Sunday Telegraph
Former McDonald’s director takes on Italy’s historic treasures. Prompting jokes about McDonatellos, a former McDonald’s director, Mario Resca, wants to shake up Italy’s dusty cultural tourism scene. “I see visitors as customers, clients. When you come to one of my museums, you are a guest and your needs should be satisfied,” he has said, and suggests Herculaneum and the Colosseum pay their own way by playing host to corporate events.
Cadbury is “worth fighting for”, says family member Felicity Loudon in response to the potential takeover of the family business by Kraft. “It appals me that a company like Kraft that makes something you put on your hamburger could end up owning Cadbury.”
Inventor Sir James Dyson is to head up a Tory taskforce to turn the UK into a high-tech centre of excellence. The entrepreneur will focus on encouraging the skills the UK needs to become Europe’s high-tech exporter. Dyson was said to have lost out to Dragons’ Den entrepreneur Peter Jones earlier this year when Jones’s proposal for an entrepreneur’s academy won favour over Dyson’s engineering one.
Meanwhile, BAE Systems is demonstrating the dark side of global trade as it finds itself between a rock and a hard place in the Serious Fraud Office’s corruption enquiry. Having refused a £300m settlement deal last week. Various reports across all the Sundays suggest it is hoping to re-start talks with the SFO and may plead guilty to lesser charge, while the SFO is said to be seeking the Attorney General’s permission to prosecute the company.
Overseas investors will have breathed a sigh of relief as Ireland approved the Lisbon Treaty, which is expected to protect billions of investments by US technology companies including Dell and Intel.
Can Chancellor Darling keep the UK from being edged out of the IMF? Modernisation discussions in Istanbul (dubbed by one wag as the “Bosphorous Tea Party”) could result in the UK losing its permanent seat on the policy-making committee, while emerging China could join the US, Japan and the EU at the top table of superpowers.
It shed 1,300 jobs and shut down for four months, but Honda’s Swindon plant is back with a vengeance. Adopting the motto, “Chance is a chance”, it used the closure time to put managers on a 10-day leadership course and refurbish operations so that the “buzz at the factory is now palpable,” according to the UK’s director of manufacturing.
Sunday Times
Avoiding administration is the name of the game in this recession. Debt-for-equity swaps are increasingly favoured over outright administration, with the latest mooted deal landing on Gala Coral’s bingo card as the gaming group laden with £2.6bn of debt looks to private equity investors for salvation.
PE owners Candover, Cinven and Permira, would be expected to yield up to half their stake to other investment groups Intermediate Capital and Park Square. Such deals are seen as preferable to allowing a struggling business to go into under — but raise questions about whether they are prolonging the agony for shareholders and creating new debt baggage for a string of investors.
Thousands of Teesside jobs could be saved in the chemicals industry if a Texan company, Third Coast Chemicals, takes over a Dow plant threatened with closure later this year. But the rescue would be state-led — it would need to invest £50m to refit the former ICI chemical plant at Wilton, part ofa possible aid strategy for the £60bn-a-year chemicals sector, which employs some 200,000 people in total.
The dangers of philanthrophy in a downturn: the University of St Andrews’ £45m medical school needs an injection of funds. Nearing completion, it it finds itself shy an £8m boost from Malaysian donor Vinod Sekhar. The rubber baron was to lend his father’s name (along with millions in funding) to the university’s
medical school. But 18 months later, St Andrewss has £5m in shares in Sekhar’s private companies, with the remaining £3m still outstanding. Sekhar has said the financial crisis hit his business “quite badly”, but has promised to honour his commitment to St Andrews.
CEOs don’t — or shouldn’t — sift through their email first thing every morning, says Peter Long, the head of Tui Travel. It’s a poor use of their time, says Long, who is also a fan of ‘management by walking around’ — “I like to get out and about, meeting the bright young leaders. I work closely with the HR director to create the talent pool” — makes a change to hear a CEO talking about bringing people on, not laying them off.
Tesco is the “Big Brother of the shopping world”, thanks to its Clubcard — one in two UK households has one, not to mention the 12 million members overseas and in other parts of Europe. Set up by marketing firm Dunnhumby in 1994, Tesco now analyses data from six million transactions a day to decide what to stock, where and when and can fine mill the data to find out whether a Clubcard owner has a pet, or whether they can cook or not. Every little helps, all right.
There is an upside to climate change. Denbies Wine Estate is cultivating a few acres of sauvignon blanc grapes to see if they take as well in Dorking as in the Loire Valley. And Sussex sparkling wine production may one day put us on a par with the best in the world. But it’s not all wine and roses: Denbies’ wine sales manager Elfrida Spooner points out that Brit grapes may improve, “but the plight of human beings will get worse and worse.”
The Observer
Banks may be expected to inject money into deprived communities, mirroring the US’s Community Reinvestment Act, which requires US lenders to pump billions into inner-city projects. Liam Byrne, chief secretary to the Treasury, is quoted as saying the UK is exploring a similar idea for Britain, whereby lenders would need to demonstrate that they are serving an entire community, not just the most lucrative prospects. Capitalising on public sentiment and calls for banks to demonstrate greater corporate citizenship, Byrne says: “If we are not going to do it now, we will never do it.”
Why can’t big businesses get succession right? From Rio Tinto to ITV, boards are finding it tough to fill the top jobs. One problem may be in the “cult” for favouring outside candidates, argues one expert. “You don’t always need someone to come in and shake a place up… Also, if you don’t make use of your own best people, the danger is that they will go somewhere else.” One investment body boss says succession should feature more prominently in annual reports, with updating requirements written into the Combined Code.
“My boy asked me, ‘why do I need to learn things when I can just Google them on my iPhone‘, and in a way, he’s right,” says Tom Alexander of Orange. Where to start…
The credit crisis has turned spendthrift Britons into supersavers who outstrip their normally cautious
Japanese peers when it comes to putting away the pennies. The UK savings ratio has risen to 5.6 percent, while Japan’s is now below five percent. Vicky Redwood of Capital Economics predicts it could go higher — suggesting it could ratio could reach double digits and constrain economic recovery.
