Money laundering is a dirty business that we need to clean up together March 14, 2019 Flag it up, clean it up, flush it out, whatever the call to action, anti-money laundering (AML) legislation is worthy of laser focus. It also requires hyper-vigilance from the accountancy profession. Last week, parliament’s Treasury select committee warned that the UK’s current efforts to counter money laundering are “fragmented”, and that its supervision requires greater [...]
Enrolling with the times: How the workplace pension hike could affect you March 13, 2019 Since the government began phasing in auto-enrolment almost seven years ago, 10m people have now joined their workplace pension scheme. By encouraging Brits of all ages to save for retirement, the auto-enrolment system was designed to stop the UK from hurtling head-first into a pensions crisis. So far, it’s been a success. Even more people are [...]
Karren Brady and a lesson on the duties of directors March 13, 2019 Several months after Sir Philip Green became embroiled in a highly publicised scandal, Karren Brady resigned as chair of his retail empire. Despite allegations of harassment and discrimination made by staff against Green, Brady initially intended to remain with Taveta Investments, the holding company of Green’s Arcadia Group. She cited her duty to employees as [...]
How the arrival of the World Wide Web has changed the mortgage market March 12, 2019 In 1989, the Swiss physics laboratory, CERN, was buzzing with information but it had one big problem: ideas, data and knowledge held by the lab was stored across incompatible computers. A young scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, envisioned creating a unifying structure for sharing information across its computer systems. He wrote a proposal for a linked information [...]
Norway has grown rich on oil, so why is its state-owned fund divesting from fossil fuels? March 12, 2019 Last week, one of the largest planned divestments of fossil fuel assets in history was announced. The Norwegian government publicly declared its intention to sell off ownership in oil and gas companies, to the tune of 66bn Norwegian krone (£5.7bn). This massive decision sent ripples through the markets, and the international benchmark Brent Crude was [...]
Forget Brexit, corporate debt is a bigger issue March 11, 2019 As a few of you might have been told many times already, today is the latest Brexit D-Day for the UK, and for Theresa May in particular. Now, despite the fact that I am – at the moment that you are reading this – down on a chilly College Green in Westminster reporting on the latest [...]
Anabel Kingsley on taking on her late father’s celeb-loved hair business March 11, 2019 When I arrive at the address, I have to double-check that I’m at the right place. The Philip Kingsley clinic in Mayfair is pretty inconspicuous – from the outside, it’s just an ordinary Victorian terraced house. But this is part of its charm, and probably ideal for the privacy of the clinic’s celebrity customers. The [...]
Workplaces should be designed with mothers in mind March 8, 2019 With this year’s International Women’s Day celebrating the theme of gender balance, it serves as a stark reminder of how far we have to go to bring parity into the workplace. Women make up half of the UK’s labour force with over 74 per cent of Britain’s mums currently in work. However, accommodating new mothers [...]
Want to empower women? Fund them March 8, 2019 In the century since the first International Women’s Day was celebrated, the UK has taken great strides towards gender equality. From the right to vote to equal pay, across many fields the battle has been won. Since the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, women have moved into paid employment outside the home in ways that [...]
M&A could be the cure for the UK’s threatened pharmaceutical industry March 7, 2019 Six in 10 UK hospital pharmacists report medicine shortages daily – twice the rate as the whole of the European Union. And this is before the fast-approaching EU withdrawal agreement puts additional pressure on the medicine supply chain. According to Mike Thompson, chief executive of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry: “every month, 45m [...]
