Martin Vander Weyer

Welcome to The Spectator’s Economic Disruptor of the Year Awards 2019, sponsored by Julius Baer. We’re waiting to hear from entrepreneurs in every business sector across the UK who are eager to tell us how their products are bringing radical benefits to consumers in terms of price and choice. We’re looking for disruptors who can make an impact nationally and globally. Meanwhile, we’ll be presenting inspirational stories about the people behind the UK’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial ventures. In the first of the series, Martin Vander Weyer meets Virraj Jatania, whose low-cost banking app Pockit was the overall winner of our 2018 awards.  Virraj Jatania doesn’t need to be an entrepreneur.

There’s a lesson for all boardrooms — and an echo of the lost era of big-bucks, big-ego banking — in the story of Santander’s withdrawal of its job offer to Andrea Orcel. The Italian-born former UBS and Merrill Lynch investment banker was named last September as the next chief executive of the Spanish giant that is Europe’s fifth-largest commercial banking group; but during his ‘gardening leave’ between employers, the deal fell apart. The amount Orcel was demanding in compensation for deferred rewards at UBS — some reports say €50 million — turned out to be way over the top for the Spaniards.

Happy Chinese New Year, or at least let’s hope so. The chubby pig of 2019 is an obvious symbol of wealth; but being both pragmatists and optimists where money is concerned, the Chinese easily find reasons to associate all 12 of their zodiac creatures, (including 2018’s dog) with rising prosperity. This year, however, the amount spent by their shoppers and tourists during the New Year festivities will be compared against last year’s figure of $190 billion for signs of a weakening economy. We already know that trade tensions with the US and other negative factors have been afflicting Chinese sales of western imports, from iPhones to Land Rovers, and that property and shares have been afflicted too, with the Shanghai stock market down by half from its 2015 peak.

Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a citizen’s duty, not an act of virtue. But for the very rich it is also a choice, since with the help of expensive advisers they can duck it or pay very little of it by using complex avoidance devices and offshore havens. So if they stay onshore and pay up, we should salute their good citizenship — if only to encourage others like them who might lighten the tax burden for the rest of us. In that context I was pleased to see two of this column’s controversial heroes of modern capitalism in the Sunday Times list of the UK’s 50 highest taxpayers.

Patisserie Valerie, the cake-shop chain that found a potentially fraudulent £40 million black hole in its finances last October, fell into administration today after failing to persuade its bankers not to pull the plug. Chairman Luke Johnson, having lent the company £10 million plus last-minute cash to help pay this month’s wages for 3,000 staff, joins the creditors’ queue. Investors who put £15 million into his attempted rescue late last year are disgruntled, while investigations into the role of auditors Grant Thornton and former finance director Chris Marsh have yet to throw light on what went wrong in the first place. What’s curious about this mystery story is that it could not have happened to a more genteel brand.

Against a background of drooping eurozone growth (the consensus forecast is 1.6 per cent this year) I met no one in France who was celebrating the 20th birthday of the euro, despite European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s imaginative toast to it as ‘a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability [that] has delivered prosperity and protection for our citizens’. The French associate the euro with the inflation that is stoking unrest, but only the very old feel nostalgic for the franc (and they tend to mean the pre-1960 ‘old franc’, of which there were 100 to the new one).

In France after New Year, the only gilets jaunes I spotted were a rather dejected bunch near an autoroute exit. I was ready to give them a cheery thumbs-up rather than risk having my path blocked, but they took no notice of me — and no one I met expressed support for them. The novelty has worn off and sensible French citizens are horrified that the protests have led to deaths in car and lorry accidents at the barricades.

Are smartphones fuelling a pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression? That’s the question parents will wrestle with this Christmas as their offspring clamour for the latest Samsung or Huawei. And the answer seems to be yes: these must-have accessories are corroding the nature of human interaction for the next generation — but the young can’t live without them, so we’d better get used to it. And that gives rise to an even trickier yuletide dilemma: what of the previous generation? Is there a digital device that’s safe to pop under the tree for an elderly relative? The solution, I suggest, is the iPad.

I wrote last week of my fear that we’ll never ‘take back control of our fish’, as Brexiteers ardently wish, because the rights of UK fishermen — whose diminished industry contributes less than half a per cent of GDP — will be too easy to give away in the next negotiating phase. Sure enough, last Sunday’s Brussels summit to approve the withdrawal agreement produced an explicit warning from President Emmanuel Macron that unless the UK allows continuing access into its waters for EU (meaning specifically French) fishing boats, he may veto a wider trade deal, which means the hated ‘backstop’ would come into force instead.