He denied the company had appealed to the Government to provide a

He denied the company had appealed to the Government to provide a rescue package, as it has with MG Rover.Mr MacAskill declined to comment on whether the company was looking for a buyer. Morgan Stanley is advising the company on its options.Up to 2,500 of Marconi’s 4,500-strong workforce are set to lose their jobs as a result of failing to win any of the business from BT, as the company makes a shift away from the UK to European markets. The job losses are expected to be made in Coventry and Liverpool, where the Labour Party won all of the available seats at the last general election.Skip MacAskill, a spokesman for the company, confirmed yesterday that the Government had asked for an update on the situation, but insisted there had been no suggestion of intervention. Marconi, the struggling technology group, has embarked on a search for an overseas buyer after discovering last week it had been snubbed by BT in its latest £10bn investment in telecommunications equipment.
Marconi’s share price fell almost 50 per cent on the back of the news last week, wiping £400m off its market value.

A strategic review of the company is under way, which is expected to result in the board formally putting the business up for sale when it announces its results on 17 May. A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that PDO is considering alternative options to the development of Mukhaizna and we welcome the government’s offer for Shell to play a major role whatever contractual structure is selected.” She said Shell was confident it would be able to double the recovery rate from the other 100 oilfields it has under production in the country.Last October Shell merged its UK and Dutch halves into a single company under the control of a unified board with Jeroen van der Veer, the chairman of its committee of managing directors, as chief executive of the merged company.. Shell remains the dominant foreign investor in Oman’s energy sector thanks its 34 per cent stake in Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), which controls 94 per cent of production.Shell insisted it could still be involved in the project. Oman, a non-Opec producer, had wanted to raise output from Mukhaizna from 10,000 barrels a day to at least 80,000, according to reports.The official Oman News Agency said Occidental would invest more than $2bn (£1.05bn) to increase production from the field to 150,000 barrels a day within the next few years.The news may come as a setback for Shell, which is seeking to boost reserves that took a hit last year after it overbooked on several large projects Mukhaizna holds estimated reserves of 2.4 billion barrels.

Shell, the oil company, suffered a fresh blow yesterday after it lost the right to develop a large oilfield in Oman after a dispute over how to boost output. The company plans to list on AIM via a flotation that will raise £2.5m to fund expansion in the UK and overseas.It uses a steel frame on the vertical part of the step to run either segments of a whole poster or a simple repeated message. Market surveys have shown that more than four out 10 people recalled seeing the advertising at a sample of stations where Media Steps has a presence, the company said.Under the flotation the directors, led by the co-founder and managing director, Tony Jansen, will end up with one-fifth of the company, valuing their share at £1.4m. Three large institution shareholders will get 35 per cent of the company..

A company that has patented advertisements that can be displayed running up a flight of steps is to float for about £7m this month.
Media Steps has 420 exclusively contracted sites at railway stations run by the train operators Thameslink and Southern Trains and is in negotiations with three other rail firms for a further 1,200 sites. These moves, critics contend, would lower – not raise – the nuclear threshold.The signs are that the White House, no admirer of the UN at the best of times, has decided to circumvent the world body, by trying to secure an informal deal among civil nuclear powers – the so-called Nuclear Suppliers Group – to refuse to sell nuclear technology and equipment to North Korea, Iran and others suspected of seeking nuclear weapons.Stephen Rademaker, the leader of the US delegation, said America’s goal was “to come up with ways of re-inforcing the treaty regime without rewriting it”.. That disclosure followed fresh speculation that the country may conduct an underground test next month, banishing any lingering doubts over its nuclear capability.The North would thus visibly join Israel, India and Pakistan in the club of unofficial nuclear powers, beside the US, Russia, Britain, France and China, the five “authorised” nuclear powers when the treaty was signed in 1970.Meanwhile, Iran, unlike North Korea a signatory of the treaty, said that talks with the EU over its nuclear programme were going nowhere and threatened to end its voluntary suspension of uranium enrichment. Talks on curbing nuclear proliferation which open today in New York seem doomed to failure, threatened by deadlock over two proposals and overshadowed by new threats from Iran and North Korea, the two countries believed closest to building their own nuclear weapons.
The secretive regime in Pyongyang created new unease by test firing a short-range missile into the Sea of Japan yesterday, on the eve of the opening of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s five-yearly review conference at the UN.The missile firing, confirmed by the White House, came days after a top US intelligence official warned that North Korea was now able to put a nuclear warhead on a ballistic missile. Urenco said it always managed its security “in strict accordance with national and international security regulations”.. LES has promised the plant will employ 400 workers during the construction phase and, once it is up and running, 210 people, with a payroll of more than $10m.But campaigners are trying to give LES a bloody nose. The Sierra Club, a US environmental group, said a rogue Pakistani scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was working for a firm contracted to Urenco when he stole secrets and sold them to Pakistan, Libya, North Korea and Iran.

Marilyn Snell, editor of the group’s magazine, Sierra, said the US Department of Energy had failed to conduct a thorough security review.LES declined to comment. Then it withdrew from a similar proposal in Hartsville, Tennessee, in 2003 after running into opposition from the former vice president Al Gore.The latest site proposed by LES is in the flat, scrub-covered desert 340 miles from Albuquerque in the south-eastern corner of the state, close to Texas. If it is built, it would be the first privately operated enrichment plant in the US and the first to use centrifuge technology, rather than an older process known as gaseous diffusion.LES wanted to build the project in rural Louisiana, but backed out in 1998 after opponents accused it of targeting a predominantly poor and black community. “The oil industry won’t be able to support our economy 20 or 30 years from now.”Republican Senator Pete Domenici, who has long lobbied to lure such a plant to New Mexico, said: “There are no downsides.”The enrichment facility which is going through a public consultation stage has been proposed by a consortium called the Louisiana Energy Project (LES), that is 70 per cent controlled by Urenco.