It Was The Scousers That Nicked It!
Congratulations all round to Vauxhall’s Ellesmere Port fsctory for getting the nod to manufacture the new Astra, as reported here.
Duncan Aldred, the chairman of Vauxhall, who had a lot of say in the decision, is not exactly a scouser, as he was born in Bolton, but then Aldred is quite a common surname in Liverpool and one of the Senior Lecturers in Engineering at Liverpool University in the 1960s was another of the clan. So one way or another the man who took the decision was on the payroll of the Scouse Army.
I suspect though, that one drink in the Phil was enough to get the Americans on his side, as who could resist a city and its workforce after seeing some of the best pub toilets in the world.
Saving Fish With Flies
A large amount of the fish caught in the sea ends up as animal feed. The Sunday Times reports how in South Africa, a process has been developed to create chicken feed from maggots fed on blood from abattoirs. Sounds gruesome!
But if it means we take less fish from the sea to feed animals, it’s surely better.
Rupert Murdoch Drops Himself In It
Rupert Murdoch “is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company”, MPs have said. I’m not going to argue with that, as I don’t have the detailed evidence. However, I do know from the personal recollection of a friend of mine, who did a bit of business with Rupert, that he very much takes all the decisions.
So the buck stops with Mr. Murdoch! Unfortunately, there was no system of checks and balances to make sure he took the right decision!
Perhaps we need a rule, that all senior people in public companies are not above a certain age.
Call That A Bin?
I was watching the Apprentice on BBC1 and one team came up with a bin design.
It may be arrogant to say it, but my bin design of a couple of years ago is better.
Zopa Mentioned in the Guardian
My Google Alert for Zopa found this report in the Guardian. It’s not particularly relevant to Zopa or peer-to-peer lending as this extract shows.
Not all hairdressers are on one giant VAT dodge, otherwise there would have been some public outcry and we would all, by now, be doing each other’s hair (we would call it peer-to-peer grooming, it would be somewhere between Zopa and a zoo, and it wouldn’t matter what we looked like, because we’d all look the same).
But it does show that you should choose a unique name for your company.
Getting The Wife On The Board
We all know that we need more women on the board of both public and private companies. But is Volkswagen Chairman Ferdinand Piech taking this a bit too far, by getting his wife, Ursula, on the board, as reported here on Bloomberg?
I’ve served on committees with board husband and wife on them and they are a nightmare. You spend all the meeting trying to get a concensus and wo-betide you, if the wife has been outvoted by the group including her husband. She will then spend all night changing his mind, so you have to go through the process all over again.
So do Volkswagen know what they are getting themselves into?
Surely, there must be another woman in Germany, who would do a better job than the Chairman’s wife!
How To Create Jobs in Hong Kong
It would appear according to this article, that the Prudential, which is Britain’s biggest insurer, might be moving its headquarters out of the EU, because of regulation.
Hong Kong would seem to be the likely recipient of the jobs, as the company does 45% of its business in Asia.
Is this really what those of the left and the Occupy Movement want? After all, I’d like to see what happened to an Occupy Hong Kong?
Actually, it doesn’t bother me, as I don’t work for the Pru and I insure with a mutual.
RBS Is In A Downward Spiral
This morning RBS has announced another 3,500 job losses on top of 2,000 announced, just a few months ago.
I’ve always felt that RBS should have been allowed to go bust. I think now, that some of the employees who are still left, wish it had happened, as at least they’d now know where they stand. I suspect too, if they’d been put out of work at the time, they might have been able to have rebuilt their lives and careers since.
Now they are just in an awful state of limbo.
The country might be in a better state too, if the money used to prop up RBS had been used for more important purposes.
But saving RBS was just a bribe to Scotland, by Britain’s worst-ever Prime Minister, Gordon Brown. As he got voted out in 2010, it didn’t even work!
The Money-Go-Round
I must admit that I’ve borrowed this title from the nickname of a rather dubious tax-saving scheme thought up in the 1980s by a company called Rossminster Group. Little is found on the Internet about this company, although there is a bit in the obituary of one of Mrs. Thatcher’s ministers, Peter Rees. I became aware of Rossminster through my bank manager and friend, David, who was also bank manager to the Group. He explained what they did as moving money between large number of onshore and offshore accounts, so that it was difficult to say, where it was for taxation purposes. You have to remember that in those days of the 1970s, tax rates were very high and moving money to say the United States to start a subsidiary there was so impossible it was virtually banned. The latter is one of the main reasons, why so few small, but very profitable private companies were successful before the 1980s and 1990s. Any success, especially in a technological field was to be envied and not nurtured, especially if it was in competition with one of the government’s pet projects. And if it was successful, it had to be taxed to the hilt.
My association with Rossminster was rather limited, but I was asked to quote for a computer system to manage all those accounts. I didn’t do much, as I had bigger fish to fry. But David did a lot of business with Rossminster, as all those transfers meant a lot of bank charges in those days. In the end, as he once said he had a good run with the company, but eventually someone offered Rossminster a better deal.
The Anonymous Widower 