While there will not be an ADR, Saudi Binladen, a $ 2.7 bn-sales family-owned construction and building materials company, plans to do an initial public offering of about 20% of its shares before the summer heat sets in. The firm is controlled by the Bin Laden family, a local business dynasty, one of whose members created Al-Qaeda. I'll give it a miss.

Following up on my speculation yesterday on why Mohamed El-Erian quit Pimco, it appears that no fewer than three executives are required to replace the former CEO and co-Chief Investment Officer (shares) at the California bond house. One of them is the new deputy chief investment officer, senior man in share, Andrew Balls, a British analyst, former correspondent for The Financial Times. But his post is not only because of his journalistic experience. He is the brother of the shadow (Labour Party, opposition) Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ed Balls, certainly richer and reportedly smarter. Ed Balls, his brother, has the unenviable task of attacking the rather successful economic policy of the British coalition government in Parliament.

The real issue is succession planning for the head of Pimco, Bill Gross, who is 67. He is the public voice of the investment house, a bond bull, not exactly fashionable today. Pimco needs to lure in investors to its funds. Will Mr. Balls become his heir-apparent?

The Great Wall crashed. On Tuesday afternoon Jan. 21, Chinese netizens could not access the Internet, the largest outage by number of users (over 600 million accounts out.) The outage was blamed on a malicious cyber attack by China's Computer Network Emergency Response Center. However, censorship-tracker services now say the Chinese language web went down because of China's Great Wall (to stop politically incorrect web sites) had gotten out of hand. Techies say the Chinese Internet gateway domain servers had been contaminated, perhaps only failing at one point. But because all Chinese-language connections are funneled through the servers to stop porn, gambling, and dissident comment, much of the country went down.

More for what this means for our companies and news from Finland, Canada, Jordan, China, Britain, Spain, Singapore, Ireland,  and other places follows for paid subscribers only. If your blog ends here, your sub has run out. You should also have received three notifications but they may have been blocked by excessively zealous spam-blockers hunting marketing e-mails.

*Our China play, search engine and gaming site Tencent, was relatively unscathed by the cyber outage compared to some rival services because it has its own internal censorship system in place. More open-ended Internet and telephone services, notably Alibaba, which is plotting an IPO, and Baidu, took longer to recover. But this casts a shadow over the whole China Internet hoopla. TCFZF is a Hong Kong company but it operates mainly in China.

*IAM Gold reported yesterday and as if there weren't problems enough for the Canada gold miner with lower demand, its all-in 2013 cost of gold production (including finance charges and overhead) came in at the high end of its forecasts, at $1235/oz overall, and at $1,175/oz at the mines it owns and operates. One source of comfort is niobium, a metal in high demand, where sales rose 13% (vs an estimate of 8% for 2013), and prices rose 20%. However, this side product is not yet over 20% of total sales by IAG.

For 2014, the company is cutting back sharply, with all-in costs of all gold expected to be around $1150-1250/oz, and at is owner-operator mines an austere and somewhat improbable $1100-1200/oz. This will be achieved by a 40% slash in cap ex, achieved by deferral in bringing on new mines like Sadiola in West Africa and Niobec in Quebec.

Clarus, a broker, cut IAG to hold from buy after the report.

*More on Africa Opportunity Fund's share issue reported on yesterday. I was called by a Grant Thornton broker just now telling me that he knows nothing beyond the statement AROFF made to the London Stock Exchange on a possible issue of C shares. He suggested googling the term.

C shares in the USA are issued by open-end mutual funds with back end rather than front end loads, which doesn't fit this UK closed-end fund, I think.

Under UK company law, a C share can be a non-cumulative redeemable preferred stock issued to common shareholders in lieu of dividends. It is what the Brits call “scrip”, a kind of alternative payout to cash, but one which can be redeemed for cash during certain periods. If these are way in the future, the dividends have effectively been deferred. In some cases scrip can be converted into more ordinary (common) shares rather than cash. Some variant on this is more likely to be what AROFF (AOF in London trading) is planning.

It is not clear if the articles of association of AOF which is incorporated in the Cayman Islands does or does not give existing shareholders preemptive rights if a C share payment or issue is decided upon.

*Banco Santander according to rumor revealed disappointing earnings per share today, 10 Eurocents/share, vs analysts' forecast of 13 eurocents according to www.seekingalpha.com. There is nothing on the wires nor on the bank's Spanish website. Beyond the headline there is no news available as SAN is publicly traded here as well as in the USA and the formal announcement, if true, will not come until the USA market closes. It may be untrue.

SAN responded to high demand for its Santander Consumer USA (SC) high-yield securities by doing the IPO a day early, yesterday. It raised $1.88 bn by selling c21.5% of the holding company for car loans to subprime US borrowers at $24-25/share. It earlier expected to sell at only $22-24. The money raised (including a green shoe option) goes to the Spanish bank. Other shareholders of SC are selling 18% and also cashing out. They are private equity funds Warburg Pincus, Centerbridge Partners, and KKR. SAN still owns c61% of the IPO'd entity now worth $8.3 bn overall. It begins trading today.

Separately, Spain reported marginally positive GNP again in Q4 2013, 0.3%.

Moreover Madrid this year is expected to exit the European bailout fund after 18 months. Although Spain was offered Euros 100 bn, only 41.3 bn was drawn down to clean up the country's real estate sector by stuffing the bum mortgages into a “bad bank.” The repayment will cut the price Spain has to pay for funding further. The yield on Spanish 10-yr bonds now is below 4%. All this is good news for SAN. While your editor put in for cash dividends (as a matter of principal and because the yield is c9%) the odds are that the payout will require some take up of 'scrip', shares in lieu of cash, pro-rated. And the outlook is relatively good.

*Bombardier faces a Wreck of the Old '97 with a London Underground contract it cannot fill. The Canadian firm shocked markets last week by announcing new delays on the rollout of its commuter jet. Now it seems to have overestimated its ability in railroad signaling systems as well. It bid GBP354 mn to install new signal control systems on four older Tube lines (District, Circle, Metropolitan, and Hammersmith & City lines), underbidding to win the business from Siemens which upgraded the more modern Victoria line signals.

But now BDRAF has told the Underground that the planned CityFlo650 control center it installed for Madrid would not work in London because the Tube has multiple sub-surface junctions. Since the oldest London tube lines were bored rather than built by cut-and-cover, the lines are deeper than in more modern metros like Madrid's. So having collected GBP 85 mn already, it has now withdrawn from the project. Now even this occasional tourist to London knows that the Tube is deeper than, say, the New York Subway.

The Underground now has to find a new contractor and will probably spend at least GBP 100 mn more than Bombardier bid. The London Underground ultimately is controlled by the UK Government's Transport Department.

What will hurt Bombardier most is that its bid for the GBP1 bn Crossrail project, expected to be selected soon, is unlikely to be taken seriously after the Underground fiasco. The award will be by the UK Transport Dept. The Canadian company is not the only one looking silly; the specifications and expenses set out by the Underground for the bid also went wrong. But a private company will feel the pain more.

*Liberty Global plc, which we own as LBTYA and LBTYK, plans to spin off its Latin American ops to raise money. CeO Mike Friess at the Davos World Economic Forum told Dow-Jones that while Liberty expects greater broadbank penetration there (from current levels of c25%), its 5% stake is distracting management time from the main Euroland-UK focus. Moreover, John Malone is even older than my average reader and doesn't have much time to recreate his cable empire. We got these shares by the takeover of Virgin Media.

*GlaxoSmithKline won a US appeals court ruling over its dual HIV drug Norvir, the other half supplied by Abbott Labs, now Abbvie jointly together with GSK's Lexiva. The US partner raised the price of the combo 400% which GSK says violated their contract and was aimed at furthering its own non-GSK AIDS drug Kaletra. The first hearing at a lower court barred a gay man from the jury, which led the 9^th Court of Appeals to rule that GSK has the right to a new trial.

*Canadian Solar and Silvercreek Partners are building a 17.5 mn kiloWatt hours/yr solar power plant in Ontario using over 48,000 CSIQ CS6X 10MWac modules made near Alymer, Ont. It will be built on 88 acres of land, and is being subsidized by feed-in tariffs. This is the first Silvercreek solar project but both parties say they expect there to be more. This share was recommended by our Austrian buddy who edits green newsletter Oeko-Invest. Sehr vielen Dank Max Deml.

*Motley Fool Singapore recommended Global Logistic Properties today, GBTZF in the USA, because it is global, in logistics, and a real estate company. We told you first.

*Odontoprev of Brazil paid us an annual dividend equal to 4% of the current price. ODPVY is a dental insurance firm with captive dental clinics.

*JPMorgan-Cazenove has initiated coverage of Hikma Pharmaceuticals, the Jordanian firm whose listings are in Dubai and London, with an overweight rating. HKMPY.

*Reckitt Benckiser continues to shine here in London for no reason I can find except that it is expected to report good results as have some competitors. RBGLY comes up on the Reuters building share feed I see whenever I go down into the Canary Wharf underground station, which cheers me up.

*Coca Cola Hellenic, another Brit share, also flourishes. CCH.

*HSBC downrated Barrick Gold to underweight from neutral. We told you first. ABX yesterday announced that it would sell its Kanowna Belle and Kundana mines in Western Australia to Northern Star Resources for A$75 mn. They produced 225,000 oz of gold last year. The deal closes in Mar.

*Nokia Oyj reports fully later this afternoon European time, but I have appointments to go to. Again according to seekingalpha.com it is said to have reported earnings of 8 eurocents per share, beating forecasts by 3 eurocents. Again there is no Deutsche Bank says as much as 40% of the proceeds from the sale of its mobile-phone handset business to Microsoft will go to shareholders as a dividend. NOK it says will also start a dividend policy for the future. Nokia warned that its 2013 report will not be comparable to earlier one, but the Finnish company restated last year's results to exclude what had been its leading business, devices and services, before the deal. We will know more tomorrow.

The headline news is that its NSN network systems sales fell 22% from prior year restated levels in Q4 2013, to euros 3.1 bn, translated by Reuters from the Finnish press release. The total is just below the Reuters consensus estimate of euros 3.2 bn but it undermines the whole future equipment production focus NOK has adopted.

Meanwhile Q4 smart phone volumes fell y/o/y because of competition, but that volumes of lower-margin cellphones held up. But overall margins were lower and sales flat. This phone news is mainly of historic interest. NOK ended the year with cash of euros 2.3 bn and added another 900 to its stash of patents. What we want to know is how much it will go to us this year and going forward.

NOK in London trading fell 4.94% to euros 5.43/sh this morning, not a good sign, but at low volume.

*Following Patti the Biotech maven, I took today some profits from a 10-bagger she recommended. Unfortunately for the rest of you, it is a USA firm, Illumina Inc., ILMN, not part of the ADR world.