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With his shock of blond hair, deep tan and rakish English charm, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson likes to portray himself as maverick of the business world. And, on Monday, he made a typically bold gesture, announcing that he would lead an investment consortium to rescue the ailing U.K. mortgage lender Northern Rock. In an open letter to Northern Rock customers entitled "A Fresh Start," he pledged to save the bank and declared that the company would soon be known as Virgin Money...
...even as the takeover bid was welcomed by the Northern Rock board and the British government, shareholders small and large indicated they may block Branson's bid, a move that could protract efforts to save this high-profile casualty of the global credit crunch, and cause a full-blown political crisis for Chancellor of the Exchequer-turned-Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who has already seen his reputation for fiscal prudence damaged by the affair...
...Branson, whose consortium includes U.S. billionaire investor Wilbur Ross, hedge fund Toscafund and the First Eastern Investment Group, proposes an injection of $2.69 billion of new cash into Northern Rock, with half of that investment from the consortium. The remainder would be raised through an offer to existing shareholders to buy new shares for 25 pence (52 cents) each?as opposed to a share price that reached 110.1 pence ($2.28) on Monday during turbulent trading. The offered price values Northern Rock at $413 million, which is considerably less than its current market value of $960 million...
...Giving Earth a Voice I am an environmental educator who works internationally, and I bought the "Heroes of the Environment" special issue with great interest [Oct. 29]. However, I was disappointed to see Virgin tycoon Richard Branson alongside real environmental heroes such as Gaia theorist James Lovelock and Green Belt Movement co-founder Wangari Maathai. Although the writer defended Branson's inclusion, I am not convinced. I acknowledge that he is giving a large sum of money to scientific research for developing clean fuels, and this will certainly help our fight. But his environmental efforts are akin to offsetting long...
Sony recently teamed with Virgin Comics, a Bangalore-based collaboration of self-help guru Deepak Chopra, filmmaker Shekhar Kapur and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Group Ltd. With Sony, Virgin Comics is developing a multiplayer online game based on "Ramayan 3329," a comic book written by Chopra and Kapur and inspired by a famous Indian epic about a battle against demons...