Business briefs

LABI hires small business director
BATON ROUGE (AP) — The Louisiana Association of Business and Industry has hired Renee Amar as director of its Small Business Council.
The trade lobbying group says Amar will be lead advocacy efforts on behalf of small businesses in Louisiana/
Amar, a longtime lobbyist, has been state director for the National Federation of Independent Business since 2007.
Before joining NFIB, Amar worked for the Louisiana Hospital Association as governmental affairs coordinator.0

Callon Petroleum sells assets
NATCHEZ, Miss. (AP)— W&T Offshore Inc. plans to buy Callon Petroleum Co.’s shares of Gulf of Mexico oil and gas fields for $100 million.
Callon announced the sale Thursday. It’s supposed to close by Nov. 30.
Houston-based W&T will buy a 15 percent share of the Medusa field, which produces about 1,000 barrels of oil per day, and Callon’s 7.5 percent interest in the production facilities for the field.
Also included in the sale are 10 shallow-water fields that Callon doesn’t operate that produce about 5.1 million cubic feet of natural gas each day.
Chairman and CEO Fred Callon says the sale completes the company’s transition to one that only drills onshore and focuses on western Texas’ Permian Basin. Callon says the company will use the money to acquire or drill more wells.

Carlos will lead Terrebonne chamber
HOUMA (AP) — The Houma-Terrebonne Chamber of Commerce has appointed Suzanne Carlos as president and chief executive officer.
Carlos, an LSU graduate, formerly worked in business outreach at Terrebonne General Medical Center, the Terrebonne School District and Southland Mall.
She has spent nearly two decades as a business advocate.
Carlos served for six weeks as interim chamber president after the resignation of Gordon Crow. Crow had been on the job for seven months before resigning.

Huntington Ingalls delivers to Navy
NEW ORLEANS (AP)— Huntington Ingalls Industries says its New Orleans-area shipyard has delivered the last of three ships named for 9/11 attack sites to the U.S. Navy.
The USS Somerset is named for the Pennsylvania county where a hijacked airliner crashed after passengers stormed the cockpit.
The $1.2 billion Somerset is the last ship to be made at the Avondale shipyard.
The ships are designed to launch helicopters, tilt-rotor aircraft and assault watercraft to bring up to 800 troops to shore.
The Somerset was christened in July 2012.

Monks’ casket ruling prompting mall funeral store
KENNER (AP)— A former Orleans Parish sheriff’s deputy says he’s going into the custom casket and urn business, now that funeral directors no longer have a monopoly in Louisiana.
Jonathan Lahatte plans to open a branch of the Kansas-based ‘Til We Meet Again memorial store on Oct. 26 at The Esplanade in Kenner.
He said his partners are Nathan Smith and Traci Smith-Cone, who own the original store in Wichita. There’s another in Phoenix. Lahatte says others are planned.
Smith and Smith-Cone have exclusive NCAA and Southeastern Conference licenses, so LSU or Saints fans can get caskets with their team’s logo, Lahatte said.

Nucor takes $14M write-down on La. dome collapse
CONVENT(AP) — The storage dome collapse at Nucor Corp.’s plant in Convent has prompted the company based in Charlotte, N.C., to take a $14 million write-down in its third quarter earnings.
The write-down of inventory and fixed asset balances came to 3 cents per diluted share, the company said.
It announced earnings Thursday of $147.6 million, or 46 cents per share — an improvement over the $110.3 million, or 35 cents a share, from the third quarter of 2012.
Startup at Nucor Steel Louisiana has been delayed until the end of the year.
The company had been a few weeks from starting production in St. James Parish when the dome collapsed Sept. 25. No one was hurt and there was no environmental impact.
The $750 million plant will use natural gas to convert iron ore pellets into “direct-reduced iron,” also called “sponge iron,” which is then used to make steel.
The collapsed dome was one of three set up to store iron ore pellets.
Nucor said construction and testing of the plant operations are continuing while the accident is investigated.