Kansas firm to buy Harrison-based bank
Equity Bancshares of Wichita, Kan., has agreed to buy Community First Bancshares of Harrison, Equity said Thursday.
Equity will pay almost $69 million in stock and cash for Community First Bank.
Community First has $475 million in assets and five branches -- two in Harrison and one each in Berryville, Eureka Springs and Pea Ridge.
The deal is expected to close late this year.
Community First's customers will benefit from additional products offered by Equity, Jerry Maland, the Harrison bank's chief executive officer, said.
"Our customers can count on continued local service by our board and key Community First leaders, including Dave Morton, Ann Main and Danny Criner," Maland said. The three are among the top executives at Community First.
Equity has $1.5 billion in assets and 29 offices in Kansas and Missouri.
The purchase is the first since Equity went public in November and the 10th in the past 14 years.
-- David Smith
In state, 41 Wendy's sites hacked for data
Wendy's has identified 41 Arkansas restaurant locations where data from customers' debit and credit cards may have been stolen by computer hackers.
Hackers obtained card numbers, names, expiration dates and other data on credit and debit cards from December 2015 to early June 2016, the company said.
The hack affected Wendy's restaurants in all 50 states and Washington, D.C.
"We sincerely apologize to anyone who has been inconvenienced as a result of these highly sophisticated, criminal cyberattacks involving some Wendy's restaurants," Todd Penegor, president and chief executive officer of Wendy's, said in a statement.
The company announced in February that it had found malware in fewer than 300 restaurants. In early June the company found another type of malware, increasing the number of affected locations to 1,025. Wendy's, based in Dublin, Ohio, has 5,700 locations in the U.S.
The company is offering a year of free credit monitoring to customers who made purchases with a debit or credit card at an affected restaurant. Customers can call 866-779-0485 between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. for assistance.
-- Stephanie Lamm
30-year mortgage ticks up; 15-year dips
WASHINGTON -- Long-term U.S. mortgage rates moved little this week, remaining near historically low levels.
Mortgage giant Freddie Mac said the average for the benchmark 30-year fixed-rate mortgage ticked up to 3.42 percent from 3.41 percent last week, staying close to its all-time low of 3.31 percent in November 2012. The average rate is down sharply from 4.09 percent a year ago.
The 15-year mortgage rate slipped to 2.72 percent from 2.74 percent last week.
After Britain's recent vote to leave the European Union, investors fled to the safety of U.S. Treasury bonds, driving up their prices and lowering their yields. Long-term mortgage rates tend to track the yield on 10-year Treasury notes.
-- The Associated Press
Biggest U.S. ocean wind farm in works
UNIONDALE, N.Y. -- A New York utility plans to build a wind farm off eastern Long Island that would be the nation's largest offshore wind energy project, three times larger than one set to begin operation this year off Rhode Island.
The Long Island Power Authority's board of directors is expected to approve the proposed 90-megawatt, 15-turbine wind farm east of Montauk at a meeting next Wednesday, the utility's chief executive officer, Thomas Falcone, told The Associated Press.
The U.S. lags behind Europe and others in development of offshore wind energy. Many wind farms in Europe are already producing hundreds of megawatts of power. The U.S. has seen other proposals for big offshore wind farms, but none have yet come to fruition.
"This is the first in New York, it's the largest to date, but we're looking at this and seeing a tremendous offshore wind resource that will be developed and it's not the last," Falcone said Wednesday. "I think this is a very big step ... for New York, but also for the United States."
-- The Associated Press
China group to invest $2.8B in S. Africa
A group of Chinese investors will spend more than $2.8 billion in an energy and metals-related industrial park in South Africa.
The consortium, led by Hong Kong Mining Exchange Co., will develop and manage the park, which will house plants to process minerals including chrome, manganese, coking coal and lime and is expected to create almost 21,000 jobs, South Africa's Department of Trade and Industry said in an emailed statement on Thursday. The park will be located inside a new Special Economic Zone in the north of Limpopo, a largely rural province.
South Africa's development of economic zones, which offer incentives including a 15 percent corporate tax and streamlined approval processes, seeks to bolster industrial activity and investment in an economy that's forecast to grow at the slowest rate this year since a 2009 recession. The Limpopo park also forms part of state efforts to ensure the nation benefits more from its mineral resources.
-- Bloomberg News
Cigarette-maker firing 950 in Germany
British American Tobacco PLC, the maker of Lucky Strike cigarettes, is eliminating 950 jobs at a German factory as it moves to cut costs amid a decline in smoking in western Europe.
The layoffs at the 1,320-worker factory in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth will be implemented over two years, the London-based tobacco company said in a statement Thursday. Cigarette production will be shifted to BAT's other European plants, though the factory will continue to make fine-cut tobacco, it said.
BAT has whittled its total employee count down to about 87,000 at the end of 2015 from about 140,000 in 2001 as higher tobacco taxes and public smoking bans shrink cigarette consumption. In the past 10 years, the smoking rate in western Europe has declined by 3.6 percentage points to 23 percent, according to data tracker Euromonitor.
-- Bloomberg News
Business on 07/15/2016