Unilever’s abandonment of plans to scrap its Anglo-Dutch corporate structure and leave London is a huge embarrassment for chief executive Paul Polman, whose days in post must surely be numbered. More significantly, it’s a rare demonstration of the power of UK institutional investors (the likes of Aviva, Legal & General, M&G and Schroders) to exercise
‘Let me say it, loud and clear: the Conservative party is, and always will be, the party of business,’ declared Philip Hammond at Birmingham — a few hours after City tycoon and former Tory treasurer Michael Spencer told the BBC that the Prime Minister had ‘let herself down personally by not being a champion of
The least convincing thing said by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was ‘I believe we’ll be elected for a second term.’ In all his other remarks about plans for compulsory employee share schemes, workers on boards, higher corporate taxes, extended employment rights, attacks on the rich and below-market
‘I’m afraid I think he’s making it up,’ was the retort of Tory MP Sir Bernard Jenkin on Monday’s Today programme to the claim by Ralf Speth, boss of Jaguar Land Rover, that a bad Brexit deal could put tens of thousands of jobs at risk in JLR and its suppliers, and cost his company
Our cinema is showing Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and I’m reminded of a remark attributed to Mark Twain, that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes’. On 3 October 2008, three weeks after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, treasury secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for the US banking system was passed
Costa, in my opinion, sells a decent cup of coffee. It employs polite youngsters who seem happy in their work. If you’re desperate for caffeine, even its petrol-station vending machines are not too bad. And unlike the UK operation of Starbucks, whose coffee is vile, it pays tax on its profits at close to the
All good things must come to an end, including summer holidays and bull markets. The bull run in US shares that began in the aftermath of the financial crisis in March 2009 has now officially passed the previous record of 3,452 more-up-than-down days from October 1990 to March 2000. This time round, the S&P500 index
As I set to compiling your email responses into our ‘broadband dossier’ to send to BT chairman Jan du Plessis, the government issued its own evaluation of the ‘economic impact and public value’ of the superfast broadband roll-out programme launched in 2010. Compiled by outside experts, this document from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media
This column has consistently stood up for Mike Ashley, even when the lonesome billionaire’s notions of corporate governance at Sports Direct and staff welfare at its Shirebrook warehouse made that a challenging position to sustain — not to mention his troubled ownership of Newcastle United. Ashley has grown his core business over 35 years from
‘There has to be a level playing field so that… Amazon cannot undercut domestic booksellers by using the tax advantage of booking in Luxembourg a sale to a UK customer that is fulfilled from a UK warehouse.’ I wrote that five years ago: since then, no government anywhere has effectively addressed the issue of global
Those twice-weekly sales emails from Foxtons that the recent GDPR clean-up has failed to stop have lately been spattered with the words ‘recent price reduction’ in big red capitals. Hence no surprise that the glossy estate agent and bellwether of London residential property has just reported a first-half loss of £2.8 million, compared to £3.8
I bought BT’s offer of an upgrade to ‘superfast’ broadband because the standard service seemed to be deteriorating just as the daily quota of sales calls from India was increasing. But the improvement is barely perceptible. The blue light that tells me the hub is working turns orange to tell me it’s not with irritating
When I first visited Canary Wharf in the early 1990s, I was struck by a set of black-and-white posters in the shopping concourse advertising the Co-op Bank’s ethical banking stance: essentially, no lending to arms, tobacco, gambling or oil companies, or to regimes that disrespected human rights. A cynic might have argued that it was
An IT glitch afflicting BP petrol stations for three hours last Sunday evening might not sound like headline news. A ten-hour meltdown of Visa card payment systems in June was a bigger story — as was the notorious TSB computer upgrade cock-up that started on 20 April, which was still afflicting customers a month later
I’ve been on a mini-tour, full of echoes and warnings. First, to the Grange Festival in Hampshire, where we might still have been enjoying the summer of ’87: a moneyed audience in a Barings mansion laughing at funny foreigners in John Copley’s retro Seraglio (see Richard Bratby’s crit last week). Then to Oxford, to show
The voice of business has been all but silent in the Brexit debate ever since former Marks & Spencer boss Stuart Rose made such a hash of trying to lead the pre-referendum ‘Britain Stronger in Europe campaign’. Now suddenly there’s a business cacophony: Airbus, BMW, Siemens and the heads of the CBI, the Institute of
Should he stay or should he go — or will he already have gone by the time you read this? These are frequently asked questions about chief executives whose businesses hit troubled waters. It’s true that the higher you rise, the higher the risk if you don’t deliver, but it’s not always true that bosses
At last the government has restarted the process of selling its stake in Royal Bank of Scotland. A first £2 billion sale in 2015 (of 5 per cent of the bank’s shares) took place at 330 pence per share, against a purchase price of 502 pence in the 2008 bailout. Those numbers looked so embarrassing
I’m not in the least surprised to learn that WH Smith has been voted Britain’s worst high-street retailer in a Which? survey of more than 10,000 consumers: this is the eighth year in a row that the newsagent and bookseller has come bottom or second-to-bottom in the same poll. These days its cramped shops give
If Ben Broadbent’s Daily Telegraph interview last week was the launch of a bid for the governorship of the Bank of England, then it spectacularly misfired. The deputy governor’s use of ‘-menopausal’ to describe an economy past its productive peak — damned by the Guardian as ‘un-abashed misogyny’ even though his awkward metaphor, on closer
