Ringfencing
In business and finance, ringfencing or ring-fencing occurs when a portion of a company's assets or profits are financially separated without necessarily being operated as a separate entity. This might be for: * regulatory reasons * creating asset protection schemes with respect to financing arrangements * segregating into separate income streams for taxation purposes * avoiding sanctions against a country. Asset protection In asset protection arrangements, ring-fencing can be employed through segregating specific assets and liabilities into separate companies of a corporate group. It can also be used as a method for mitigating liquidation risk or to improve a corporate credit rating. Separation for tax purposes In the United Kingdom, ring fence profits arise from income and gains from oil extraction activities or oil rights in the UK and UK continental shelf, and are subject to a higher rate of corporation tax. This petroleum fiscal regime can be seen in other countries as well. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Escrow
An escrow is a contractual arrangement in which a third party (the stakeholder or escrow agent) receives and disburses money or property for the primary transacting parties, with the disbursement dependent on conditions agreed to by the transacting parties. Examples include an account established by a broker for holding funds on behalf of the broker's principal or some other person until the consummation or termination of a transaction; or, a trust account held in the borrower's name to pay obligations such as property taxes and insurance premiums. The word derives from the Old French word , meaning a scrap of paper or a scroll of parchment; this indicated the deed that a third party held until a transaction was completed. Types Escrow generally refers to money held by a third party on behalf of transacting parties. It is mostly used regarding the purchase of shares of a company. It is best known in the United States in the context of the real estate industry (specifically in m ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Petroleum Fiscal Regime
The petroleum fiscal regime of a country is a set of laws, regulations and agreements which governs the economical benefits derived from petroleum exploration and production. The regime regulates transactions between the political entity and the legal entities involved. A commercial or legal entity in this context is commonly an oil company, and two or more companies may establish partnerships to share economic risks and investment capital. Although petroleum, oil and gas, and hydrocarbons are not technically mineral resources, the term mineral rights is used to denote rights to exploit oil and gas resources from the underground. Onshore, in United States, the landowner possesses exclusive rights for mineral rights, elsewhere generally the state does. For this reason, the fiscal regime of US is divergent from that of other countries. The petroleum licensing system of a country may be considered interwoven with the fiscal regime, however, a licensing system has its distinct fun ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Asset Protection
Asset protection (sometimes also referred to as ''debtor-creditor law'') is a set of legal techniques and a body of statutory and common law dealing with protecting assets of individuals and business entities from civil money judgments. The goal of asset protection planning is to insulate assets from claims of creditors without perjury or tax evasion. Asset protection consists of methods available to protect assets from liabilities arising elsewhere. It should not be confused with ''limiting liability'', which concerns the ability to stop or constrain liability to the asset or activity from which it arises. Assets that are shielded from creditors by law are few: common examples include some home equity, certain retirement plans and interests in LLCs and limited partnerships (and even these are not always unreachable). Assets that are almost always unreachable are those to which one does not hold legal title. In many cases it is possible to vest legal title to personal assets in a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Corporate Group
A corporate group, company group or business group, also formally known as a group of companies, is a collection of parent and subsidiary corporations that function as a single economic entity through a common source of control. These types of groups are often managed by an account manager. The concept of a group is frequently used in tax law and accounting and (less frequently) company law to attribute the rights and duties of one member of the group to another or the whole. If the corporations are engaged in entirely different businesses, the group is called a conglomerate. The forming of corporate groups usually involves consolidation via mergers and acquisitions, although the group concept focuses on the instances in which the merged and acquired corporate entities remain in existence rather than the instances in which they are dissolved by the parent. The group may be owned by a holding company which may have no actual operations. Black Bear Development, conceptualized ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Credit Rating
A credit rating is an evaluation of the credit risk of a prospective debtor (an individual, a business, company or a government). It is the practice of predicting or forecasting the ability of a supposed debtor to pay back the debt or default. The credit rating represents an evaluation from a credit rating agency of the qualitative and quantitative information for the prospective debtor, including information provided by the prospective debtor and other non-public information obtained by the credit rating agency's analysts. Credit reporting (or credit score) is a subset of credit rating. It is a numeric evaluation of an ''individual's'' credit worthiness, which is done by a credit bureau or consumer credit reporting agency. Sovereign credit ratings A sovereign credit rating is the credit rating of a sovereign entity, such as a national government. The sovereign credit rating indicates the risk level of the investing environment of a country and is used by investors when looki ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The UK includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland, and most of List of islands of the United Kingdom, the smaller islands within the British Isles, covering . Northern Ireland shares Republic of Ireland–United Kingdom border, a land border with the Republic of Ireland; otherwise, the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel, the Celtic Sea and the Irish Sea. It maintains sovereignty over the British Overseas Territories, which are located across various oceans and seas globally. The UK had an estimated population of over 68.2 million people in 2023. The capital and largest city of both England and the UK is London. The cities o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Continental Shelf
A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island is known as an "''insular shelf''." The continental margin, between the continental shelf and the abyssal plain, comprises a steep continental slope, surrounded by the flatter continental rise, in which sediment from the continent above cascades down the slope and accumulates as a pile of sediment at the base of the slope. Extending as far as 500 km (310 mi) from the slope, it consists of thick sediments deposited by turbidity currents from the shelf and slope. The continental rise's gradient is intermediate between the gradients of the slope and the shelf. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the name continental shelf was given a legal definition as the stretch of the seabed adjacent to the shores ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Balance Sheet
In financial accounting, a balance sheet (also known as statement of financial position or statement of financial condition) is a summary of the financial balances of an individual or organization, whether it be a sole proprietorship, a business partnership, a corporation, private limited company or other organization such as government or not-for-profit entity. Assets, liabilities and ownership equity are listed as of a specific date, such as the end of its financial year. A balance sheet is often described as a "snapshot of a company's financial condition". It is the summary of each and every financial statement of an organization. Of the four basic financial statements, the balance sheet is the only statement which applies to a single point in time of a business's calendar year. A standard company balance sheet has two sides: assets on the left, and financing on the right–which itself has two parts; liabilities and ownership equity. The main categories of assets are ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Public Utility
A public utility company (usually just utility) is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service (often also providing a service using that infrastructure). Public utilities are subject to forms of public control and regulation ranging from local community-based groups to statewide government monopolies. Public utilities are meant to supply goods and services that are considered essential; water, gas, electricity, telephone, waste disposal, and other communication systems represent much of the public utility market. The transmission lines used in the transportation of electricity, or natural gas pipelines, have natural monopoly characteristics. A monopoly can occur when it finds the best way to minimize its costs through economies of scale to the point where other companies cannot compete with it. For example, if many companies are already offering electricity, the additional installation of a power plant will only disadvantage the consumer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Enron
Enron Corporation was an American Energy development, energy, Commodity, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was led by Kenneth Lay and developed in 1985 via a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies at the time of the merger. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper industry, pulp and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000. ''Fortune (magazine), Fortune'' named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years. At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting scandals, accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Enron became synonymous with willful, institutional fraud and systemic Corporate crime, corruptio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Portland General Electric
Portland General Electric (PGE) is a Fortune 1000, ''Fortune'' 1000, publicly-traded energy company based in Portland, Oregon, that generates, transmits and distributes electricity, serving almost two-thirds of Oregon's commercial and industrial activity. PGE is regulated by the Oregon Public Utility Commission. Founded in 1888 as the Willamette Falls Electric Company, the company has been an independent company for most of its existence, though was briefly owned by the Houston, Texas, Houston-based Enron, Enron Corporation from 1997 until 2006, when Enron divested itself of PGE during its bankruptcy. Notably, PGE does not serve all of Portland. Its service territory comprises most of Portland west of the Willamette River, sharing most of the city east of the river with PacifiCorp, Pacific Power. PGE holds a mix of generation and storage facilities including hydropower, wind, solar, battery storage and thermal, as well as key transmission resources. The company's power plants ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Financial Services (Banking Reform) Act 2013
Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance. The finance industry in its most common sense concerns commercial banks that provide market liquidity, risk instruments, and brokerage for large public companies and multinational corporations at a macroeconomic scale that impacts domestic politics and foreign relations. The extragovernmental power and scale of the finance industry remains an ongoing controversy in many industrialized Western economies, as seen in the American Occupy Wall Street civil protest movement of 2011. Styles of financial institution include credit union, bank, savings and loan association, trust company, building society, brokerage firm, payment processor, many types of broker, and some government-sponsored enterprise. Financial services include accountancy, investment ba ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |