It’s time we called out the Home Office for its shameful attitude to refugees February 15, 2019 “There’s no place like home”, Dorothy says, as she taps her red heels together three times and returns to the place she loves. She’s right. Your home is your shelter, It’s your community, your friends, your local shops and landmarks. It’s dedication and love for your area. Building a home takes time and investment; familiarity does [...]
Mark Kleinman: Aviva’s missed deadline ensures brickbats February 15, 2019 Viva Aviva? For such a stalwart of blue-chip boardrooms, Sir Adrian Montague suddenly can’t put a foot right. Four years after taking over the chairmanship of Aviva when John McFarlane scuttled off to Barclays, he’s ended up in a rather large pickle of his own making. Sacking Mark Wilson as the insurer’s chief executive last [...]
Editor’s Notes: The EU simply chooses which rules to enforce and which to ignore February 14, 2019 Allow me a moment away from our own Brexit turmoil and to focus instead on a nasty spot of rot right at the heart of the European Commission. While the Brexit process has made some of the EU’s top brass more recognisable to a British audience, it’s unlikely that many could identify one of its [...]
Theresa May defeated on Brexit again as anti-EU Tories desert her in Commons vote February 14, 2019 Theresa May suffered a Valentine’s Day massacre on Thursday when Conservative Brexiters helped inflict a heavy Commons defeat on the government. The Prime Minister lost the support of the European Research Group of Tories after she tried to force her party to back a plan ruling out a ‘no deal’ Brexit. While the motion was [...]
Luke Johnson will see his reputation recover from Patisserie Valerie’s fraud scandal February 14, 2019 Warren Buffett once said that “bad things aren’t obvious when times are good”. It is a statement that rings painfully true in the case of Luke Johnson, who was riding high last year with a £250m fortune, when the bad things – an alleged long-term fraud of Patisserie Valerie accounts – were apparently far from obvious. [...]
Bitcoin sceptic Jamie Dimon launches JP Morgan’s own cryptocurrency February 14, 2019 JP Morgan is to launch its own cryptocurrency in an unprecedented step for a major US bank. The bank is to trial its JPM Coin in the coming months, which will handle a tiny fraction of the $6 trillion (£4.7 trillion) in payments it moves around globally every day. Read more: The year crypto went [...]
Patisserie Valerie wins rescue backing from private equity firm February 14, 2019 Scandal-hit Patisserie Valerie has been rescued in a £13m management buyout backed by Irish private equity firm Causeway Capital Partners. The cake chain confirmed this morning that Causeway Capital Partners had struck a deal with Patisserie Valerie's administrators in a move that is set to save 2,000 jobs and 96 of the firm's remaining branches. Retail and [...]
Trade minister Liam Fox urges MPs to back Prime Minister in Brexit vote February 14, 2019 Trade secretary Liam Fox has urged his Tory colleagues to fall in line ahead of a showdown between Prime Minister Theresa May and her party’s hardline Brexiters in a vote this afternoon. The motion asks parliament to reiterate its support for a previous Brexit vote, when MPs passed an amendment allowing May to return to [...]
Options are running out for the man who destroyed Venezuela February 14, 2019 It takes some front for a man who has presided over a double-digit recession for three successive years to claim that his country is being destabilised by a “gang of extremists” rather than his own inept economic performance. But that is exactly what Venezuela’s embattled President Nicolas Maduro did this week, when he stated that the [...]
US considers 60-day extension to looming China tariff deadline February 14, 2019 US President Donald Trump is mulling a 60- day extension of the 1 March deadline for higher tariffs on Chinese imports, according to reports. Trump is considering an extension to the 1 March deadline for more than doubling tariffs on $200bn (£156bn) of Chinese exports in order to give the two sides more time to come to [...]