Financial Times News - Jonathan Guthrie Column

No soft soap from Lord Sugar

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:15:39 GMT

It was a case of 200 against one. The 200 were badly outnumbered. Lord Sugar, the government's enterprise champion, was lecturing an audience at the British Library as part of the Global Enterprise Week youth festival. Did I say lecturing? Haranguing, more like. Tearing off a strip, even.

Charter of the blindingly obvious

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:45:37 GMT

Cast out of the earthly Eden of public approval, benighted bankers are shielding themselves from criticism with the fig leaves of customer charters. Lloyds Banking Group is the latest bank to don this scratchy apparel. Its charter, "Encouraging Enterprise", is adorned with a photo of a jolly old business bod in a bike shop. Shame on you for imagining that he is there to trade down from a BMW to a bone shaker. He is the shop owner. With LBG as his financial guardian, his future is as rosy as his apple cheeks.

Zytek poised for 4.5m injection of funds

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:25:22 GMT

The government is poised to invest £4.5m in a project to develop a small electric vehicle produced by Zytek Automotive Technology and Gordon Murray Design.

Midlands looks for respite from recession

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:00:33 GMT

"Second time lucky" may transpire to be the unofficial motto of the £40m Manufacturing Technology Centre that regional development agencies plan to build at Ansty near Coventry.

Lookalikes agency suffers double trouble

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 23:15:23 GMT

By November, Susan Scott Lookalikes, an entertainment agency in North London, usually has 50 bookings for celebrity doppelgangers to entertain guests at Christmas parties. But it has only four booked so far, writes Jonathan Guthrie.

Hacked off with strike-offs

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:00:28 GMT

Carl Hughes, Claudia Daxelhoffer and Bruno Schultz all share the indignity of having been struck off as UK company directors in recent months. Many more erring directors should suffer the same fate, according to R3, the body for insolvency practitioners, to improve standards of behaviour in business.

Bumpy ride

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:35:43 GMT

The mood in British business has lifted. A few months ago it was apocalyptic. Now it is merely gloomy. Straight-line extrapolation of the future trend would postulate a resurgence of full economic confidence in just a few months. In that happy hereafter, business people would shake their heads disbelievingly and say: "Recession? Oh yes, I remember. What was that about?"

Digital spies will tame the roadhogs

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:15:29 GMT

The history of the M1 motorway, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, is that of motoring's loss of innocence. When the UK's first autobahn opened, it was a miracle of civil engineering that would bear Britons out of austerity and into a prosperous tomorrow. Today it is too often a free-form car park from which the peripatetic business person calls with the dread words "I don't know when I'll get there. I'm stuck on the M1."

Arise Mr Liquidity and Little Miss Integrity

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:15:24 GMT

Why are business people usually baddies when they appear in fiction? The latest is John Veals, a greedy London hedge fund manager. He gleefully wrecks the British financial system in A Week In December, a novel by Sebastian Faulks. All he needs to complete his villainy are moustachios to twirl. Veals and his cronies make such remarks as "shorting [shares] takes rugby-sized balls". Real hedgies surely never say that. They must have some sense of irony.

Dyson supports tax relief for innovation

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:40:16 GMT

Technology entrepreneur Sir James Dyson is likely to recommend that an incoming Tory government should introduce tax breaks for high-tech investment and preferential residency rules for scientists and engineers. The reforms would form part of a package of measures to stimulate innovation as the UK battles to rebalance its economy towards manufacturing.

Man in the News: James Dyson

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 20:40:15 GMT

Tah-dah! There is something of the conjurer about Sir James Dyson, the British technologist whose new table fan is causing a stir on both sides of the Atlantic. The fan produces a smooth breeze as if by magic, using a void framed by a ring, not spinning blades. The illusion depends on an air pump in the fan's base, a narrow vent in the ring and clever aerodynamics.

Punning salons will still be hair tomorrow

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:25:27 GMT

We will know that a proper recovery is under way when women start spending more on getting their hair done. Philosophically minded hair stylists say that it is their job to reconcile a client's personal view of herself with the image that she projects to the world. It follows that an epidemic of expensive hair-dos will be a leading indicator of resurgent consumer confidence. Do not bother asking economists where things are headed. Their data are always hopelessly out of date. Instead, ask a crimper where she is going on holiday. If it is Crete rather than Colwyn Bay, tips are rising and good times are rolling again.

Industrialists uninspired by party of business

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:25:24 GMT

Bentley tyres swished up the drive of a medieval castle in Middle England. The chairmen of 50 large private businesses were to debate politics among the armour and stags' heads. I earwigged, feeling like a gatecrasher at the neighbourhood branch of the Bilderberg group. Surely the mood would be triumphal. The Tories, the hereditary party of business, were, according to pollsters, rolling unstoppably towards power. Bolly and bonuses all round.

Health alert after River Trent cyanide leak

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:35:23 GMT

A Severn Trent sewage works has discharged cyanide and raw sewage into the River Trent in Staffordshire.

Health alert after cyanide leak into Severn Trent

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:05:26 GMT

A Severn Trent sewage works has discharged cyanide and raw sewage into the River Trent in Staffordshire.

Britain does not need a version of Chapter 11

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:00:19 GMT

If religion is the opium of the people, reform is the double whisky of the legislators. Creating laws gives politicians a nice, warm glow. It makes them feel needed, an elusive buzz in a profession that is as unpopular as banking and journalism. The result is tinkering that is unhelpful to business.

MG Rover aide perplexed by focus on sex

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 23:35:28 GMT

Qu Li says she is being "stoned to death" twice over. First, a report on MG Rover revealed that the car company paid her £1.7m under a contract authorised by a director who was also briefly her lover. Second, the tabloid media seized on the story, its interest intensified by Ms Li's involvement in bidding for assets of LDV , the failed van maker.

Take a punt on a bank to offset your tax

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:10:11 GMT

Shoulder pads have made a brief comeback. Jerky electro pop is once again in vogue. So it is appropriate that the Conservatives have floated the idea of a privatisation of state-owned banks that includes an offering of shares to private investors.

Ex-Rover consultant linked to LDV

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:35:26 GMT

Qu Li, a Chinese motor consultant controversially employed by MG Rover, has emerged as a participant in talks to buy the assets of LDV, the Birmingham vanmaker that collapsed into administration in June.

Sentiment helps raise the bar for Cadbury

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 22:00:19 GMT

Chocolate is love, made tangible and moulded into a foil-wrapped bar. As toddlers, we gorge innocently on parental treats, the sticky stuff smearing our lips like kisses. Later, chocolate may herald or substitute for grown-up sensual pleasures. Kraft's £10.2bn bid for Cadbury therefore stirs deep emotions, like chocolate itself. MPs and councillors in Birmingham are viscerally against the takeover. Correspondence from FT readers broadly favours Cadbury remaining independent.

War of words over MG Rover collapse

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 20:20:24 GMT

A vitriolic row broke out on Friday after a government-sponsored report into the collapse of MG Rover sharply criticised the £42m in financial rewards extracted by the so-called "Phoenix Four" directors of the failed car maker.

Heroes fell far short of their billing

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:10:25 GMT

The Phoenix Four have gone from heroes to zeroes in public estimation. But the most recent nail driven into the coffin of their reputations by Friday's government-sponsored report is compensated by some other noughts: those on the end of their bank statements.

Board ban sought for 'Phoenix Four'

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:25:17 GMT

Former directors of MG Rover have reacted furiously to a government-sponsored report that is highly critical of their management of the company, which collapsed in 2005.

Board ban sought on Phoenix Four

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:05:09 GMT

Former directors of MG Rover Cars have reacted furiously to a government-sponsored report that is highly critical of their management of the company, which collapsed in 2005.

When beauty is in the eye of the super-rich

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:20:16 GMT

I had planned to chop up a DayGlo abstract painting using an axe. You might call it art criticism. I called it "making kindling". It never happened. The painting was consigned to the log pile, judged noxious and unsaleable by my mother, inheritor of a modest art collection. A visiting dealer spotted the painting at The Matriarch's pad before I could do the "Here's Johnny!" thing. Shortly after, he sold it on commission to a collector for a few thousand pounds.