RAMSEY CROOKALL & CO

EVENING REPORT

2 SEPTEMBER 2010

Leading shares are still lacking direction, a condition matched in the US where shares opened mixed.

Tullow Oil is a high profile faller. The company is to buy half-shares in five licences in the East African rift basins of Kenya and Ethiopia. Africa Oil Corp has sold Tullow 50% stakes in blocks 10BB, 10A, 12A and 13T in Kenya and the South Omo block in Ethiopia, an area covering 97,000 square kilometres.

Takeover talk is said to be behind a 13% rise in the price of Yellow Pages publisher Yell Group, which is thought to be in the sights of private equity groups.

In company news, AstraZeneca has received approval from the European Commission (EC) for its schizophrenia and bipolar drug Seroquel XR as an add-on treatment for major depressive episodes where antidepressants haven’t worked.

Elsewhere, Royal Bank of Scotland is cutting another 3,500 UK jobs as it trims its back office operations, taking the number of staff axed since the bank was nationalised two years ago to 26,600. The staff cuts are part of a programme that aims to deliver annual savings of £2.5bn.

And Britain’s largest supermarket Tesco is one of ten bidders battling it out to win the Southeast Asian business of French supermarket chain Carrefour. Up for grabs are 61 stores in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand worth an estimated £650m.



THE FTSE 100 CLOSED UP 4 @ 5371

THE DOW JONES AT 4.30 IS DOWN 7 @ 10,261

THE NASDAQ COMP AT 4.30 IS UP 14 @ 2191



Exchange Rates

GBP – USD 1. 540

GBP – EUR 1. 200