Category Archives: Business

Air Canada to cut more than 5,000 jobs in response to coronavirus crisis

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Canada’s largest airline plans to cut more than 5,000 jobs in the coming weeks as the coronavirus forces it to ground hundreds of international and domestic flights.

Air Canada is cutting 3,600 employees from its banner company and 1,549 from its discount carrier Rouge. The cuts, which make up nearly 60% of the company’s flight staff, will come in April.

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Every major UK and European carmaker to stop or cut production

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As disruption from Covid-19 spreads, only some low-volume producers will remain open

Every major carmaker in the UK and Europe is suspending or cutting production as the disruption from the coronavirus outbreak spreads – with only lower-volume manufacturers such as Aston Martin keeping factories open.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Bentley Motors have become the latest British carmakers to suspend production at their UK factories.

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Bank of England’s QE programme is bigger than the City expected

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Quantitative easing stimulus is equivalent to almost 2% off interest rates

The Bank of England has gone all in. By cutting interest rates to 0.1% and announcing a fresh £200bn of money creation via its quantitative easing programme it has fired all the conventional weapons in its arsenal.

There will be some who say this is all reminiscent of the Beyond the Fringe sketch where Peter Cook demands “a futile gesture” to raise the whole tone of the war. Others will saythe Bank’s new governor Andrew Bailey had no choice given the state of the markets and the imminent lockdown in London. Bailey has had a good first week in the job.

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Former London bankers convicted after Germany’s ‘greatest tax robbery’

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First case of its kind sheds light on complex fraud known as cum-ex trading

Two former London bankers were handed suspended jail terms and one a €14m fine for tax fraud in a landmark trial that is likely to unleash dozens of similar cases across Germany.

The ruling is the first criminal conviction for what the judge, Roland Zickler, called “a collective case of thievery from state coffers”.

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ECB U-turn shows it fears coronavirus could destroy eurozone project

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Bank now realises Europe will sustain grievous economic damage from Covid-19

Weak. Clumsy. Behind the curve. The European Central Bank took stick for its initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic – and rightly so.

Those accusations can no longer be levied after the ECB used an emergency meeting to launch a gigantic new package of quantitative easing (QE) – the electronic money creation device that has become a key tool for central banks since the financial crisis of 2008.

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Garment workers face destitution as Covid-19 closes factories

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Campaigners call for fashion brands to protect workers in their supply chains globally as coronavirus causes orders to dry up

The fashion industry is facing calls to step in and protect the wages of the 40 million garment workers in their supply chains around the world who face destitution as factories close and orders dry up in the wake of the Covid-19 epidemic.

Many factories in garment-producing countries including Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam are already closing due to a shortage of raw materials from China and declining orders from western clothing brands.

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Coronavirus Australia latest: at a glance

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A summary of major developments in the coronavirus outbreak across Australia

• Follow our Australia coronavirus live blog for all the latest news and updates

• Follow the latest global coronavirus updates in our international live blog

Key Australian developments in the global coronavirus outbreak on Thursday include:

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Peacetime constraints ditched in the war for economic survival | Larry Elliott

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The Covid-19 outbreak is forcing politicians and central bankers to set aside ideology and orthodoxy to prevent a global collapse

It is as if the lights have been switched off. The global economy has been plunged into darkness as countries hunker down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Most recessions develop gradually over time. When the last one started in 2008 it took the Bank of England six months to spot it. This time it is different. Then it was a financial virus, this time it is the real thing. Commentators often say the economy is hitting the wall or is falling off a cliff on the weakest of evidence. Today the cliches are horrifyingly true.

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Amazon to suspend non-essential shipments to UK and US warehouses

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The company is prioritising five categories of goods which it classifies as essential products

  • Coronavirus – latest updates
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    • Online retail giant Amazon is stopping sellers from sending non-essential items to its UK and US warehouses until 5 April, to make space for vital items needed by its customers during the coronavirus outbreak.

    Amazon wrote to its third-party sellers, some of whom use the company’s logistics to store and dispatch their products, to inform them that stocks of medical supplies and certain household items are running low due to increased demand from online shoppers.

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    TikTok ‘tried to filter out videos from ugly, poor or disabled users’

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    Documents from the Incercept show social media app put pressure on moderators

    TikTok moderators were told to suppress videos from users who appeared too ugly, poor or disabled, as part of the company’s efforts to curate an aspirational air in the videos it promotes, according to new documents published by the Intercept.

    The documents detail how moderators for the social video app were instructed to select content for the influential “For You” feed, an algorithmic timeline that is most users’ first port of call when they open the app. As a result, being selected for For You can drive huge numbers of views to a given video, but the selection criteria have always remained a secret, with little understanding as to the amount of automation involved.

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    British American Tobacco circumventing ad ban, experts say

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    BAT seems to be running accounts to promote e-cigarettes after crackdown on hiring influencers

    British American Tobacco (BAT) is marketing e-cigarettes and heated cigarettes with pictures of attractive models and using hashtags such as “I dare you to try it”, despite a crackdown last year after it paid social media influencers to promote its products.

    BAT had come under fire after hiring young models to sell its products despite having an explicit policy banning under-25s from appearing in adverts.

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    Apple fined record €1.1bn by French competition regulator

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    Tech giant conspired with wholesalers Tech Data and Ingram Micro to align prices, says watchdog

    Apple has been fined a record €1.1bn (£990m) by antitrust regulators in France for engaging in anti-competitive agreements with two wholesalers. The penalty imposed on the US tech giant is the largest ever handed out to a company by the Autorité de la Concurrence.

    Commenting on the move, Isabelle de Silva, head of the French competition watchdog, said: “Apple and its two wholesalers agreed to not compete against each other and prevent resellers from promoting competition between each other, thus sterilising the wholesale market for Apple products.”

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    Markets plunge despite coordinated action by central banks

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    Sharp losses recorded after US interest rate cut, as Bank of England hints at further support to combat turmoil

    The FTSE 100 fell below 5,000 points on Monday and trading on Wall Street was suspended for the third time in a week as markets were gripped by mounting concerns over the threat of a global recession, despite a coordinated effort by central banks to protect growth and jobs.

    In an escalation of the worst turmoil since the 2008 financial crisis, stock markets suffered further sharp losses on Monday despite dramatic action taken by the US central bank late on Sunday in an attempt to limit the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

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    Airlines make dramatic cuts to services and call for state bailouts

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    Aviation consultancy warns that international industry could collapse within months


    Major airlines including British Airways, Ryanair, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic announced a dramatic scaling-back of their operations on Monday, including plans to cancel the majority of their flights and ground thousands of planes, with experts and industry executives calling for government bailouts to avoid bankruptcies.

    The moves came as an aviation consultancy warned that the international airline industry will collapse within months, with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, unless states worldwide inject billions of dollars of emergency funding to see it through the coronavirus “catastrophe”.

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    West Saharan group takes New Zealand superannuation fund to court over ‘blood phosphate’

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    Independence movement lodges documents in high court arguing $45bn fund invests in illegally mined fertiliser

    The Western Sahara liberation movement has taken New Zealand’s superannuation fund to the country’s highest court over its investments in farms that use phosphate illegally mined in the occupied territory.

    New Zealand is one of the few remaining countries – and last western nation – that accepts imports from the contested territory in West Africa, forcibly occupied by Morocco since 1975. Morocco’s claims to the territory are largely unrecognised internationally.

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    Jet2 planes turn around in mid-air as firm cancels Spain flights

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    LOT Polish Airlines has also suspended flights from Poland and Hungary for 10 days

    Jet2 planes heading to Spain turned back in mid-air on Saturday as the airline cancelled all flights to the country because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The decision follows a sharp increase in infections in Spain and a rise in the death toll to 120. The government has declared a two-week state of emergency and placed 60,000 people in four towns under mandatory lockdown on Friday.

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    Fed bids to shore up confidence after worst week in 12 years

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    Pledges of help from EU, China and Germany plus declaration of US emergency produce mild rally after torrid week

    The world’s most powerful central bank, the US Federal Reserve, is preparing a fresh attempt to shore up investor confidence despite a late rally on Wall Street on Friday that ended a torrid week for stock markets on a more positive note.

    Fresh pledges of help from China, Germany and the European commission combined with Donald Trump’s declaration of a national emergency over coronavirus to reassure investors after an ordeal for equities on both sides of the Atlantic that echoed the depths of the banking crisis.

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    BA says jobs will go as airline industry faces crisis ‘worse than 9/11’

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    Coronavirus memo says British Airways will be ‘parking aircraft in a way we never have before’

    British Airways has warned staff it is in a fight for survival and expects to make job cuts and ground an unprecedented number of planes, as it said the coronavirus pandemic has caused a crisis “worse than 9/11” for the airline industry.

    BA’s chief executive, Alex Cruz, said in a message to 45,000 employees entitled “The Survival of British Airways” that the airline would be “parking aircraft in a way we never have before” after the drop in demand was compounded by the shock US travel ban from Europe announced on Wednesday night. It came as the German media reported that the country’s flagship carrier, Lufthansa, might ground most of its fleet and ask for state aid in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise move.

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    Qantas repays more than $7m to staff it underpaid for up to eight years

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    Airline has so far paid back 638 head-office staff, Fair Work Ombudsman says, and agreed to give every affected worker an additional $1,000

    The Fair Work Ombudsman has said Qantas is paying back millions of dollars to hundreds of workers it underpaid for up to eight years.

    The airline had so far paid back $7.1m to 638 staff at head office who were underpaid between June 2011 and June 2019, the ombudsman said on Friday.

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    Budget 2020: read the small print on spending pledge, urges IFS

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    Thinktank praises Covid-19 response but says ‘splurge’ relies on already announced plans

    Rishi Sunak’s first budget is not as generous as it seems and will leave many Whitehall departments worse off than they were before the spending squeeze began in 2010, according to Britain’s foremost economics thinktank.

    The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the chancellor made the budget sound more substantial than it was, while relying on previously announced spending plans.

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