Rio Tinto chief executive steps down, LondonMetric sells six distribution warehouses

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 16 points lower on Friday, having closed down 0.16% at 6,003.32 on Thursday.

Stocks to watch

Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sébastien Jacques has resigned after the company’s board yielded to shareholder pressure over the destruction of sacred 46,000-year-old rock shelters in Western Australia. Rio Tinto said Jacques was leaving “by mutual agreement”. Two other executives, Chris Salisbury, and corporate affairs head Simone Niven are also leaving, the company said on Friday.

LondonMetric Property announced the disposal of a portfolio of six distribution warehouses for £57.3m on Friday, to Canmoor and Canadian institutional investor AIMCo, reflecting a blended net initial yield of 5.3%. The FTSE 250 company said the disposal would bring in an £8.8m profit on cost and an ungeared internal rate of return of 11% per annum. Completion would be delayed until 25 March 2021, allowing LondonMetric to receive around £1.5m of additional rent.

Ashmore proposed an unchanged final dividend of 12.10p a share as the emerging markets fund manager reported a 1% increase in pretax profit to £221.5m for the year to the end of June.

Newspaper round-up

Hotels and restaurants have been hit by a wave of cancellations as new coronavirus restrictions throw the country’s Christmas celebrations into doubt and raise the prospect of a fresh setback for the high street. If new rules banning gatherings of more than six people remain in place over the festive season, analysts say, the absence of Christmas parties and big family get-togethers could cost retailers billions of pounds in lost clothing and food sales. - Guardian

The Labour party has called on the government to intervene to prevent parts of the microchip designer Arm from being moved out of the UK if it is bought by the US chipmaker Nvidia. Ed Miliband, the shadow business secretary, said the government should seek “legally binding assurances” from Nvidia that it would not move Arm’s headquarters out of Cambridge. - Guardian

Rishi Sunak has been urged by MPs to extend the taxpayer-funded furlough scheme for businesses with a chance of surviving the Covid storm. The Chancellor should "show flexibility" and target companies that are still viable when the existing programme ends in October, members of the Treasury select committee said. - Telegraph

A British electronics company is to manufacture a potentially “ground-breaking” experimental saliva swab test designed to detect coronavirus within 20 seconds, sending its shares up 40 per cent. TT Electronics has been appointed as the exclusive manufacturing partner for the launch of Virolens, a “non-intrusive” coronavirus test that does not need to be administered by healthcare professionals and if approved by regulators could get the “world moving again”. - The Times

Deloitte has become the first of the Big Four accountancy firms to devise plans for a new governance structure to comply with its regulator’s demands for a break-up of their operations. The firm will establish an audit governance board in January that will provide independent oversight of the UK audit practice. The board will ensure that the firm complies with a plan by the Financial Reporting Council for the operational separation of the audit divisions in Deloitte, KPMG, PwC and EY. - The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks closed lower on Thursday as tech stocks resumed their downward descent.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 1.45% at 27,534.58, while the S&P 500 was 1.76% softer at 3,339.19 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 1.99% weaker at 10,919.59.

The Dow closed 405.89 points lower on Thursday, reversing gains recorded in the previous session.

Thursday's main focus was the weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department, which revealed initial US jobless claims were unchanged over the most recent week although secondary claims did edge higher.

Initial unemployment claims for the week ending on 5 September were at 884,000, flat week-on-week and higher than expectations for a reading of 850,000. On the other hand, the four-week moving average, which aims to smooth out the variations in the data from one week to the next, dipped by 21,750 to 970,750.