Leeds Sporting, the company that owns the football club, yesterday teamed up with Allied Dunbar and Skipton Building Society to launch a new financial services arm which will offer fans a full range of Leeds-branded financial products.
Apart from pensions and mortgages, the division will also offer life insurance and medical plans.Leeds will act as an intermediary, introducing potential customers to Allied Dunbar and Skipton Building Society. The company said it expected 1998 profits, excluding PolyGram, to be roughly the same as the previous year’s, compared to earlier forecasts of double digit earnings growth.Outlook, page 17. You can’t regret something you never had.”EMI’s warning was echoed by a profits warning from Philips, the Dutch electronics group which agreed to sell its stake in PolyGram to Seagram earlier this year. “The surprise is that they considered bidding for it at all,” one analyst said.Others said EMI was the victim of an industry-wide malaise that is seeing a slowdown in global music sales and fewer blockbusting acts capable of producing a strong, profitable back catalogue of original recorded music. “In this sort of market, you really need the hot products to generate sales,” the company said.Sir Colin Southgate, EMI’s chairman, said the company was continuing its search for a new chief executive but denied that it was a mistake to snub Seagram “They never put in an official bid. The company is testing investor patience,” one said.The warning comes just days after EMI announced it was pulling out of the running to buy Polygram Filmed entertainment, which has been put up for sale by Seagram. Key problem areas have been South- East Asia and Brazil, where the music market has fallen by 25 per cent in the past few months, compared to growth of 30 per cent last year.It said some markets in Europe had also been disappointing and that its release schedule would not match last year’s strong performance when sales were enhanced by new releases from top bands such as The Verve and Chumbawumba.Sales of the recent Smashing Pumpkins album have reached only half the expected level, the company said, while profits have been further affected by a change in the mix of sales that will result in lower margins.As analysts cut their full year profits’ forecasts by about pounds 45m to pounds 242m before exceptionals, some music industry experts said that EMI was developing an unfortunate habit of disappointing City expectations: “Profit forecasts had been a bit on the high side but this is another straw on the camel’s back.

They stood at 738p when the group was de-merged from the Thorn rentals business two years’ ago.
EMI blamed the latest setback on a “significant deterioration of some major music markets in recent months”. The shares have now lost almost half their value since Seagram offered an estimated 620p per share in the spring. “Unless the company comes up with a retraction and an apology this could run and run,” he added.A spokesman for Business Post declined to comment.The dispute centres on Business Post’s board meeting on 12 August when Peter Kane, previously a non-executive director, was reappointed chief executive. His brother Michael Kane also took on executive responsibilities.Mr Montague-Johnstone, who opposed the move, agreed to leave the group after working six months’ notice. However, he says he did not expect the company to issue a trading update when it announced the changes to the Stock Exchange the following day.. EMI, THE UK music group that turned down a pounds 5bn takeover approach from Seagram in May, delivered a further blow to investors yesterday when it issued its second profits warning of the year which forced the shares 18 per cent lower. EMI shares closed down 61p at 335p when the company, whose roster of artists includes the Spice Girls, The Verve and Radiohead, warned that operating profits for the first half would be 20 per cent lower than last year.

Its shares almost halved in value and SBC Warburg, the house broker, reduced its full-year profit forecast to pounds 19.8m from pounds 22.8m.Mr Montague-Johnstone believes Business Post has unfairly blamed him for misleading the market about the company’s performance, and is demanding an apology.He has also accused the company of “deficiencies” in its corporate governance. THE FORMER finance director of Business Post yesterday hit back at allegations by the troubled mail group that he was responsible for misleading the stock market about the company’s performance. Torquil Montague-Johnstone, who stepped down as finance director last week, said he had not been shown a trading update which reassured investors that the company’s performance was on track before it was issued to the Stock Exchange on 13 August.
Mr Montague-Johnstone says he wrote to Peter Kane, the chief executive, the following day dissociating himself from the statement.Last week, Business Post shocked the market with a warning that earlier assumptions about sales were “unrealistic”. The Russian stock market closed down 4.6 per cent at 47.81, a record low, and currency trading was suspended after fragile market sentiment was dented further by the central bank’s decision to print money. In Brazil, the Bovespa index closed down 3.9 per cent at 6,450.Bonds were once again the main beneficiary of the turmoil in the equity markets.