Virgin has said it intends to float the business in the next

Virgin has said it intends to float the business in the next 20 months. Estimates of the likely flotation price range up to A$1.2bn.Virgin Blue was launched 18 months ago after the Australian government gave the go-ahead for foreign airlines to come in and compete with the two domestic carriers, Qantas and Ansett Australia, which subsequently collapsed. The airline began with four aircraft but has grown to 16 and is about to expand further with another seven jets on order.Part of the proceeds from the share sale to Patrick could be used to purchase assets from the receivers of Ansett. Virgin Blue currently has around 15 per cent of the Australian market but a deal with Ansett could double its share to 30 per cent.Sir Richard will have to take his stake in Virgin Blue down to less than 50 per cent if he wants to expand into neighbouring markets such as New Zealand. Ownership rules require that Virgin Blue be Australian-owned if it wants to expand beyond the domestic market.Mr Whitehorn played down suggestions that the group was about to raise yet more cash by selling up to 49 per cent of Virgin Entertainment, which comprises Virgin Megastores, V-Shops and Virgin’s cinema operations outside the UK.A trade sale or partial flotation of the business could raise £250m. However, Virgin said it had not yet appointed banking advisers and a sale was at least a year and more probably two years away. The one small disposal that Virgin Entertainment has done is the £14m sale of part of its Japanese cinema interests to the technology incubator Ant Factory.Virgin hopes to repeat the success of Virgin Blue with its other budget airline, Virgin Express, which is based in Brussels and has been negotiating to take over routes from the now defunct Belgian carrier Sabena.

However, its long-haul carrier, Virgin Atlantic, is still thought to be haemorrhaging cash following 11 September and the downturn in the transatlantic airline market. Despite this, Mr Whitehorn denied that the group’s overall finances were stretched. “We are now entering a period where the businesses are largely debt-free and cash positive,” he said.The strategy now, he added, was to concentrate on five markets: transport and travel, communications, financial services, retailing and leisure and media. More than £250m has been invested by Virgin over the last three years in joint ventures ranging from cars and wine to mobile telephones and online train information.. The healthcare company Amersham is to spend £700m to take full control of its life sciences joint venture. He said that a “Chinese wall” between the main Amersham business and Biosciences could now be broken down.

“The simplified structure will increase our flexibility and speed of decision making,” he said.Amersham’s main business is dyestuffs injected into the body to improve pictures from medical scanners. Sir William said this expertise in diagnostics would increasingly be combined with gene-based tests to judge which treatments will be most suitable for individual patient.The deal brings to an end lingering hopes of a flotation. At the height of the biotech boom in 2000, Amersham planned to float a minority stakeon Nasdaq, which analysts predicted would value the venture between £3bn and £4bn, but it was put on ice when the sector fell from favour.Yesterday’s agreement shows how this valuation has almost halved. Operating profits grew 12 per cent to £72m in 2001 on sales of £681m.Analysts believe the purchase price, below even their most-recent reduced estimates, represents a good deal for Amersham. But some were unenthusiastic about the division’s growth prospects and nervous over research and development spending requirements.Morgan Stanley and ABN Amro, Amersham’s brokers, were last night conducting a book-building exercise and will tonight set a price for the placing of 50 million new shares, equal to 8 per cent of its share capital Amersham shares fell 31.5p to 705p yesterday. The rest of the £704m purchase price will be funded through existing bank facilities The deal is expected to close within a week.. Two of the world’s biggest media companies were preparing for a fierce $1bn (£706m) court battle yesterday after a Vivendi Universal subsidiary alleged that a News Corporation-controlled firm had engaged in corporate espionage and had aided piracy of its products in a move that enabled millions of people to watch digital TV for free.

“The implications of the claim now being made by Canal Plus are truly shocking,” it said.Pay-TV companies like Sky and ITV Digital give their customers smart cards which, when inserted into set-top boxes, enable them to watch whichever channels they have paid for.Industry sources yesterday estimated there could be 100,000 fraudulent cards in the UK but millions more across Europe including as many as 2 to 3 million in Italy.Canal Plus was keeping quiet yesterday on exactly what evidence it had up its sleeve but Francois Carayol, the executive vice president of Canal Plus and chairman and chief executive of Canal Plus Technologies, was adamant he could prove the spying was the action of a corporation not an individual.He said: “These things don’t happen by chance or accident. They do require extremely sophisticated, very expensive equipment, well-trained engineers and a very large amount of time…. It’s a corporate effort.”Mr Carayol said Canal Plus, which undertook a two-year investigation into the affair, had an unfruitful meeting with NDS’ management to see if an “amicable solution” could be reached. While NDS’ Mr Peled admitted the pair had met in December, he said Canal Plus had approached NDS “with the idea of merging the two companies” and had “attempted to use these baseless allegations to gain leverage in the negotiations.”In late 1998, Canal Plus alleges NDS cracked the software codes on the cards through “electrical and optical examination” and, in March of 1999, went on to publish the code on a website called DR7 .. City bankers were bracing themselves for more redundancies yesterday after Credit Suisse First Boston warned revenues were still falling and UBS Warburg said it could not find work for almost half of its graduate trainees.