to the Florida Attorney General’s Office and the Office of Financial Regulation.

Under the settlement, consumers who opted to receive the restitution payments relinquished their right to file lawsuits related to the loans covered by the settlement.

However, consumers who participated in the settlement did not give up any claim they may otherwise raise if their home goes into foreclosure.

Florida had the second-largest number of claimants after California, which had 44,000 and ahead of Texas, which had 20,000.

Sandi Copes, a spokeswoman for Attorney General Bill McCollum’s office, said about 60 percent of those eligible responded to the state’s request for claims involving Ameriquest loans.

The 2006 settlement resolved allegations that Ameriquest and its affiliates misrepresented or did not adequately disclose the terms of home loans, such as whether a loan carried a fixed or an adjustable rate; charged excessive loan-origination fees and prepayment penalties; refinanced borrowers into improper or inappropriate loans; or improperly inflated appraisals used to qualify borrowers for loans.

The settlement included Ameriquest’s parent company, ACC Capital Holding Corp., with subsidiaries Town & Country Credit Corp online payday advance. –>. and AMC Mortgage Services Inc., formerly known as Bedford Home Loans.

Sourse

Research by Lloyds TSB shows that 64 per cent of people expect their mortgage rate to rise when they get a new deal and so they are preparing by cutting back elsewhere.

Mr King is a director of National Homebuyers, the UK’s largest quick property sale firm and the UK leaders in Sale and Rent Back agreements. The company guarantees a fast property purchase for homeowners who need to sell quick.

Sourse

A Bush administration plan to help financially stretched US homeowners keep their homes calls for freezing interest rates on subprime mortgages for five years, news reports said Wednesday. President George W Bush was expected to unveil the plan Thursday as the US housing market slump enters a third year, slowing economic growth in the buildup to the November 2008 presidential election.

Rising mortgage defaults have rocked financial markets, caused billion of dollars in losses on securities backed by the home loans and pushed the crisis high onto the politcal agenda.

The plan proposes freezing interest rates on some subprime loans for five years and would widen the options for state and local governments to fund the refinancing of troubled mortgages, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Subprime loans, promoted by financial companies as a way for people with weak credit to buy homes, start out with low interest rates that rise after the first few years - the reason many homeowners are now struggling.

The Bush administration has negotiated with mortgage lenders and investors over ways to reverse the rise in home foreclosures, while avoiding a government bailout of investors who lost money in the crisis.

More than 30 per cent of subprime mortgage holders are behind on their payments, and Credit Suisse analysts say 775,000 homes with more than 143 billion dollars of mortgage debt will go into foreclosure in the next two years, Bloomberg News reported cash advance loans. Nearly twice as many US homes were foreclosed in October compared to a year earlier.

Sorse