Category Archives: Business

Australia news live: accused cabinet minister set to address rape allegation; international borders closed until June

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Minister expected to declare his innocence and is not planning on stepping down. Follow latest updates

• Full report: cabinet minister to make statement addressing historical rape allegation against him
• Australia’s Covid vaccine tracker: when will you get your jab?

Labor’s assistant shadow treasurer, Andrew Leigh, has been on Sydney radio contrasting the government’s attitude towards companies that got jobkeeper and welfare recipients it pursued in its unlawful and botched robodebt scheme.

At Leigh’s request, auditor-general Grant Hehir is investigating the administration of the $100bn job subsidy scheme, and yesterday Leigh asked for the probe to be extended to touch on stevedore Qube, which got $30m in jobkeeper.

But the bulk of Australian firms haven’t handed it back, and they haven’t received the pressure to do so because the Treasurer hasn’t come out and been clear about how the JobKeeper scheme operated...

In terms of the government, we gave Josh Frydenberg extraordinary latitude to tweak JobKeeper where it wasn’t working as intended. But he hasn’t used that at all to prevent money flowing to shareholders and executives. He’s been as silent on this as the government was noisy about RoboDebt, clawing money out of the hands of social security recipients in an illegal approach.

Attention at the Albanese press conference has now turned to the historic rape allegation levelled against a (currently unnamed) cabinet minister in the Liberal government.

Albanese has been asked if he thinks the minister should stand down:

Quite clearly, this woman told multiple people, including people in public life, but also her friends that she wanted an investigation of this. It is very clear [the government] are pretending that this will go away, it will not ...

It is very clear that, in my mind, that this will require further leadership and action ... and I await the statement by the minister involved, the presumption of innocence is a critical part of our legal system but now that the existing legal processes have been unable to proceed, certainly in terms of NSW police, I think people will be looking for further responses beyond any statement that might be made today by the minister.

I was very disappointed by Scott Morrison’s statement yesterday where he said that he hadn’t read the documentation that was forwarded to him by the woman who was at the centre of the allegation who then took her own life by her friends.

He then also said, essentially, that he had spoken to the minister and that he believed the minister. That stands in stark contrast to what Scott Morrison said in May of 2019. About the need to believe people. Who come forward.

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Covid: Germany and France under pressure to shift Oxford vaccine

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Both countries urged to take action to avoid pile-up of unused AstraZeneca vaccine doses

Authorities in Germany and France are under pressure to come up with creative solutions to shift the AstraZeneca vaccine at higher speed in order to avoid a pile-up of unused doses over the coming weeks.

On Monday, France’s medical regulator reversed its advice not to use the AstraZeneca jab on over-65s, and Germany’s vaccination committee is coming under increasing pressure to follow suit or even scrap prioritisation altogether.

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City firms made plans in Brexit run-up to move assets worth £100bn to EU – survey

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Data from EY highlights last-minute transfers in order to hold on to European business

City firms revealed in the final months of 2020 that they planned to shift nearly £100bn in assets to the EU, taking the total value of assets lost to the bloc since the Brexit vote to £1.3 trillion, according to a new survey.

The data from consulting group EY pointed to a last-minute push by firms before 31 December after the UK-EU trade deal did not offer concessions for the UK’s dominant financial services sector. It forced companies to move staff and assets to the continent in order to continue serving EU customers.

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Rishi Sunak to offer ‘help to grow’ training for SME managers

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Small businesses will receive help in Wednesday’s budget to boost tech and management skills

The bosses of small businesses are to be invited back to school to brush up on their management skills, under plans to be announced in the budget designed to help close Britain’s productivity gap with rival nations.

As part of the attempt to speed up the UK’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will unveil a “help to grow” scheme that will offer the leaders of up to 130,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) the chance of MBA-style management training.

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Fossil fuel cars make ‘hundreds of times’ more waste than electric cars

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Analysis by transport group says battery electric vehicles are superior to their petrol and diesel counterparts

Fossil fuel cars waste hundreds of times more raw material than their battery electric equivalents, according to a study that adds to evidence that the move away from petrol and diesel cars will bring large net environmental benefits.

Only about 30kg of raw material will be lost over the lifecycle of a lithium ion battery used in electric cars once recycling is taken into account, compared with 17,000 litres of oil, according to analysis by Transport & Environment (T&E) seen by the Guardian. A calculation of the resources used to make cars relative to their weight shows it is at least 300 times greater for oil-fuelled cars.

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Old-school Stellantis car factories gear up for the shock of electric

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Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port plant is one of many whose future lies in the hands of the merged auto giant

Carlos Tavares is an unashamed petrolhead, with a rally-racing hobby that harks back to an earlier automotive age. Yet carmakers like Stellantis, which he leads, and its rivals have had to set aside affection for roaring internal combustion engines as environmental rules set the limits for the industry.

Stellantis was formed in January in a €50bn (£43bn) merger between France’s Peugeot and Italian-American Fiat Chrysler, in one of the clearest responses to the Tesla-driven electric revolution: the merger will allow them to share expensive investments in battery technology.

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‘Record companies have me on a dartboard’: the man making millions buying classic hits

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Hit songs can be a better investment than gold – and by snapping up the rights, Merck Mercuriadis has become the most disruptive force in music

Merck Mercuriadis had a good Christmas. On Christmas Day, the No 1 song in the UK was LadBaby’s Don’t Stop Me Eatin’, a novelty cover version of Journey’s 1981 soft-rock anthem Don’t Stop Believin’. It replaced Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You, which had topped the chart 26 years after its original release. Both songs are unkillable, evergreen hits, which are closing in on 1 billion Spotify streams apiece. Both songs are among the 61,000 owned, in whole or in part, by Mercuriadis’s investment company, Hipgnosis Songs Fund, and epitomise the thesis that has made the 57-year-old Canadian, in less than three years, the most disruptive force in the music business.

Put simply, Hipgnosis raises money from investors and spends it on acquiring the intellectual property rights to popular songs by people like Mark Ronson, Timbaland, Barry Manilow and Blondie. In a fast-growing market, what sets Hipgnosis apart from competitors is its founder’s bona fides as a veteran A&R man, manager and record label CEO. Like an old-school music mogul, Mercuriadis sells his brand by selling himself. Unlike those moguls, he’s a buff, teetotal vegan with spartan tastes. “The only material thing that I really care about is vinyl,” he says. “And Arsenal football club.” He looks rather like a rock-concert security guard: shaven head, burly torso, plain black T-shirt, hawkish gaze. Mark Ronson calls him “the smartest guy in the room”.

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Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries’

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Bitcoin mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithm – is a deeply energy intensive process

It’s not just the value of bitcoin that has soared in the last year – so has the huge amount of energy it consumes.

The cryptocurrency’s value has dipped recently after passing a high of $50,000 but the energy used to create it has continued to soar during its epic rise, climbing to the equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina, according to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool from researchers at Cambridge University that measures the currency’s energy use.

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House approves $1.9tn Covid aid bill despite minimum wage setback

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Relief bill represents Biden first big legislative win but wage hike proposal to be removed from Senate version

The US House of Representatives has passed Joe Biden’s $1.9tn coronavirus aid bill in his first major legislative victory.

Related: Criticism builds over Biden's failure to lift Trump sanctions on ICC prosecutors

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Johnson & Johnson one-shot Covid vaccine gets nod from FDA advisory panel

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Vaccine, along with those from Pfizer and Moderna, should provide US with more than enough supply to vaccinate every person

The battle against Covid-19 took a major step forward on Friday as the US moved closer to distributing its first one-shot Covid-19 vaccine, after an independent expert advisory panel recommended drug regulators authorize the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for emergency use.

The authorization would be a significant boost to the Biden administration’s vaccination plans, making Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine the third available to the public. Janssen, Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine subsidiary, told a congressional hearing this week that it expects to deliver 20m doses by March and a total of 100m doses before the end of June.

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Global stock markets drop as inflation fears prompt sell-off

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UK FTSE was down 2.5%, its biggest one-day fall in percentage terms since the end of October

Global stock markets ended February deep in the red, as fears of higher inflation prompted a sell-off in government bonds and spread anxiety across financial markets.

The UK’s FTSE 100 index fell 168 points to 6,483, a 2.5% drop – the biggest one-day fall in percentage terms since the end of October.

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Harvey Norman to keep $22m in jobkeeper despite profits doubling to $462m in pandemic

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Billionaire owner Gerry Harvey is resisting pressure to repay the money despite a $462m net profit for the second half of 2020

Billionaire Harvey Norman chairman Gerry Harvey has defied political pressure to pay back an estimated $22m in jobkeeper after the retailer’s profits more than doubled during the pandemic.

The furniture, electrical and whitegoods retailer on Friday reported that first-half sales climbed 25% and contributed to a net profit after tax of $462.03m for the last six months of 2020 – up 116% on the same time period in the previous year.

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Thames Water hopes to harness human ‘poo power’ to heat homes

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Company says sewage plan would avoid 105,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over 30 years

Thousands of homes in south-west London could soon be warmed by the waste from their local sewage works as part of England’s first poo-powered district heating scheme.

Thames Water hopes to harness the heat of human waste from its treatment plant in Kingston upon Thames to warm more than 2,000 new homes that form part of a regeneration plan for the borough’s Cambridge Road estate.

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Ursula von der Leyen issues Covid vaccine export warning at EU summit

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Commission head reassures leaders she will ban vaccines leaving EU if suppliers fail to deliver again

Ursula von der Leyen has reassured EU leaders she will ban coronavirus vaccines from leaving the EU if suppliers such as AstraZeneca fail to deliver again, as she faced questions over her handling of shortages.

The European commission president’s pledge at a virtual summit came as leaders issued a statement promising to “accelerate the provision of vaccines”, with just 8% of the adult population having received a jab compared with 27% in the UK.

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GameStop shares surge more than 100% as trading frenzy returns

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Investors are puzzled about why the stock favoured by home-based investors soared by 104%, and then 85% after hours

GameStop shares more than doubled in afternoon trading on Wednesday, surprising those who thought the video game retailer’s stock price would stabilise after a fierce rally and steep dive that upended Wall Street in January.

The shares soared nearly 104% during the session in which trading was halted several times, then jumped another 85% after hours.

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Lloyds and HSBC are shedding office space … did they have too much to begin with?

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Why there may be more to the announcement of Covid-inspired cuts than meets the eye

Here comes another bank that has decided, apparently definitively, that working practices will not return to their pre-pandemic norms. Lloyds Banking Group says it plans to shed 20% of its office space. Earlier this week, HSBC said it would get rid of 40%.

These figures are so dramatic that they invite suspicion. Have managements really come to the firm view that working from home is so popular that employees’ demands for flexibility must be granted? Or did these banks have too much office space in the first place and now wish to save a few quid?

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Keir Starmer under pressure to back plans for corporation tax rise

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Labour leader has faced backlash after saying he would oppose any new tax on business in budget

Keir Starmer is under pressure to back future rises in corporation tax after a backlash when the Labour leader said he would oppose any new tax on business in next week’s budget.

Treasury officials are believed to be looking at increasing the tax on company profits from the current rate of 19% to up to 25% as the government tries to recoup some of the massive debts incurred during the pandemic, though the rise may be delayed until later in the parliament.

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Reporting on WTO’s first female head ‘sexist and racist’, say African UN leaders

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Coverage of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala criticised by group who say such attitudes ‘discourage women from taking on leadership positions’

Senior African leaders at the UN have criticised the “sexist and racist” language used in coverage of the appointment of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as the new president of the World Trade Organization.

Okonjo-Iweala, a graduate of Harvard University, was confirmed as the new head of the WTO last week, making her the first woman and the first African to lead the organisation.

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HSBC looks to Asia after profits plunge 34%

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More executive roles are expected to relocate to home base of Hong Kong as part of Asia shift, where most of its earnings come from

HSBC, Britain’s biggest bank, has recorded a 34% drop in profit for 2020 as it prepares to double down on its operations in Hong Kong and China despite concern about the political crackdown in the former UK colony.

The bank said on Tuesday that pre-tax profit was down from $13.3bn (£9.4bn) in 2019 to $8.8bn in the 12 months to 31 December, while the adjusted profit before tax of $12.1bn (£8.6bn) fell 76% on the year before.

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Denver plane engine fire consistent with metal fatigue in fan blade, say investigators

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US reveals preliminary results of inquiry into Pratt & Whitney engine fire that led to grounding of dozens of Boeing 777s around the world

Metal fatigue in the fan blades may have been behind the engine failure of a Boeing jet in Denver at the weekend, the US National Transportation Safety Board has said.

The Pratt & Whitney engine caught fire shortly after take off on a United Airlines Boeing 777-200, during a flight from Denver to Honolulu, with 231 passengers and 10 crew onboard. Pilots issued a mayday call and returned to Denver.

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