"Mr. Rolf, His Royal Highness the Duke also asked me to tell you that Barclays Bank and your friendship with the Devonshire family will always face tests. I hope you will make the right choice."
Looking at the public relations consultant of the Cavendish Family Office in front of him, Annabella's friendly smile revealed a bit of determination, and Rolf also smiled:
"Ms. Nolan, your Highness can rest assured, because I value my friendship with him very much."
The reason for their meeting was that Barron had received a piece of news from Viscountess Butt before. She overheard that Viscount Butt was not completely honest with her at the Argent Real Estate Group.
Securing a loan from the bank was a good idea after Argent Property's King's Cross renewal plan exceeded budget because of rising building material costs.
But Viscount Bute prefers to solve the funding problem by introducing investors with whom he has a closer relationship - this will also increase the shares they can control and thus maintain control over Argent Real Estate Group.
Of course, if there is a need to increase capital and expand shares, Barron is not completely passive. According to the original investment agreement, he also has the power to increase capital to maintain his shareholding ratio.
But the problem now is that Barron has already started merger negotiations with O2. This is a super-large-scale acquisition. Even with the help of financial leverage, it is likely that Barron will find it difficult to invest much additional funds in Argent Real Estate Group while this plan is in progress.
Therefore, after Barron considered it, there was one thing he had to guard against, that is, at this time, the easiest place to grasp the flow of his funds and the scale of funds was Barclays Bank, with which he had cooperated in many fields.
That led to the meeting between Annabella Nolan and Rolf today. Through Annabella, Barron needed to remind Rolf not to stand against him.
At this time, the merger and acquisition negotiations between DS Capital and O2 had made some progress. Barron raised the acquisition price to 5 billion pounds. Although O2 also lowered the price, it still insisted on the price of 6 billion pounds and would not give in.
Next, in order to gain the support of O2's management, Barron's team contacted them and guaranteed that unless O2's operations encountered major problems after the acquisition, there would not be major adjustments to the company's management.
This is also why Baron made this statement because he knew that in the original time and space, the management of O2 had done a good job and successfully opened up the markets in France and Germany, allowing O2's communications business to enter the European continent.
At the same time, through the "coordination" of the royal family and the government, more importantly, Digital UK has developed rapidly this year. As of early March, the number of users of the Freeview platform has exceeded 1 million, and the number of new users is expected to reach an explosive growth of 400,000 to 500,000 households per month.
Digital UK will also use the latest technology to install upgraded set-top boxes for users, which will have some network functions.
In this case, if Digital UK's controlling shareholder DS Capital can successfully acquire O2, then O2 will receive Digital UK's cooperation orders for Internet broadband business, thereby directly increasing the number of users by millions. This is also the reason why O2 is willing to make certain compromises with DS Capital.
As mentioned before, O2 was originally spun off from British Telecom. During the rapid development of the telecommunications industry around 2000, British Telecom's business also continued to expand.
However, due to the impact of the Internet bubble crisis, British Telecom began to suffer huge losses. It was in this context that they divested their mobile communications and other businesses for individual users, and mainly retained their own telephone business and broadband business for corporate companies.
Therefore, in addition to mobile communications business, O2 now also has broadband business for individual households.
It's just that compared with its mobile communications business, its broadband business is not as competitive as that of other companies.
But Barron knew that 3G networks would soon be available, and by then, individual household mobile Internet services and broadband services could actually be integrated together to form a highly competitive package service.
Faced with the large number of potential users offered by Digital UK, O2 is very envious and hopes to use this to expand the scale of its broadband business.
…
On March 10, ministers and secretaries from OPEC member countries arrived in Vienna to attend the 124th OPEC meeting held the next day.
As the United States is on the verge of launching a war against Iraq, what needs to be agreed upon urgently at this meeting is what measures OPEC should take to alleviate the possible shortage of crude oil supply in the international market if the war causes the interruption of Iraq's oil exports.
At the meeting, in order to ensure oil supply and prevent oil prices from skyrocketing, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other countries advocated that once the United States goes to war with Iran, the organization's production quotas should be temporarily lifted, allowing member countries to resume production.
However, countries such as Iran, Algeria and Nigeria oppose the removal of the quota, arguing that the market is currently well supplied and there is no need to increase production.
Algerian Energy and Mines Minister Khalil said that OPEC had increased its daily production twice last year, by 2.8 million barrels, so there was no need to increase production even if a war broke out.
Iranian Oil Minister Zanganeh even raised the oil price issue to a political level, saying Iran does not support decisions with political motives.
Industry insiders believe that the question is not "whether the temporary cancellation of OPEC's production quotas will be included in the agenda of this meeting", but how much capacity OPEC member countries have to increase production.
The actual situation is that, except for Venezuela, whose oil production has not yet reached the limit, other member countries are mostly over-production under the temptation of high oil prices and have no ability to increase production.
If Venezuela cannot resume production quickly, once Iraq's 1.7 million barrels of crude oil exports are interrupted, OPEC alone will find it difficult to fill the gap.
Under such circumstances, the market generally believes that if a war really breaks out and Iraq's oil production capacity is "cleared to zero", the trend of international crude oil prices rising again is inevitable.
By this time, the price of international crude oil had slowly fallen from its highest point of $36 in mid-February to over $30.
Although DS Capital has already made a lot of floating profits in its short crude oil futures account, facing the current situation, even Daisy, who has always trusted Barron's decisions, can't help but persuade him again that he should close his positions appropriately, or at least reduce the leverage multiples, to avoid a real war and a short-term surge in oil prices, leading to a margin call.
Prior to this, on March 7, the United States, Britain and Spain submitted the latest proposal on the use of force against Iraq to the Security Council, but in the vote of the permanent members, only Britain and the United States voted in favor, China and France abstained, and Russia vetoed.
This resolution was also opposed by most European countries. Among the major European countries, France and Germany were opposed, and only Portugal expressed support.
The Norwegian government said in Oslo on the 10th that if Iraq is hit by war, the Norwegian government is ready to provide 100 million Norwegian kroner (about 71.8 million US dollars) of emergency aid to the Iraqi people.
At this time, Barron knew that after realizing that there was no hope of obtaining UN authorization and that the United States could not get enough votes of support, they would not give up on using force against Iraq.
War is coming soon.