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(Bloomberg Opinion) -- After the troubles at Nikola Corp. you’d think stock market investors would have had their fill of startups that promise to revolutionize the trucking world.Yet this week another Texas-based truck electrification business, whose founder is even younger than Nikola’s, is poised to go public. And once again a special-purpose acquisition vehicle (or SPAC) is in the driving seat and making piles of money.Hyliion Inc.’s 28-year-old chief executive officer, Thomas Healy, will become a paper billionaire — a fact that’s sure to capture plenty of attention — as long as the shareholders of cash shell Tortoise Acquisition Corp. vote on Monday in favor of a merger with his company.A Carnegie Mellon mechanical engineering graduate, Healy doesn’t spend a lot of time on Twitter and seems more modest than Nikola’s boastful chairman Trevor Milton, who resigned last week after a scathing short-seller report raised awkward questions about his company.Unlike Milton, Healy isn’t trying...
The daughter of Esperanza Ugalde of Illinois filed in August what lawyers believe is the first wrongful death "take home" lawsuit, alleging her mother died of COVID-19 that her father contracted at Aurora Packing Co's meat processing plant. The cases borrow elements from "take home" asbestos litigation and avoid caps on liability for workplace injuries, exposing business to costly pain and suffering damages, even though the plaintiff never set foot on their premises. "Businesses should be very concerned about these cases," said labor and employment attorney Tom Gies of Crowell & Moring, which defends employers....
(Bloomberg) -- Back in March, long before a short seller would raise questions about electric-truck company Nikola Corp. and hasten its founder’s exit, early investors in the company were expressing concerns of their own.Those investors, led by mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments, were worried that Trevor Milton, for all his brash visionary talk and Twitter braggadocio, lacked the ability that Elon Musk possesses to deliver these sorts of newfangled products to market. They lobbied successfully to remove him as CEO before the company’s June IPO and for Milton’s father to leave the board, according to people familiar with the matter. When the deal was done, Milton only held the title of chairman, the post he resigned this month.The back-room negotiations show that Milton’s past was a concern to investors months before General Motors Co. executives placed a bet on the company in a $2 billion deal carved out after the IPO. They...
(Bloomberg) -- HSBC Holdings Plc rose the most since 2009, recovering from a 25-year low, as its biggest shareholder raised its stake in a bet the embattled lender will return to paying dividends.China’s Ping An Insurance Group Co., which last week bought 10.8 million shares to boost its stake to 8%, remains confident in HSBC’s long-term prospects, a spokesperson said. The recent slump in the share and the valuation only increases HSBC’s appeal, the spokesperson said.“Ping An believes HSBC’s suspension of dividend payments is a short-term issue and has been actively communicating with the lender about the possibility of restoring dividends in the future,” the spokesperson said.HSBC shares in Hong Kong on Monday rose 9.2%, the biggest gain since April 2009, clawing back most of last week’s tumble and adding $6.8 billion to its market capitalization. In London, HSBC rose as much as 11.5% -- also the most since April 2009....
Top news and what to watch in the markets on Monday, September 28, 2020....
(Bloomberg) -- Siemens Energy AG shares recovered after dipping as much as 13% on debut in Frankfurt, though the market value of the company whose technology is behind roughly one-sixth of the world’s electricity remained below expectations.The shares were little changed at 11:45 a.m. in Frankfurt, hovering around the opening price of 22.01 euros. That represents a market capitalization of about 16 billion euros ($18.6 billion), compared with the 17 billion-euro net book value parent Siemens AG flagged ahead of the spinoff.Monday’s listing is the latest step in the unwinding of Siemens -- a German conglomerate making a vast array of goods that spans medical scanners, locomotives and gas turbines -- into separate companies better suited to confront their own unique challenges.The sale is taking place at a time of transition toward greener energy sources, which could hit Siemens Energy’s dominant coal and gas-turbine business and cloud the company’s long-term growth...
(Bloomberg) -- Margarita Louis-Dreyfus took another hefty dividend from the eponymous agricultural-commodity trading house she controls, as the billionaire continues to squeeze the business for cash.During the first six months of the year, Louis Dreyfus Co. paid a dividend of $302 million. The payout related to last year’s profit, the sale of several assets in Canada and its former metals-trading business, according to the company’s interim financial statement. The dividend reduced the company’s equity to $4.48 billion at the end of June, down from $4.79 billion six months earlier.Louis-Dreyfus, who controls more than 96% of the holding company that owns LDC, has been taking big dividends over the past few years to help repay about $1 billion she borrowed to buy out other family members. The payouts, often surpassing the trading house’s profit, have steadily reduced the company’s value.The billionaire owner has been in talks to sell a minority stake in...
