Bob Wigley

Scottish Daily Record. Business

DRAGON’S Den tycoon Peter Jones pocketed £12million yesterday by selling two hi-tech firms to another of his investments.

Internet gadget shop eXpansys paid almost £50million for Data Select Network Solutions, who sell SIM cards to mobile phone companies and internet design business PJ Media. Both are controlled by the tycoon.

Mirror – Business. CLINTON MANNING. 7 July 2010

DRAGONS’ Den star Peter Jones pocketed around £12million yesterday by selling two hi-tech firms to one of his online ventures.

The deals left him with a 43% stake worth £40m in eXpansys, the internet gadget shop rivalling Dixons and Carphone Warehouse.

City AM

Smartphone retailer eXpansys yesterday agreed to buy two companies controlled by its key shareholder Peter Jones, the BBC Dragon, for £38m in a cash and stock deal. The company said it would fund the acquisition of SIM cards distributor Data Select Network Solutions and online marketing services provider PJ Media by raising £30m through a placing of 535.7m shares at 5.6p each – a 58 per cent discount to its last closing price.

The Times

N Brown: The home shopping group, based in Manchester, whose brands include High & Mighty and Oxendales, said that group sales were up by 1.1 per cent in the 18 weeks to last Saturday, compared with a year ago, and were up by 0.1 per cent on a like-for-like basis. But it warned that trading had been subdued since the general election.NBrown added that it had increased its share in women’s clothing and footwear.

The Times. Catherine Boyle

You know him as yer man off the telly, but Peter Jones does do some other things, too. Yesterday the entrepreneur said “I’m in” to a venture involving higher stakes than a typical Dragons’ Den investment.

Financial Times. By Tim Bradshaw, Digital Media Correspondent

Peter Jones, the telecoms entrepreneur, is to combine Expansys, the Aim-traded e-commerce site in which he is the largest shareholder, with two of his unlisted businesses to create an online retailer that aims to challenge Carphone Warehouse and Currys.

Management Today. 29-Jun-10

Pooling the state’s low-carbon funding makes a lot of sense. But are there risks attached?

A commission of independent experts said today that it’s time to scrap the Government’s many and varied separate ‘green’ funds and quangos (including the high-profile Carbon Trust) and replace them with a Green Investment Bank, designed to funnel public and private funds towards low-carbon investment projects.

Green bank

By Alexander Smith

Green bank: The UK needs to spend 1 trillion pounds to “decarbonise” its infrastructure. So says a new report from the Green Investment Bank Commission, set up by the Conservative Party before the election which brought it into power. A worthy notion, but the plan to raise 50 billion or so pounds a year looks ambitious. This idea is likely to fade in the bright light of power.

Reuters. Tue Jun 29, 2010 11:53am GMT. By Gerard Wynn

- Funding priorities: smart grid, offshore wind, efficiency
- Raised from corporate and retail investors, levies

LONDON, June 29 (Reuters) – Britain needs a green bank to meet its 2020 goals to slash carbon emissions and curb use of fossil fuels, a report commissioned by the Conservative Party said on Tuesday.

Mike Foster. 29 Jun 2010

Bob Wigley, former European chairman at Merrill Lynch, has warned that Britain is facing £1 trillion (?1.23 trillion) of infrastructure expenditure to meet ambitious targets to cut its carbon dioxide emissions and says £265bn in bond issues are needed over the next five years to start paying for it.