Any other business

Numerous readers told me they liked my recent tale — offered as an antidote to ‘media sniping at corporate capitalism’ — about the temporary school built by Porta-kabin after the Grenfell Tower fire. I’m on the lookout for other business stories that celebrate the positive, and I had it in mind to write about an entrepreneur I’ve known throughout his career who has built an international brand that pleases customers, creates skilled jobs and has carried him through tough times to a fortune. But when we spoke, our conversation took an unexpected turn. Did I realise, he asked, how he and his cohort are beginning to think in relation to the risk of an incoming Corbyn-McDonnell government?

Perhaps we should be relieved that Donald Trump has made a dull appointment to succeed Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. He might have picked another alt-right wacko or Kremlin stooge — or his Las Vegas buddy Phil Ruffin, the casino owner he allegedly thought of sending as envoy to China. But in fact he has chosen Jerome ‘Jay’ Powell, an identikit lawyer-turned-banker who has been called the candidate of ‘continuity’ and ‘compromise’ after a late run to beat frontrunner Kevin Warsh, a former Trump adviser with more aggressive opinions on the need for monetary tightening.

In connection with the receding possibility of a London Stock Exchange listing for Saudi Aramco, I wrote that the City authorities’ apparent eagerness to accommodate companies ‘from places not best known for their accounting standards, business probity or general attachment to democracy and the rule of law’ smacked of Brexit-driven desperation. Russia was one of the places I had in mind. Now along comes a listing candidate that rings more alarm bells than the secretive Saudi oil giant. The company concerned is called EN+ Group, and it is the first Russian entity to come to the London market since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine and Crimea provoked US and EU sanctions in 2014.

Another week, another blue-chip in the dock. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has brought fraud charges against London-based mining giant Rio Tinto and two former executives in relation to an ill-starred coal venture in Mozambique. Whatever its legalities, this was a colossal corporate cock-up. In 2010, Rio paid $3.7 billion for Riversdale, an Australian company that controlled large coal deposits in the Tete region of Mozambique. The plan was to send coal by barge 400 miles down the Zambezi river to the coast, for shipping to Chinese power stations. But the coal reserves proved disappointing, while the Mozambique government refused to permit the barge operation and a rail link proved too expensive.

How did we mislay half a trillion pounds? Revised data from the Office for National Statistics has just reduced the UK’s ‘net international investment position’ from a surplus of £469 billion to a deficit of £22 billion. Downing Street dismissed this as ‘a technical revision’ — and in truth it’s not as bad it sounds, since what it tells us is that we own fewer foreign assets, and foreigners own more British assets, than had previously been recorded. Does national pride not attach to the idea that the rest of the world sees us as an investment safe haven? So why worry? Well, past miscounting apart, actual current trends in this respect do not encourage optimism.

Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined up at Leeds-Bradford airport alongside those of Ryanair and its brash northern rival Jet2, I sometimes wondered why Monarch was still there. Now it has been brought down by a combination of the weak pound, too much competition on Iberian routes and too little demand for terrorist-threatened ones to Turkey, Tunisia and Egypt. Even the orderly repatriation of 110,000 Monarch passengers has had an old-fashioned feel to it (perhaps even a touch of Dunkirk, for those who have seen that excellent film), enhanced by the reassuring tones of Dame Deirdre Hutton, the veteran quango queen who chairs the Civil Aviation Authority.

An Uber insider tells me not to write off the ride-hailing giant too soon, because it’s a very smart company for all its faults — and because the numbers of drivers and users for whom it is part of daily life will make it difficult for Transport for London to uphold its licence withdrawal on appeal, so long as Uber makes gestures of humility. But the moral of the story, says my source, is that as a ‘tech disrupter’ invading a regulated sector, the company created by Travis Kalanick ‘relished the fight with governments and entrenched interests far more than was normal or reasonable’, rather than seeking to be part of the urban fabric through collaboration or partnership.

Should we place faith in a survey, conducted in June but published this week, that says London is still the world’s pre-eminent financial centre? Yes, in the sense that no one challenges that long-standing claim as of today; no, in the sense that complacency would be a huge mistake while every financial firm operating in the City, the West End and Canary Wharf is busy making contingency plans for a bad Brexit outcome.

Arguably it was Robert Peston’s breathless reporting of trouble at Northern Rock on the evening of 13 September 2007 that kicked off the crisis. The next morning, depositors were queuing round the block and the drama that would almost bring down the global banking system a year later had begun. Looking back after a decade, we can be grateful for the bailout interventions that shored it all up at the moment of cataclysm — but we can also observe the lingering and deep unfairnesses of the longer-term recovery.

Now here’s a tricky question. The world’s largest oil company, potentially worth six times as much as ExxonMobil and ten times as much as Royal Dutch Shell, wants to list its shares on a major stock exchange next year, and has indicated that the choice is between London and New York. The company’s initial public offering of just 5 per cent of its shares promises a $100 billion deal that will generate a fee bonanza for bankers, lawyers and PR men in the chosen marketplace, with several more tranches to come. Clearly London should go all-out to win this lucrative and prestigious piece of business, which would reconfirm the City’s pre-eminent place in the financial world.

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally used, even for the smallest transactions.