Category Archives: Business

Australia coronavirus update: major cyber attack under way as Victoria records 12 new Covid-19 cases – live news

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A sophisticated state-based actor is targeting all levels of government and companies in a range of sectors, PM reveals. Follow live

Also, the Five Eyes finance ministers met. Given what their operatives do, a meeting seems superfluous, but ok.

Today Australia hosted a call with the Finance Ministers of the “Five Eyes” nations – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States.

It was the first of what will be regular calls among the countries to discuss the economic issues associated with COVID-19.

I guess when you don’t have the Global Times, you have to be a little more overt in your silent diplomacy.

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Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds among UK banks that had links to slavery

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Many bank directors received compensation after slavery was made illegal in 1833

The slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807 but it was not until 1833 that the Slavery Abolition Act finally banned the ownership of other human beings. However, 46,000 slave owners continued to benefit financially as the subsequent Slave Compensation Act provided £20m in payments – a sum worth billions in 2020 terms. Despite the name of the act, the former slaves were not compensated.

University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project shows that 10% to 20% of Britain’s wealthy can be identified as having had significant links to slavery. The amount of money borrowed to pay off slave owners was so large that the government only repaid it fully in 2015. Companies with links to slavery in their past include:

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Coronavirus Australia update: Northern Territory to reopen borders in July as Victoria records 18 new Covid-19 cases – question time live

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Michael Gunner declared the NT Covid-free and will prepare to allow domestic travel; person who attended Melbourne Black Lives Matter protest among new Vic cases. Follow live

That leads to this exchange:

Tony Smith: The Prime Minister will resume his seat. The Prime Minister will resume his seat. The Manager of Opposition Business will resume his seat. The Prime Minister needs to withdraw that imputation.

Anthony Albanese to Scott Morrison:

My question is to the Prime Minister. Under this Prime Minister, Australia has entered its first recession in three decades. Australia now has an effective unemployment rate of 11.3%. How many unemployed Australians don’t have a job because the Prime Minister deliberately excluded them from JobKeeper?

No-one in this country is unemployed because of the Government’s responses.

People are unemployed in this country, people have been reduced to zero hours which is the same thing, people have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic!

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Papua New Guinea chiefs call for halt to plan for country’s largest ever mine

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Locals say the Sepik river region must be protected from ‘exploitation and destruction from outsiders’

Chiefs from 28 haus tambarans – “spirit houses” – representing 78,000 people along Papua New Guinea’s remote Sepik river have formally declared they want a proposal for the country’s largest ever mine halted.

PanAust, an Australian-registered miner ultimately owned by the Chinese state-owned Guangdong Rising Assets Management, has proposed building a gold, silver and copper mine on the Frieda river, a tributary to the Sepik.

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South African police make arrests over notorious bank corruption scandal

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VBS Mutual collapsed in 2018 with £100m of debts allegedly looted in ‘pattern of racketeering’

A number of people have been arrested by police investigating one of South Africa’s most notorious corruption scandals, the looting and collapse of VBS Mutual Bank.

VBS, which held the savings of many disadvantaged people and local municipalities, collapsed with more than £100m in debts in 2018. Much of the money had been siphoned into private bank accounts and some spent on property or luxury cars, investigators found.

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UK begins talks with Australia and New Zealand on free trade deal for post-Brexit era

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Australian and New Zealand ministers say they are eager to do deals with the UK as their economies emerge from the coronavirus crisis

Australia and New Zealand are about to begin negotiations on a free trade agreement with the UK in what the Australian trade minister said was “a strong signal of our mutual support for free trade” in a post-Covid-19 world.

Simon Birmingham said Australia was “ready to help the UK find new beginnings post-Brexit and in doing so, open up new doors for our farmers, businesses and investors”.

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Australian politics live: consular officials talk to Karm Gilespie, Australian man facing death penalty in China – latest updates

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Foreign affairs minister Marise Payne says Australian authorities visited the detention centre where the 53-year-old is being held. Follow live

Julian Hill is looking at the government’s spend on consultants (an evergreen sentence, no matter what political party is in government)

New analysis by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) has found that the big four consultancy firms – Deloitte, Ernest&Young, KPMG and PwC – now collectively reap $800m a year in government contracts.

But only 20% of that figure is spent on actual consultancy contracts, meaning the Morrison government is paying top dollar to large consultancy firms to work as contractors doing the day-to-day work of public servants.

The Australia Institute has begun a new campaign to have truth in advertising part of Australia’s political advertising.

An open letter coordinated by the Australia Institute and signed by 29 prominent Australians calls for parliament to pass truth-in-political advertising laws that are nationally consistent, constitutional and uphold freedom of speech.

Signatories to the open letter include former political party leaders and politicians, Dr John Hewson, Cheryl Kernot and Michael Beahan; former supreme court judges, the Hon Anthony Whealy QC, the Hon Paul Stein AM QC and the Hon David Harper AM QC, as well as barristers, community leaders, business people and other prominent Australians.

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UK Finance boss resigns as Amanda Staveley high court case continues

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Ex-Barclays executive Stephen Jones says he apologised over alleged sexist remarks referred to in court documents

The boss of the banking lobby group UK Finance has resigned just weeks before his alleged sexist remarks about the financier Amanda Staveley are due to be revealed in the high court.

Stephen Jones, a senior Barclays executive during the financial crisis who became the first chief executive of UK Finance in 2017, said he had also apologised to Staveley and the body’s staff about the comments, which were made as the bank scrambled to save itself from nationalisation in 2008.

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Australia considering shorter Covid-19 quarantine for students and low-transmission countries

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Government ministers outline measures being considered to reopen for international travel

Senior Morrison government ministers have flagged shorter quarantine periods for international students and business travellers as part of a suite of measures to reopen Australia to international travel.

On Sunday, the health minister, Greg Hunt, confirmed that modifications to the existing mandatory two-week hotel quarantine could be enacted in addition to travel bubbles with safe countries, such as New Zealand, which would not require quarantine.

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CMA to look into Facebook’s purchase of gif search engine

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Watchdog fears that social media giant’s takeover of Giphy may reduce competition

The UK’s competition regulator has opened an investigation into the proposed $400m (£320m) takeover of gif search engine Giphy by Facebook amid fears that the acquisition may reduce competition in the UK.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is inviting comments about Facebook’s purchase of a company that currently provides gif search across many of the social network’s competitors, including Twitter and the messaging service Signal.

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Brexit: full controls on goods entering UK will not apply until July 2021

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Three-phased plan for Brexit border checks welcomed as UK formally rejects extension to transition period

Full border controls on goods entering the UK will not apply until July next year the government has announced, as it formally notified the EU it does not want an extension to the transition period.

The announcement of a three-phased plan for Brexit border checks was welcomed by industry leaders but represents the most dramatic change to international trading since 1993 when the single market was introduced.

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BA, easyJet and Ryanair begin court action over UK quarantine rules

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Airlines seeking urgent judicial review of policy that they say could cost thousands of jobs

Britain’s three biggest airlines have filed papers in the high court to seek an urgent judicial review of the government’s quarantine laws, which they say are having a devastating effect on tourism and the wider economy.

British Airways, easyJet and Ryanair say the rules, which came into effect on Monday and require passengers arriving from abroad to self-isolate at a single address for 14 days, are flawed and will cost thousands of jobs.

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Coronavirus Australia update: PM apologises for ‘no slavery’ comments as Queensland sticks with 10 July border open date – politics live

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Qld deputy premier and health minister says situation will be reviewed at the end of June ‘as we’ve said consistently’. Follow live

Speaking of awkward, Angus Taylor just took a dixer.

So that is a bit awkward, then.

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Stock markets tumble as another 1.5m Americans file for unemployment

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Dow Jones loses more than 1,800 points while S&P down 5% after US coronavirus infections hit 2m

Stock markets tumbled in the US and Europe on Thursday amid growing fears over the long-term economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

The sell off started after the US labor department announced another 1.5 million people had filed for unemployment benefits and the number of coronavirus infections passed 2m even as states across the US continued to relax their quarantine measures.

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No-deal Brexit would be ‘major block’ to UK’s recovery, warns CBI

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Carolyn Fairbairn says most UK businesses cannot prepare for no-deal during Covid-19 crisis

Business leaders have pleaded with the government not to walk away from Brexit talks without a deal after Michael Gove claimed the Confederation of British Industry supported no extension to the transition period.

The CBI’s director general, Carolyn Fairbairn, said to crash out without a deal would be a “major block to recovery”.

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Unilever picks London as its home over Rotterdam

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Anglo-Dutch conglomerate denies U-turn after finally choosing the UK capital over Dutch city as its HQ

Unilever has picked London as its home in an about-face on the company’s 2018 decision to “go Dutch” which was abandoned after a revolt by British shareholders.

Despite a fresh internal review that this time selected London rather than Rotterdam as the location of its headquarters, the Unilever chairman, Nils Andersen, insisted it was not a flip-flop but a pragmatic way to complete an overdue overhaul of its unwieldy corporate structure.

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Coronavirus Australia update: warning of severe Covid-19 economic shock as ‘double-hit scenario’ looms – politics live

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Australia’s GDP could fall by 6.3% this year if hit by a second wave of infections, the OECD says in a new report. Follow live updates

Scott Morrison is now calling on all the closed states to nominate the date they will re-open in July.

Because he is getting “frustrated” at the interstate border closures.

“People who rallied this [past] weekend, showed great disrespect for their neighbours,” Scott Morrison says.

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BHP to destroy at least 40 Aboriginal sites, up to 15,000 years old, to expand Pilbara mine

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Exclusive: WA minister gave consent to BHP plan just three days after Juukan Gorge site was blown up by Rio Tinto in a move that has horrified the public

Mining giant BHP Billiton is poised to destroy at least 40 – and possibly as many as 86 – significant Aboriginal sites in the central Pilbara to expand its $4.5bn South Flank iron ore mining operation, even though its own reports show it is aware that the traditional owners are deeply opposed to the move.

In documents seen by Guardian Australia, a BHP archaeological survey identified rock shelters that were occupied between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago and noted that evidence in the broader area showed “occupation of the surrounding landscape has been ongoing for approximately 40,000 years”.

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Zara owner to close up to 1,200 fashion stores around the world

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Inditex seeks to boost online retailing as coronavirus causes 44% sales slump

The owner of Zara will close as many as 1,200 stores around the world as the clothing retailer tries to boost online sales during the chaos wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inditex said it would “absorb” between 1,000 and 1,200 mainly smaller stores, with losses concentrated among older shops from brands other than Zara. The Spanish company’s other brands include Bershka, Pull & Bear and Massimo Dutti.

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Anger at huge shareholder payout as US chain Kohl’s cancels $150m in orders

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Retailer paid $109m in dividends just weeks after cancelling clothing orders, leaving suppliers in Bangladesh facing financial crisis

Kohl’s, one of the US’s largest clothing retailers, cancelled millions of dollars worth of existing orders from Bangladeshi and Korean garment factories just weeks before paying out $109m (£85m) in dividends to shareholders, the Guardian can reveal.

The company cancelled orders of clothing worth approximately $100m from Korea and $50m from Bangaldeshi factories after the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and refused petitions from suppliers asking for the option to renegotiate payments. 

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