Time: 02-08-2012
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GAS COSTS
HOW
MUCH
Average price per
gallon of regular
gas in Louisville
$3.52
$3.56
$3.55
$3.55
$3.53
4
5
6
Feb.
7
8
SOURCES: AAA (Data from Oil Price
Information Service with Wright Express)
THE COURIER-JOURNAL
BUSINESS WATCH
NEWS FROM THE REGION
Working adults invited
to higher-ed showcase
Working adults who are considering starting or completing
a college degree are invited to
attend a downtown education
fair Tuesday.
The event, organized by
Greater Louisville Inc., the
metro chamber of commerce,
will be from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. at
the Hyatt Regency Louisville,
320 W. Jefferson St. Representatives from more than 20
colleges and universities will
be on hand.
The fair is a project of Degrees at Work, which is GLI’s
part of 55,000 Degrees, an effort to increase the number of
Jefferson County adults with
post-secondary degrees by
55,000 by 2020. For more information, visit www.greaterlouisville.com/DegreesAtWork
21:23
User: mstollhaus
PubDate: 02-09-2012
Business
Zone: KY
Edition: 1 Page Name: B 4 Color:
KY
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Long John Silver’s HQ
slated to open today
Long John Silver’s will open
its new headquarters this
morning in the wake of the fish
chain’s recent departure from
the Yum! Brands’ fast-food
portfolio.
Mayor Greg Fischer and Lt.
Gov. Jerry Abramson will be on
hand to cut the ribbon at 9505
Williamsburg Plaza, just off
Hurstbourne Parkway, at 9:30
a.m.
Yum! sold Long John Silver’s on Dec. 16 to a group of
private investors and longtime
franchisees, with operations
staying temporarily at Yum
headquarters in Louisville.
Before the deal became final, the Kentucky Economic
Development Finance Authority granted preliminary approval Dec. 8 for the new Long
John Silver’s, now known as
LJS Partners, to receive
$1.5 million in tax incentives if
it employs at least 60 people
and remains in Kentucky.
— From staff and wire reports
Submit items by e-mail to businessnews@courier-journal.com
Q&A
SPENDING
& SAVING
Q. At what age does the
federal child tax credit end?
A. Age 17. So the child has
to be age 16 at the end of the
year and meet other requirements, such as living with the
taxpayer for more than half of
the year, to qualify for the
credit.
If a baby is born in the latter
half of the year, the child can
still qualify for the credit.
B4
THURSDAY
FEBRUARY 9, 2012
Fee waiver for arena urged
Agencies battle
over $211,464
By Marcus Green
magreen@courier-journal.com
The Courier-Journal
A proposal before the Louisville Metro Council would exempt the operators of the KFC
Yum! Center from paying to be
part of a special downtown district.
The ordinance, sponsored by
council President Jim King,
comes as the Louisville Arena
Authority and the Louisville
Downtown Management District
are engaged in a new quarrel
over more than $200,000 in fees.
King, who serves as a nonvoting arena authority member, said
his measure is a “common-sense
solution to what has become a
lengthy dispute.”
While the arena authority is
exempt from property taxes, it is
required by law to make payments based on the arena’s assessed value to the Louisville
Downtown Management District.
But the arena authority, in protesting a $211,464 assessment for
2011, argued in a December letter
obtained under Kentucky’s open
records laws that it should be exempt because city law bans the
assessments
on
properties
owned or used by government entities. The arena authority is an
“agency of the state,” the letter
states.
Records from the Jefferson
County sheriff’s office show the
authority owes more than
$222,000 because the original
amount wasn’t paid by Jan. 30.
The downtown management
district is authorized under state
law, and its members are appointed by the mayor. City statutes al-
low the agency to collect money
based on the assessed value of
property within its boundaries.
The district uses the fees for services such as general cleaning,
maintenance, marketing and
studies to improve downtown.
Harold Workman, the arena
authority’s executive director
and president of the Kentucky
State Fair Board, which operates
the KFC Yum! Center, said arena
staff already performs some of
the management district’s services. Arena officials would prefer to pay a negotiated fee similar
to the fair board’s arrangement
for the Kentucky International
Convention Center, he said.
Still, the arena authority
agreed to pay $34,154 to settle a
dispute over its assessment from
2010. Workman said the agreement isn’t an admission that it
owes the fees.
King’s measure is to be introduced today. It would be retroac-
tive and apply to fiscal 2012,
which started July 1 .
Asked about the proposal, Deb
DeLor, the downtown management district's executive director, said, “We expect that properties within our district would pay
consistent with the ordinance as
it stands right now.”
DeLor said the opening of the
22,000-seat arena at Second and
Main streets has resulted in a 10
percent increase in downtown
visitors and higher during peak
times, such as college basketball
season. The district estimates the
arena brought more than 1 million people downtown during the
building’s first year.
As a result, she said, many of
the district’s services also increased. DeLor said her agency is
in talks with arena officials about
the appeal.
Reporter Marcus Green can be
reached at (502) 582-4675.
Caesars
IPO gives
investors
a way to
cut losses
Toyota adding 400 jobs
at Princeton, Ind., plant
Toyota will add an estimated
400 jobs at its Princeton, Ind.,
plant by the end of next year,
the automaker announced
Wednesday.
Increased production of the
Highland sport utility vehicle
will require more workers as
Toyota invests about $400 million in the plant approximately
100 miles west of Louisville. It
currently has about 4,800 employees who assemble Highlander and Sequoia SUVs, in addition to the Sienna minivan.
The new workers will increase production of the Highlander and allow export to Russia and Australia, company officials said in a statement.
Black
Yellow
Magenta
Cyan
By Oskar Garcia
Associated Press
Riot police guard the entrance to the Development Ministry in Athens, which PPC electricity
company employees occupied Wednesday to protest privatization plans. DIMITRI MESSINIS/AP
Greek leaders at
odds over new cuts
Bailout talks recess
without full agreement
By Nicholas Paphitis
Associated Press
ATHENS, Greece — Greek coalition leaders were locked in crucial debt talks with the
prime minister Wednesday to review layoffs
and other steep cutbacks as part of a $170 billion bailout package intended to save the
country from a looming bankruptcy.
The coalition met for seven hours without
reaching consensus on where the cuts should
fall, but eurozone finance ministers scheduled a meeting in Brussels today to discuss
the second massive bailout for Greece, an indication a deal was close.
Athens has already accepted a demand to
fire up to 15,000 workers in the public sector,
but is under pressure to impose deeper cuts,
including cuts in pension payments and the
minimum wage. Leaders of three parties
making up the 3-month-old Greek coalition
have been under intense pressure to accept
the new austerity measures.
A disorderly bankruptcy by Greece
would likely lead to its exit from the eurozone, a situation that European officials have
insisted is impossible because it would hurt
other weak nations like Portugal, Ireland
and Italy. Two years of cutbacks already
have seen unemployment rise to about 19
percent and poverty to 20 percent in Greece,
according to data from the EU statistics
agency Eurostat.
The coalition’s plans were to be unveiled
at a meeting with Prime Minister Lucas Papademos, after the parties were handed a 50page draft agreement, drawn up with international debt inspectors late Tuesday.
It was not clear whether the parties — the
majority Socialists, main rival conservatives, and small right-wing LAOS — would
accept the austerity demands, especially before national elections provisionally set for
late April.
Papademos called Jean-Claude Juncker,
who heads the finance minister meetings, on
Wednesday to relay Greek political parties’
reservations about proposed pension cuts, a
party official said on condition of anonymity
because the talks are ongoing.
The coalition talks have been repeatedly
postponed this week to make time for exhaustive negotiations with representatives
of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, on whose approval the continued flow
of Greece’s vital rescue loans depends.
LAS VEGAS — An initial public offering of a tiny slice of Caesars Entertainment Corp. is allowing dozens of investors who bought into what once was the
world’s largest gambling company to
get out with smaller losses than they
might have seen.
Caesars shares nearly doubled by
the middle of their first day of trading
on the Nasdaq. They opened Wednesday at $9, jumped to $17.90 by midday
and closed up 71 percent at $15.39.
The offering of 1.8 million shares —
or 1.4 percent of the company — created buzz and led traders to chase the
stock without regard to the much larger
chunk of Caesars that investors can
now dump, said David Menlow, president of IPO Financial Network.
“This is as close to market manipulation as you can get without it being illegal,” Menlow said.
The company, which owns the
Horseshoe casino in Harrison County,
Ind., said in the regulatory filing this
week that dozens of insiders — including major institutional investors such
as the California State Teachers’ Retirement System and a trust for actor
Michael J. Fox — can now sell more
than 11 million additional shares.
The offering also enables New York
investor John Paulson’s hedge fund to
sell a stake of 12.4 million shares, nearly 10 percent of the company.
And in six months, the company’s
nearly 100 million remaining shares —
the vast majority held by private equity
firms Apollo Management Group and
Texas Pacific Group — can start going
on the market as securities laws allow.
Even with Wednesday’s price jump,
the market is valuing Caesars at just
$1.9 billion, much less than Apollo and
TPG paid in 2007 when they took the
company private for $17.1 billion and
assumed $12.4 billion in debt.
Plavix fight ends with $445 million
Apotex pays
Bristol, Sanofi
By Linda A. Johnson
Associated Press
TRENTON, N.J. — Just three
months before the world’s second-best-selling drug gets U.S.
generic competition, a generic
firm has paid nearly $445 million
to finally end a decade-long,
twist-filled patent infringement
battle with two heavyweight
drugmakers over blood thinner
Plavix.
Apotex Corp., Canada’s biggest drugmaker, has paid BristolMyers Squibb Co. and Sanofi SA,
the two brand-name drugmakers
that jointly sell Plavix, $442.2
million in damages ordered over
its improper sales of a generic
version of Plavix in 2006. Apotex
also paid $1.26 million in interest
on that judgment and another
$900,000 in legal costs.
The Plavix patent saga began
with patent-challenging litigation in March 2002.
It includes an illegal deal to delay sales of generic Plavix, a
criminal antitrust investigation
by the U.S. Justice Department,
the ouster of a former Bristol
CEO and an earlier inquiry over
alleged inflation of sales figures.
By early 2006, New York-based
Bristol-Myers and France’s Sanofi, then called Sanofi-Aventis,
reached an out-of-court settlement to pay Apotex at least
$40 million to delay selling generic Plavix until at least 2011.
That’s when the primary patent for Plavix was to expire.
Federal authorities learned of
the deal and began a criminal
antitrust inquiry. With the deal
among the firms unraveling,
Apotex did what’s called an “atrisk launch” of a copycat version
of Plavix, called clopidogrel. Distributors quickly stocked large
amounts of the generic pills,
which cost nearly 20 percent less
than the brand-name ones.
After a few weeks, BristolMyers and Sanofi-Aventis won an
injunction blocking further sales
of the generic version.
But the federal judge granting
the injunction refused to require
Apotex to take back all the generic pills distributors had, costing
Bristol and Sanofi significant
revenue.
The Plavix patent fight continued, with then-federal judge
Frederick Lacey ruling in 2007
that the patent was valid. Apotex
challenged that, but an appeals
court upheld the patent’s validity
in December 2008. The case
dragged on until October, when
the same appeals court upheld
the payment of damages just
made by Apotex.
Along the way, Bristol-Myers
won a six-month extension on the
patent’s U.S. term by doing tests
of Plavix in children. That
blocked generic sales of Plavix
here until this May.
Bristol-Myers and Sanofi reported about $9.8 billion in total
Plavix sales last year. The drug
already has generic competition
in much of the European Union,
where Sanofi sells it.