Nick Clegg and David Cameron were were still struggling to find common
ground last night over the deal-breaking issue of reforming Britain's
voting system as they sought an agreement that could forge the next
government.

The Tory leader yesterday dangled the prospect of several cabinet jobs
to the Liberal Democrats, but both sides believe a looser agreement is
more likely as they edge towards a deal. Gordon Brown left Downing
Street for an hour-long meeting with Mr Clegg as he manoeuvred to make
him an offer should talks with the Tories collapse. But it could be
the last roll of the dice for the Prime Minister, who consulted his
most trusted allies yesterday over his own position.

A series of "back-channel" negotiations were taking place across the
weekend between the parties. One source familiar with the discussions
said a broad anti-Tory coalition was a serious option – but depended
on Labour having a new leader. He said: "Propping up Gordon Brown
would be toxic, but once he goes things become much easier. The
arithmetic is very much possible."

"This [electoral reform] is virtually the only issue that will be at
the forefront of any discussion with the Conservatives," one Liberal
Democrat frontbencher told The Independent last night. "No substantial
deal can be made that doesn't progress this issue. It's not going to
be handed to us on a plate but it is something that we are intent on
fighting for."

A senior Conservative said last night the two sides were still far
apart on electoral reform, but insisted Mr Cameron believed the
distance could be narrowed. He said: "David is negotiating in good
faith – he is hungry for power and so are the people around him."

Augusto Pinochet. Photograph published in the October 19, 1998, issue
of The New Yorker, for a Profile of Pinochet by Jon Lee Anderson.

Germany, France and the eurozone’s 14 other countries early Monday
morning delivered the “shock and awe” message to financial markets
that had eluded them ever since the Greek debt crisis exploded last
October.

In an initiative that far exceeded any measure announced by European
governments over the past seven months, eurozone finance ministers
committed their nations to a €500bn ($644bn, £436bn) emergency
facility to protect the euro area from potential disaster. With the
aid of a further €220bn from the International Monetary Fund, the
total rescue package hit a massive €720bn.

“Technically, the programme will not be live as of midnight. You will
need to go through the parliamentary procedures in the relevant member
states. But the aim [was] to put this in place in time for the opening
of Asian markets on Monday,” a diplomat said.

Conclusions

The GO MASSIVE Strategy.

Euro 1.2910 Bounced on EU Emergency Fund News
Pound 1.4864
Dollar Index 83.71
Higher Beta
Aussie 0.9006
Real 1.8365
Rand 7.575

Conclusions

I do not see this Euro rally holding.

The U.S. Federal Reserve will restart its emergency currency-swap tool
by providing as many dollars as needed to European central banks to
keep the continent’s sovereign-debt crisis from spreading.The swaps
with the European Central Bank, Bank of England and Swiss central bank
will allow them to provide the “full allotment” of U.S. dollars as
needed, the Fed said late yesterday in a statement in Washington. A
separate swap line with the Bank of Canada will support as much as $30
billion, the Fed said, and the Bank of Japan said it approved
reactivating its U.S. line. The swaps were authorized through January
2011.

“If there is one thing the Fed doesn’t like, it is systemic risk,”
said Torsten Slok, an economist at Deutsche Bank AG in New York.
“Early signs of systemic risk were brewing in the financial system
last week, and if policy makers had not taken action this weekend,
then this would also have been a threat to the U.S. financial system.”

The London interbank offered rate, or Libor, for three- month loans
climbed 5.5 basis points to 0.428 percent on May 7, the highest level
since Aug. 17, according to data from the British Bankers’
Association. It was the biggest increase since Jan. 16, 2009, and the
13th straight gain.

Fed officials aren’t sure what the immediate demand will be for
dollars or how much the U.S. central bank’s balance sheet will grow
from its current level of $2.33 trillion. The ECB said its first
offering will take place tomorrow. The prior incarnation of the swaps
peaked at $583.1 billion in December 2008, with deals encompassing 14
other central banks.

Conclusions

The Free Money Strategy.

Value1,630.47   
Change-47.950    
% Change-2.857

Qatar’s agreement on May 8 to buy London’s best-known store from the
family trust of Mohamed Al-Fayed  is the biggest deal in U.K.
retailing since the 11.1 billion-pound takeover of Alliance Boots Plc
in 2007, Bloomberg data show. There were about $1 billion of
transactions in all of 2009.

Al-Fayed had owned Harrods since 1985. The landmark store in
Knightsbridge, which opened in 1849, counted Sigmund Freud and Oscar
Wilde among customers, and sells goods from Christian Dior fashions to
gold bars.

Harrods has more than 1 million square feet of selling space and its
flagship store is located in one of the world’s most expensive areas
of real estate.

Harrods is “the sort of asset people would have expected them to have
bought,” said Andy Wade, a retail analyst at Numis Securities in
London. “It’s an iconic asset, a trophy asset, it’s an asset with a
property angle.”

Prices for new art fell sharply during the recession, but collectors
are still willing to pay top dollar for iconic works by postwar
masters like Jasper Johns. On Tuesday, Christie's expects to kick off
New York's week-long series of contemporary-art auctions by selling
the artist's "Flag," (shown here) for at least $10 million.

One of the carefully arranged books on the coffee table bears the
title Luxury Toys. But Ron Pratt, of Oakhurst Property Developments,
needs no cue to display the technology that his company has installed
in its latest luxe Knightsbridge apartment. He presses the buttons on
a remote control and the flames spring up from the fire, the blinds
close and the TV emerges from the cupboard. When the water from the
kitchen tap becomes hot, a light turns the top part of the flow from
blue to red.

CANNES, France--When it comes to legends, Cannes has always been
viewed more as a diamonds-and-sequins red-carpet-strutting kind of
town than a serious foodie destination.

Coquilles Saint Jacques at Félix

By the early Asian afternoon, Gold for June delivery was down $13, or
1.1%, to $1,197.40 an ounce on Globex, after touching an intraday low
of $1,196.10 in electronic trading.The contract on Friday settled
$13.10 higher, or 1.1%, at $1,210.40 an ounce. That was a five-month
high for the metal, and futures prices were closing in on the Dec. 3
all-time settlement record of $1,217.40 an ounce, with prices buoyed
by the potential for a European debt crisis.

Conclusions

Everyone is a Disciple of Gideon Gono and a Money Printer now.

Crude for June delivery, the most active contract, climbed $1.75, or
2.3%, to $76.86 a barrel on Globex after tapping an intraday high of
$76.91 in electronic trading.June crude on Friday lost $2, or 2.6%, to
settle at $75.11 in New York. That's its lowest price since
mid-February, when prices dropped to a little above $74 a barrel,
according to FactSet Research. The contract tallied a 13% loss for the
week. See Friday's Futures Movers.

Cocoa -4.93%
Sugar +1.23%

Index Value:    17,142.95
Trade Time:    2:30AM EDT
Change:    Up 373.84 (2.23%)

This year, the World Cup of soccer will be held on African soil for
the first time and 17 African countries celebrate the 50th
anniversaries of their independence. These festivals of nostalgia
could heighten a collective anxiety among Africans my age, about being
remembered as a lost generation. In many countries, the leaders and
their cronies – Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe,
Senegal’s Abdullah Wade – have been in power ever since those days of
liberation.

Only last year, Gabon’s Omar Bongo died with his presidential boots on
at the age of 73. He had been in charge of the central African country
for 41 years. By the time my cohort has wrested power from these
reluctant fathers, we may no longer be relevant.

Another generation is being mass-produced, surfing on a wave of
technological advance, presenting a demographic time bomb that
threatens to detonate everything that has gone before them. But where,
I wonder, are the younger, vibrant leaders who can harness the energy
of Africa’s increasingly youthful, urban and restless societies?

It was not always like this. If I rewind the Pathé Newsreels of
African history, I see young Turks such as, yes, Moammar Gadhafi and
Robert Mugabe, not to mention the likes of Patrice Lumumba (Congo),
Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya) and Steve Biko (South
Africa). There they are, all in their 20s and 30s, daring to stand up
to the old order, leading their countries out of the bondage of
colonialism, rejecting their parents’ institutionalized passivism and
mobilizing moral outrage to separate from a Europe exhausted by the
Second World War.

Social media have enabled us to bypass the limitations and biases of
traditional media. Here in Nigeria, websites and blogs such as
SaharaReporters.com routinely publish stories no newspaper would have
printed in the past. As they are everywhere else, the old orders are
struggling to contain the shifting shape of this irreverent new
movement.

The question I keep asking myself is how these cultural networks will
engage with the old political order. Do any of my colleagues in
government have the vision and conceptual tools to channel this
youthful energy to the common good?

The continent is vast, rich in contradictions, complex yet simple. It
is black and white, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, north and
south. It is a place that invites but defies stereotyping. As we like
to say here, what you see is what you don’t get. Whether it can
fulfill the claims of its boosters, only time can tell. What could be
decisive is whether Africa’s leaders, new and old, learn to see the
burgeoning young population as a challenge and opportunity, to be
mobilized for nation building and economic success, rather than as a
threat to self-serving elites.

Author Ken Wiwa is an aide to the President of Nigeria.

Value26,515.07   
Change-997.760    
% Change-3.627

Conclusions

When the World goes into a Tailspin SA religiously asserts a Correlation.

Value6,756.00   
Change-360.450    
% Change-5.065

Conclusions

Meet some Aggressive Selling Pressure on Friday.

Value27,508.15   
Change383.890    
% Change1.415

Conclusions

Nigeria has a Momentum entirely independent of the World.

Absa Group Ltd., the South African bank controlled by Barclays Plc,
plans to hold an initial public offering for its 55.5 percent-owned
National Bank of Commerce Ltd. in Tanzania and list it on the Dar es
Salaam exchange.

The IPO would dilute the Tanzanian government’s stake and is subject
to regulatory approvals, Absa Chief Executive Officer Maria Ramos said
in an interview in Dar es Salaam last night. The listing, which should
take place this year, will leave Absa with a 55 percent stake in the
lender, she said.

“We are very keen on Nigeria,” Ramos said. The lender, which didn’t
register with the Central Bank of Nigeria to examine buying a stake in
one of the country’s 10 rescued banks, sees the West African country
as the “obvious” place to go, and Ramos said it remains “on the radar
screen.”

Absa said on Feb. 16 that full-year profit in 2009 fell 36 percent
after bad debts surged and it lost money on equity investments. In the
first half of 2010, the company’s asset growth has been “pretty
muted,” Ramos said, adding that bad retail loans may have peaked,
while corporate bad debts may only start to decline after mid-year.

Modern piracy is a serious problem, costing shipping an estimated
$150m in 2008, according to Pirates of the 21st Century. Yet the
threat is minor compared to the past. In Somalia, in 2008, there were
an estimated 300 sailors being held hostage. In contrast, Algiers, hub
of Mediterranean brigandage, held tens of thousands of captive
Europeans in the 17th century.

“Our fish were all eradicated, so we can’t fish now, so we’re going to
fish whatever passes through our sea because we need to eat,” a Somali
pirate is quoted as saying in Pirates of the 21st Century. Somalia’s
coastline fell prey to overfishing and illegal toxic dumping by
foreign corporations following the state’s collapse in the civil wars
of the 1990s. “Piracy will not stop unless we get a government,”
another pirate says.

Pirates of the 21st Century lacks first-hand reportage or serious
analysis. Nonetheless, a sense emerges of the organised nature of
modern piracy. In Somalia, for example, gunmen are often former
militia men. The men piloting the fast dirigibles used to board cargo
ships tend to be fishermen. One 350-strong gang of Somali pirates
nicknamed the “Coast Guard” allegedly has a kind of IT department
handling the global positioning (GPS) and communications systems.

In 2009 the average ransom of a Somali-hijacked vessel was $2m. When
four pirates seize control of Phillips’ cargo ship off the Horn of
Africa, as recounted in A Captain’s Duty, they whoop with delight
about having sprung a US-flagged ship. Jackpot!

Several of the piracy victims in Pirates of the 21st Century deride
their attackers as “paranoid druggies” and “unsophisticated hoodlums”.
Others, such as Capt Phillips, are struck by their orderliness.
Treatment of hostages varies too. The crew of a French luxury yacht
discovered their captors had a good conduct manual on how to seize a
foreign vessel and spoke of being made to feel “relaxed and cheerful”.
The pirates even invited them to a barbecue.

Hostile to traditional hierarchies, stateless, highly mobile,
ruthlessly acquisitive, they signalled the emergence of a certain type
of modern consciousness. No wonder they fascinate us: in them we see a
glimmer of ourselves.

Value72.51
Change0.310    
% Change0.429

Conclusions

Like Nigeria has its own Mo.

KenolKobil has suffered a setback in its compensation case against
Kenya Pipeline Company Ltd, which might dent its revenue projections
for the year.The High Court dismissed an application by the oil
marketer to have the pipeline company’s appeal against an arbitration
court’s Sh4.6 billion award struck out. “I come to the conclusion that
the application before me is incompetent. It is accordingly dismissed
with costs,” Lady Justice Hannah Okwengu, said about KenolKobil’s
application in her 19-page ruling on April 20 this year.

On December 10, 2009, arbitrator Ahmednasir Abdullahi, ordered KPC to
pay KenolKobil Sh4.6 billion for contravening a transportation and
storage agreement. Mr Abdullahi explained that the award was damages
for loss of consumer goodwill, cost of public relations, marketing
campaign and loss of financial goodwill.

KenoKobil had factored the award in its 2010 revenues, which it hoped
would boost its balance sheet if awarded in its favour. Mr Abdullahi,
a former Law Society of Kenya (LSK) chairman, ruled that the State
corporation breached the transportation and storage agreement by
allowing the collapsed Triton Petroleum to use its facility, Kipevu,
in Mombasa, as a warehouse.

Par Value:                  0.50/-
Closing Price:          103.00
Total Shares Issued:          147,176,128
Market Capitalization:        15,159M
EPS:            8.77
PE:                11.745

The Bourse turned defensive as Regulator Risk [previously at 0]
started to be priced into Safaricom. Confidence is as fragile as an
Egg and If Folks want to jump up and down they will not make an
Omelette but a Mess. Safaricom is the biggest Counter at the Bourse
and therefore utterances from the Regulator might have an outsize
impact on the Bourse as a whole and the eventual Resuscitation or not
of the GOK IPO Pipeline. With 40% of Turnover at the Bourse driven by
Foreigners, the recent news Flow is alarming many of them.

The NSE20 fell back 40.27 points to close at 4237.35.
The NASI was down 1.07 points at 90.11.
Market Cap was 1.049263 Trillion versus 1.06171 Trillion.
Equity Turnover was 244.195m versus 453.779m.

Kakuzi traded 3,000 shares higher at 80.00.
Rea Vipingo traded 5,600 shares to close firmer at 19.20.
Sasini closed firmer at 15.40 and traded 167,200 shares.

SAFARICOM

shares volume     8.515,000
avg price     5.77 Closing Price 5.75 -2.54%
high price     6.00
low price     5.60
last price     5.75

Conclusions

Safaricom was the most active Counter and the price began to feel some
backlash from the ongoing Contretemps between the CCK and Safaricom,
the merits or demerits of which I discussed here http://bit.ly/9zaDNS
. Safaricom traded a 5.60-6.00 range and eased 2.54% to close at 5.75.
Safaricom traded 7.708m shares worth 44.544m.

Kenya Airways was the 2nd most active counter closing unchanged at
56.00. Kenya Airways traded a 56.00-57.00 range and 662,700 shares
worth 37.173m.

Car and General rallied a further 9.18% to close at 53.50. Car and
General traded a 1,000 shares. Car and General has returned 78.687%
over 12 months and trades on an unexacting PE of 5.568 and has rallied
sharply over the last few Sessions.

Car and General share price data from www.rich.co.ke
http://bit.ly/ato90s

Par Value:                  5/-
Closing Price:          49.00
Total Shares Issued:          22,279,616
Market Capitalization:        1,092M
EPS:            8.80
PE:                5.568

CMC Holdings firmed 1.11% to close at 13.65 and traded 23,100 shares.
There has been a strong mopping up Exercise which started at the time
of the Profits warning and when the share price was at 10.00.

Nation closed 4.17% lower at 138.00 and traded a 137.00-139.00 range
and 13,100 shares. Nation trades on a trailing PE of 18.701 which is
not inexpensive.
Standard traded 700 shares at 41.00.

Access Kenya closed 5.479% weaker at 17.25 and traded shares as low as
16.60. Access Kenya traded 135,600 shares with a 3-1 Supply versus
Demand Imbalance.

Scangroup was unchanged at 32.50 and traded a 33.00 session high and
48,500 shares. It looks well underpinned post Ogilvy especially as it
will now pop up on a lot of Africa Fund Managers's screens given its
expanded SSA Footprint.

TPS Serena traded 14,000 shares all at 63.00 +3.28%.

Equity Bank was unchanged at 19.05 and traded a 18.90-19.20 range and
483,900 shares. It is well underpinned post the 1st Quarter 2010
Earnings report and Inflection.
KCB fell 6.74% to close at 20.75 and traded a 20.25-22.50 range and
535,400 shares.
Barclays Bank was unchanged at 58.00 and traded a 57.00-59.00 range
and 156,300 shares.
COOP Bank was unchanged at 12.00 and traded a 12.00-12.30 range and
575,200 shares.
Stanchart was marked down 1.96% to close at 200.00 on low volume of
7,600 shares.

CFC StanBic closed 1.53% stronger at 49.75 and traded 57,400 shares.
DTB bounced a shilling to close at 86.50 and traded 7,300 shares.
HFCK was unchanged at 22.50 and traded 24,000 shares.
NBK eased 25 cents to close at 42.75 and traded 12,900 shares.
NIC shaved off 25 cents to close at 38.75 and traded 8,500 shares.

Centum was unchanged at 18.70 and traded 78,500 shares.

Kenya Re was unchanged at 13.20 and traded 157,900 shares.
Jubilee closed 2.86% lower at 175.00 and traded 600 shares.
PanAfric traded 1,500 shares at 56.00.

Kenolkobil was the 4th most active Counter and slumped 9.226875% to
close at 93.50. Kenolkobil traded a 93.00-95.00 range and 155,000
shares worth 14.527m. The Newspapers carried a report that
Kenolkobil's claim against the KPC had been thrown out and this sent
the price limit down most of the session until the End where it ticked
up to trade 95.00.
Total firmed 3.36% to close at 30.75 and traded 6,100 shares.

Mumias Sugar was the 3rd most actively traded Counter at the Bourse.
Mumias Sugar eased 0.74% to close at 13.50 and traded a 13.50-13.70
range and 1.33m shares. Mumias was at 13.70 session highs into the
close.

KPLC firmed 1.1% to close at 184.00 and traded a 182.00-189.00 range
and 25,900 shares.
KENGEN was marked down 1.18% to close at 16.80 and traded 131,000 shares.
Cables fell 2.27% to close at 21.50 and traded 26,000 shares.

EABL was unchanged at 170.00 and traded 11,700 shares.

Bamburi eased 1.06% to close at 186.00 and traded 1,300 shares.
ARM was unchanged at 115.00 and traded 3,600 shares.
Portland traded 500 shares at 110.00 +0.92%.

BOC Gases traded 5,100 shares and closed at 134.00 -0.57%
Carbacid did not trade.

BAT did not trade.
Crown Berger closed at 34.75 and traded 5,100 shares.
Eveready closed 2.10% easier at 4.65.
Sameer retreated 3.08% to close at 9.15 on 172,600 shares.
Unga closed firmer at 12.40 and traded 34,800 shares.