Tim Worstall

The warning came amid reports that one Cayman islands-based vulture fund, Dart Management, received almost 90pc of the €435m of debts that Greece repaid on Tuesday. The fund, founded by American tax exile Kenneth Dart, was one of those that refused the debt restructuring deal that saved Greece from default in March. It was one [...]

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A Sainsbury’s potato buyer accepted £5 million in corrupt payments from a key supplier, staying at Claridge’s and taking luxury holidays in return for a lucrative contract. I have worked in parts of the world where this is actually the point of contract negotiations. Who gets what slice in the middle. This is actually what [...]

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Money from the employees’ fund at the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) is alleged to have been used to send the son of a police chief in Kazakhstan, where the company mines for iron ore, to college 6,000 miles away in the United States. It is claimed money was removed from ENRC’s subsidiary SSGPO to [...]

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Here in the real world, important decisions about what to do with our money are made by politicians belonging to political parties. I understand why politicians are not here held in high esteem, and why there’s considerable distaste for giving them more of our money. But as a practical matter, we’re not going to get [...]

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This is both very good and slightly alarming. About the way in which the autistics (what they really mean is those on the milder end of the autistic spectrum, Aspies and the like, not those locked in the hard shell of full blown autism) have different and valuable talents which employers ought to treasure. All [...]

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This is an interesting contortion the IPPR have managed to get themselves into. That head/rectum pose: It says that leading companies lure new customers – and those who take the trouble to switch suppliers – with “loss-leading” offers that are paid for by stinging longer-term customers with unfairly high tariffs. The IPPR says that the [...]

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Manufacturers ended 2011 with their worst quarter since Britain was in the grip of recession, although the pace of contraction slowed in December. The closely watched Markit Purchasing Managers Index survey, which asks manufacturers about their output and order books, showed a reading of 49.6 last month — an improvement on the 47.7 recorded in [...]

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So, CEO pay has rebounded after a year of decline followed by a year of stagnation. But with median increases in remuneration of the order of 35 to 40%, the real question is: were the increases justified by performance? In order to determine this – and take the long view – I looked at pay [...]

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What did he do to deserve all that money? Becht became chief executive as a result of 1999′s merger of Britain’s Reckitt & Colman with Benckiser of the Netherlands. Since then, he turned a £3bn company into a £23.5bn juggernaut, helped by the £1.9bn acquisition of Boots’s over-the-counter medicines wing in 2006 and last year’s [...]

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However, evidence suggests that family-owned companies run by sons or daughters on average under-perform their professionally managed peers. The Business Department is expected to encourage wider use of external expertise and non-executive directors on boards as part of a package of measures. All mid sized companies that recognise they have reached the limits of their [...]

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So, I’ve some reading to do this weekend. On forestry subsidies. Need some pointers to it all if anyone has any. I’ve got Chapter 9 of Galloway and the Borders, so I’ve got he effect on nature nailed down. Now it’s tax breaks etc that I’ve got to mug up on. Are there various audit [...]

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Erm, no. Trust the EU to get the wrong end of the stick here: Brussels has declared it wants to encourage more “second chance” entrepreneurs like Mike Smith of engineer Derrick Services Ltd (DSL) to reverse the European trend of punishing honest business failures. It wants to echo the US approach of giving entrepreneurs credit [...]

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A little note to make the point: Earlier this week, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded several Kodak debt securities, sending it further towards “junk” status. Fitch downgraded the company a day later. Its shares are at their lowest since June 1935. There’s no particular reason why a company should last forever: in the larger scheme [...]

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What? Betfair initially deducted 20pc of gross profits from successful punters gambling in more than 250 betting markets. In July, such charges were raised to 40pc to 60pc for customers who have won more than £250,000. Mr Sayaniya alleges he has bet in less than 250 markets and made a £24,000 profit. However, he claims [...]

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Does our Mr. Gillies know more about this? Full Tilt is alleged to have credited players’ accounts with $390m (£248m) it did not have, according to a lawsuit filed in New York on Tuesday by the US government. Full Tilt’s founder, Raymond Bitar, and other board members are also accused of paying themselves $440m from [...]

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SIR – As past presidents of the Royal Town Planning Institute, this is the first time in more than 50 years that so many of us have come together to sign a public letter. The current debate in the media about planning reform, with claim and counter claim, highlights the importance of planning for economic [...]

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Lots of people calling for state owned banks these days. Picking winners, directing industry: Nationalisation of coal, gas, electricity, steel and the railways by Labour heralded deeper political intervention. Harold Wilson went further after moving to Downing Street in 1964, talking ambitiously about a technological revolution and the creation of groups with a global reach [...]

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We’ve got the CoOp telling us that even food sales are falling: Peter Marks said that for the first time people have been cutting food budgets – normally an area that is relied upon as “recession-proof”. “People are spending less on food – that’s a first,” said the Co-op’s chief executive. He added that he [...]

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Thought this was interesting: WWF, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, makes about $500m a year from donations and corporate endorsements So the World Wildlife Fund gets $500 million a year in income. Difficult to really place an “enterprise value” on something which doesn’t avowedly make profits but that sort of turnover would [...]

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Snigger.

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