#failed $6bn

[nigerianewstimes]

EFCC declares company promoter wanted over failed $6bn Mambilla Hydropower Project

The EFCC posted the notice declaring Mr Adesanya, a promoter of Sunrise Power and Transmission Ltd, wanted on its verified Facebook page on Wednesday.

Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency, EFCC, has declared Leno Laitan Adesanya, a promoter of Sunrise Power and Transmission Ltd, wanted over his alleged role in the $6 billion Mambilla hydropower contract.

The EFCC posted the notice declaring Mr Adesanya wanted on its verified Facebook page on Wednesday.

In the publication signed by EFCC spokesperson Dele Oyewale, the commission urged members of the public to volunteer useful information about Mr Adesanya’s whereabouts.

Mr Adesanya, 66, hails from Eti-Osa Local Government Area of Lagos State.

Background

In January, the EFCC arraigned a former Minister of Power and Steel, Olu Agunloye, on corruption charges concerning the failed multi-billion-dollar Mambilla Hydropower project.

In one of the seven counts filed by the anti-graft agency, it accused Mr Agunloye of awarding a contract in May 2003 for the construction of 3,960 megawatts (mw) Mambilla Hydroelectric Power Station on a ‘Build, Operate and Transfer basis’ “without any budgetary provision, approval and cash backing”.

The commission said the award of the contract to Sunrise Power and Transmission Company Limited (SPTCL) constituted an offence contrary to and punishable under Section 22(4) of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000.

It also accused Mr Agunloye of corruptly receiving N3.6 million from Sunrise Power company in August 2019, years after leaving office, for the purported approval of the federal government for the award of the contract to the company.

EFCC said this act is also contrary to and punishable under Section 8(1)(a) and (b) of the Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Act, 2000.

But Mr Agunloye denied all the charges, insisting that he is being picked on as the fall guy for the government’s mishandling of the project, while those who were responsible for it were left off the hook.

The project, first awarded in 2003 to Sunrise Power and Transmission Limited by the Olusegun Obasanjo-led administration, is the subject of decades of a legal dispute that is now under international arbitration between the company and the Nigerian government.

Mr Obasanjo, in distancing himself from the botched contract, claimed that he was not aware that the contract was awarded by his then-minister, Mr Agunloye.

According to Mr Agunloye, the contract for the project was duly awarded in 2003 by the Obasanjo administration on a Build, Operate and Transfer basis to deliver Nigeria’s biggest power plant with over 3,000 megawatts capacity at no cost to the Nigerian government.

The project was expected to address Nigeria’s intractable energy crisis.

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

“Bit by bit, reality is succeeding where rhetoric (and statistical projections) failed. No longer are opponents of Brexit forced to make the case that in a world as interconnected as ours, cutting ties makes no sense. Or that walling yourself off from a trading bloc made up of your nearest neighbours – so that it is harder both to sell your stuff and buy their stuff – is obvious economic lunacy. Reality is making that case instead, day in and day out.”

Day by day we learn what Brexit is. A scam, a disaster, a fraud and a lie.

[mediamonarchy]

https://mediamonarchy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/20240220_MorningMonarchy.mp3 Download MP3 Private spacecraft launching, Bezos beating taxes and retraining your brain + this day in history w/paranoid woman climbs into X-ray machine to protect handbag from being stolen and our song of the day by Tunnelmental on your #MorningMonarchy for February 20, 2024. Notes/Links: Kid Rock and Jason Aldean just announced they will cancel New York from their “You can’t cancel America” tour. https://vxtwitter.com/BigBlueWaveUSA/status/1759688566492500380 US officer fired at handcuffed man in SUV after mistaking acorn for gunshot; Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez resigned after opening fire when he thought sound of acorn hitting police cruiser was shot from gun https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/16/florida-acorn-cop-shooting Video: Deputy Spooked by Falling Acorn Fires Gun at Suspect (Audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l1zdL_q5Mo Air Force announces major shakeup to prep for war with China https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2024/02/air-force-announces-major-shakeup-prep-war-china/394125/ SpaceX just launched the Odysseus lander to become the first private spacecraft on the moon; The launch by Elon Musk’s company was initially set for a day earlier, but was delayed due to an issue with the spacecraft’s methane fuel https://qz.com/spacex-launch-odysseus-elon-musk-moon-1851259860 Video: Private spacecraft blasts off to attempt first US moon landing in 52 years | BBC News (Audio) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX5dxBfCSUQ Elon Musk moves SpaceX to Texas after Delaware revoked his Tesla salary package; Musk moving SpaceX’s state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas comes after his Tesla pay package was voided by a Delaware court https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/elon-musk-moves-spacex-texas-after-delaware-revoked-tesla-salary-package Inside Tesla’s lucrative side hustle: Automaker has cashed in almost $9 billion selling EV credits to rivals that fail to meet emissions regulations https://www.dailymail.co.uk/yourmoney/electric-vehicles/article-13075163/tesla-ev-credits-rival-automakers.html Jeff Bezos dumps another 2bn$ worth of $AMZN #stocks; Now 6bn$ in just 6 days 🙈 https://vxtwitter.com/DarioCpx/status/1758245376392614328 Video: Bezos saves $600 million in taxes by moving to Florida (Audio) https://youtu.be/8ZHPynCAhvQ Kirby Cornered Over Biden-TikTok Push, While Migrants Continue To Use App For Border Malarkey https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-announces-hes-tiktok-year-after-he-banned-it-all-federal-devices Video: “Can you explain the national security concerns [of TikTok]?” KIRBY (a day after the Biden campaign joined TikTok): “Concerns about the preservation of data and the potential misuse of that data and privacy information by foreign actors…” (Audio) https://vxtwitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1757112312069005660 Video: “Hey by the way, we just joined TikTok” (Audio) https://vxtwitter.com/BidenHQ/status/1756862645360099534 New York-Based “Law Firm” Sullivan & Cromwell Handling FTX’s Bankruptcy Case to Monitor Binance https://cryptonews.com/news/law-firm-handling-ftxs-bankruptcy-case-expected-to-become-binances-independent-monitor.htm *CAPITAL ONE TO BUY DISCOVER IN ALL-STOCK DEAL VALUED AT $35.3B https://vxtwitter.com/zerohedge/status/1759727082781716977 Capital One to acquire Discover Financial Services in $35.3 billion all-stock deal https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/19/capital-one-acquiring-discover-financial-services-report-says.html Re: Ubisoft Exec Says Gamers Need to Get ‘Comfortable’ Not Owning Their Games for Subscriptions to Take Off – “If purchase isn’t ownership, then piracy isn’t theft. ” https://t.me/true_anarchy/18592 AI Is Inflaming Workplace Surveillance https://reclaimthenet.org/ai-is-inflaming-workplace-surveillance ‘Civic Listening’: Political Informants and Citizen Spies, Rebranded https://foundationforfreedomonline.com/civic-listening-political-informants-and-citizen-spies-rebranded/ ‘Trusted Messengers:’ Volunteer Censors Tra...

[olko71]

New Post has been published on All about business online

New Post has been published on http://yaroreviews.info/2023/03/credit-suisse-bank-ubs-is-in-talks-to-take-over-its-troubled-rival

Credit Suisse bank: UBS is in talks to take over its troubled rival

Getty Images

By Kathryn Armstrong & Lucy Hooker

BBC News

Switzerland’s biggest bank, UBS, is in advanced talks to buy all or part of its troubled rival Credit Suisse.

Credit Suisse, the second largest Swiss bank, is facing a crisis of confidence and its shares have fallen sharply in recent days, sending ripples of concern through the markets.

According to the Financial Times UBS is offering to pay up to $1bn (£820m) for Credit Suisse.

Regulators are trying to facilitate a deal before markets reopen on Monday.

The trouble at Credit Suisse, combined with the failure of two smaller US banks during the last two weeks, have thrown the health of the global financial system into doubt.

Credit Suisse is one of around 30 banks worldwide deemed too big to fail because they are of such importance to the banking system.

But the 167-year-old institution is loss-making and has faced a string of problems in recent years, including money laundering charges.

An emergency $54bn (£44.5bn) lifeline from the Swiss National Bank on Wednesday failed to reassure markets and Credit Suisse shares tumbled 24%, prompting a wider sell-off on European markets.

A deal could be signed as soon as Sunday evening, according to the FT, which first reported that regulators and the Swiss National Bank were facilitating talks between the two Swiss banking giants.

The deal currently believed to be on the table would value Credit Suisse shares at less than a seventh of the price they were on Friday. However the FT said terms could change and a deal had not yet been reached.

EPA

UBS shareholders would normally have six weeks to consider a deal on this scale, but the FT says the Swiss authorities are planning to change the country’s laws to bypass a shareholder vote on the transaction.

Bank of England officials have confirmed they are in close contact with their counterparts at the Swiss National Bank while regulators and management discuss Credit Suisse’s future. The UK Treasury is also monitoring the situation.

Is this a banking crisis – how worried should I be?

The deal would amount to a significant intervention from the Swiss authorities, said Mohammed El-Erian, chief economic advisor to German financial services firm Allianz.

“This is not a voluntary action, this is a shotgun wedding and it’s being done in order to restore financial stability,” Mr El-Erian told the BBC. “Without it Credit Suisse may end up in a death spiral, in which it finds it much harder to undertake its banking activities.

“That could raise questions about other banks at a time when there are also banking concerns in the United States.”

Mr El-Erian said the current turmoil could lead to banks becoming more “risk averse”, leading to a fall in credit availability.

But that amounted to a “headwind” for the global economy, rather than something like the sudden stop experienced during the 2008 financial crisis, which was “in a completely different league” to today’s problems, he said.

UBS is said to have asked the Swiss government to cover about $6bn (£4.9bn) in costs if it were to buy Credit Suisse, according to sources quoted by Reuters.

Credit Suisse reported a loss of 7.3bn Swiss francs ($7.9bn; £6.5bn) in 2022 – its worst year since the financial crisis of 2008 – and has warned it does not expect to be profitable until 2024.

UBS, however, made a profit of $7.6bn in 2022.

Any deal may also result in significant job losses.

As well as being a domestic bank with 95 branches, Credit Suisse has a global investment banking operation and manages the assets of rich clients.

At the end of last year Credit Suisse had a global staff of 50,480, including 16,700 in Switzerland, though 9,000 jobs were to be axed, the Swiss broadcaster SRF reports.

Related Topics

Banking

Credit Suisse

Switzerland

More on this story

Credit Suisse to borrow $54bn to shore up finances

3 days ago

Multi-billion dollar rescue deal for US bank

2 days ago

Is this a banking crisis – how worried should I be?

1 day ago

Credit Suisse cuts 9,000 jobs to stem losses

27 October 2022

[f1]

Mercedes keep logos of crisis-hit crypto brand FTX on their F1 cars in Brazil | 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix

Mercedes plans to continue carrying the branding of its troubled sponsor FTX at this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix. The cryptocurrency exchange suffered a collapse in value this week after users began withdrawing their funds en masse. Up to £5.1 billion ($6bn) is reported to have been taken out in the space of three days. A potential rescue deal involving rival cryptocurrency exchange Binance, which sponsors Alpine, fell apart on Wednesday. That has raised serious concerns over the future of FTX. Mercedes announced in September last year it had formed a “long-term relationship” with the cryptocurrency exchange which would “span multiple race seasons with the FTX logo being featured prominently on both the cars and the drivers.” It has carried their logos since then. The FTX logos appear on the nose, cockpit and rear wing end plates of Mercedes’ W13 cars (pictured above in Mexico). One of its noses was spotted without its usual FTX decal at the Interlagos circuit on Thursday, but RaceFans understands the team intends to display the FTX branding as usual when practice begins at the circuit tomorrow. FTX also launched a range of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in conjunction with Mercedes at the Miami Grand Prix earlier this year. FTX founder and CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, who said last year the Mercedes deal would “continue amplifying our position as the leading global cryptocurrency exchange”, today apologised for the company’s troubles in a lengthy social media post. “Right now, we’re spending the week doing everything we can to raise liquidity,” he said. “I can’t make any promises about that. But I’m going to try. And give anything I have to if that will make it work.” “At the end of the day, I was CEO, which means that I was responsible for making sure that things went well,” he added. “I, ultimately, should have been on top of everything. I clearly failed in that. I’m sorry.” Don't miss anything new from RaceFans Follow RaceFans on social media: Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and go ad-free 2022 F1 season Browse all 2022 F1 season articles via RaceFans - Independent Motorsport Coverage https://www.racefans.net/

[theotherjourney7]

“(As of today October 5th 2020), I was gonna do another The Week In Tory but, try as I might, I could not find a thing they’d done wrong since Friday.

No corruption. No ineptitude. No lies. No hypocrisy. Just a solid 96 hours of honest, decent and reliable governance.

Only kidding: it’s an absolute shit-show...

1. A report found the “Eat Out To Help Out” scheme cost £500m and didn’t do a single thing to improve the economy of the UK’s hospitality sector

However, it did help to double the number of infections, although they forgot how to count, so didn't notice

2. As infections spiked, the government briefly woke up and introduced local lockdowns

But predictably, the local councils responsible for implementing the new plans were given literally (not making this up) 5 minutes warning and no additional resources whatsoever

3. It was revealed absolutely not a single penny of the £1.58bn “Arts Rescue Plan” announced to great fanfare in July has actually been handed out to the artists or venues relying on it

So unsurprisingly, the country’s largest cinema chain had to close, costing 5,500 jobs

But thankfully Work and Pensions Minister Thérèse Coffey was on hand to reassuringly tell them they can all become Care Workers with "very little training" (I'm sure nursing is a doddle)

Slight problem: in June the government froze millions in funding for training care workers

But it’ll be fine, won’t it? I mean, who needs to train care workers? We have plenty, don't we? Oh, hold on: this week it was revealed care workers are caring for 2,400 families each, which is 10x the recommended number

4. Good News for UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as a poll of Tory Members found they think Gavin Williamson is even shitter than the Prime Minister.

Bad News: they think every other Conservative MP is better than the PM, and only 28% of them think he’s up to the job. And that’s his fan-club.

5. So UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson went on a charm offensive (and did both), and promised to build 40 new hospitals

Seemingly he had forgotten – or hoped we had – that he also promised to build 40 new hospitals a year ago, and then … how can I put this? … didn’t

The 40 new hospitals have £3.7bn budget

Unfortunately, 40 new hospitals would cost at least £24bn

And there's backlog of £6bn in maintenance and repairs, so the day it was launched the “new hospital fund” was £2.3bn short of building a single Lego Hospital

6. Last week Boris Johnson said the Covid rules were simple, then forgot them, then said they were complicated, then said he’d fine people breaking them, then didn’t fine his own dad

This week his own dad broke the rules for a second time and [tumbleweed]

So 6 days after the PM went on TV to assure us the lockdown rules were simple, the govt has announced it will announce some simplified rules. But not yet. Soon. In a bit. First we need another few levels of announcements about announcements, because there’s no rush fellas.

7. I always try to find a supportive and approving quote about Boris Johnson from an star-struck anonymous Tory MP: this week, I have an embarrassment of riches

“It’s like ‘carry on coronavirus’, with Boris as Sid James and Matt Hancock as Kenneth Williams”

“I find myself bewildered at the clownish lack of professionalism in Downing St”

“If you drop something which is entirely ornamental [meaning Boris] it tends to lose its appeal”

“We’ve gone from eat out to help out, to drink up and piss off”

8. The Tories called loudly for the firing of the SNP’s Margaret Ferrier for travelling by train after being found positive for Covid

No word yet about them calling for the removal Tory MP Peter Gibson, who travelled 250 miles by train with Covid symptoms

Peter Gibson is part of the new “Red Wall” intake of Tory MPs, so presumably was keen to return to his constituency to inform them that 1/3 of them would be £1000 a year worse off due to government cuts

9. It was revealed that 5 years after Tories pledged to end money laundering with the announcement “there is no place for dirty money in Britain”, absolutely no action has yet been taken, and the legislation has been gathering dust since 2015

10. But thankfully, non-corrupt ministers like Robert Jenrick, who takes “donations” (which are apparently different from bribes) from housing companies, are still doing the right thing, such as unlawfully overruling his own officials to grant a £50m tax saving to a donor

And a legal challenge was launched over a £580k contract to friends of Dominic Cummings, with no competitive tendering

Oh, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock takes “donations” from the horse-racing fraternity, and excluded the highly profitable Cheltenham Festival from the lockdown

The former Chief Scientific Advisor said Cheltenham Festival “probably helped to accelerate the spread” of coronavirus

11. Not that we’d know, because it appears a mere 227 days after the first case, the govt still hasn’t learned to import data into an Excel Spreadsheet

Any IT manager would tell you Excel is not the way to store the data of up to 67 million people – it is spreadsheet software for a max of 1 million records

16,000 tests were lost, and over 50,000 potentially infectious people may have been missed by contact tracers

12. On 2nd June, Boris Johnson announced he would take “direct control” of Covid

So 125 days later, he couldn’t tell us the social distancing rules, how many records had been lost, or explain why 4 different lockdown regimes exist in Greater Manchester alone

13. But human spork Health Secretary Matt Hancock rushed out to say NHS Test and Trace are working hard, neglecting to mention the slightly awkward truth that NHS Test and Trace is not run by the NHS, but by a private business under the guidance of the effortlessly terrible Dido Harding

Highly effective private business Serco do our contact tracing, which is why some of its tracing staff report being so under-occupied they have managed to watch 3 entire series of The Good Place and play computer games all day for months, while 60,000 Britons died

14. I have no idea if the Queen has noticed her government’s honesty, but this week she said “having trusted, reliable sources of information is vital”

We enter flu season under a government you can trust, but who accidentally failed to send the flu vaccine to GPs for over a month

15. And the average hours for teachers increased from 53 to 70 hours per week, as they attempt to cope with endlessly shifting instructions

Teachers are also having to be cleaners in schools, as there is no additional money for adaptations to keep staff and students safe

16. As the government prepares for 4 million unemployed in 2021, Treasury Secretary Rishi Sunak said he would introduce “job coaches”, and said 4 million of us being coached for *up to* 2 hours to do jobs that don’t exist would be “the first time that people will realise government could be helpful”

17. A report found “trust between ministers and staff is being severely eroded” by a 7-month delay in the bullying inquiry into Home Secretary and horcrux, Priti Patel

She then made a speech in which she voluntarily opted to define herself as opposite to those who “do good”

18. Possibly to distract from this, health minister Lord Bethell rushed out to claim Covid 19 would make us as proud as the Olympics

Covid 19 has killed about as many as you can fit into an Olympic Stadium, so maybe that’s what he meant

A quick detour into the magical, spinning world of gaffe-hamster Lord Bethell: last week he tried to distract from govt student cockups by claiming Covid 19 was predominantly caused by “late-night intimacy” and not by, for example, failing to trace infections

Earlier, Bethell tried to distract from govt A-Level cockups by claiming him failing A-Levels didn’t prevent him hustling to his lofty position (momentarily forgetting the hustling assistance he gained when his dad, the 4th Lord Bethell, hustled his way into a grave)

19. And finally, in an image that will haunt you, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced he would only snitch on his neighbours if he was “watching them having an Animal House-style hot tub party”. Watching. He said watching. Matt Hancock. Watching.“-Russ

[uk-news-talking-politics]

Closing down criticism: No.10's campaign to silence the outrage over covid

By Jonathan Lis

A glance at some of the newspaper front pages gives us a sense of what's happening. "Boris leads £6bn global race for vaccine," Monday's Express suggested. The Sun entitled its exclusive prime ministerial interview: "Baby gave me will to live." The bottom two-thirds of the Mail on Sunday featured a photograph of Boris Johnson's newborn son with the headline: "He's got Daddy's hair!"

In other news, the UK has overtaken Italy, the former poster-child of this catastrophe, and now registers the second-highest death toll in the world. A reader from literally anywhere else in the world would think we had lost our minds.

All this, of course, forms part of a careful communications and PR strategy. It consists of three distinct strands.

The first is the outright manipulation of statistics and facts. The last few weeks have seen an emphasis on numbers. That is, to a large extent, necessary. We need to know how many people are being tested, how many are dying and how much equipment we have to treat patients and protect those caring for them.

But on all counts, the government has dissembled. After Johnson's early promise of 250,000 daily tests was quietly abandoned, health secretary Matt Hancock plucked the number of 100,000 seemingly at random. When that seemed doomed to fail, ministers started to claim it was not about the number of tests but the capacity. Then, in order to reach the target by April 30th, the government included the unprocessed kits it had simply mailed out. Since then, the numbers of daily tests have dipped sharply – as though the entire focus had not been on testing at all, but meeting an arbitrary number on an arbitrary date and making sure it became a government success story.

Mortality statistics have also come under suspicion. Numbers have arrived days or weeks late, and for several weeks deaths in care homes were not included at all. Owing to a lack of testing, it is likely that thousands more people have died than are included in the statistics. The Financial Times estimates that the real mortality figure is a staggering 20,000 higher than the official one.

Then there's personal protective equipment. Panorama revealed that the government counted a pair of gloves as two items rather than one in order to make its activity seem more impressive.

With over 100 frontline workers dead, many of whom had openly complained about their lack of protection, we might consider this a major scandal – yet the government seems to treat it as 'one of those things', as though it hadn't known pandemics existed and hadn't in fact simulated one as recently as 2016. The second big element of the strategy is to deflect blame. At first this focused on the public, who carried the can for not understanding the government's entirely contradictory messaging.

Now it is almost exclusively targeted at the media. The government responded to a Sunday Times exposé by correcting claims the paper had not made. It sought to discredit the damning Panorama programme by pointing out that the featured medical staff were Labour supporters, as though it made any difference either way. And when the Guardian dared to question the presence of the prime minister's chief adviser Dominic Cummings on the government's independent science panel, Downing Street simply gloated about the public's lack of confidence in the media.

And as it lashed out, a stream of commentators have lambasted the media for questioning our leaders' response at all. At the very moment the government most needs to be held to account, scrutiny has been rebranded as sabotage.

The third and most important strand is language itself. Johnson's words betrayed his complacency from the very start. His Greenwich speech in February, which came after the lockdown in Wuhan, derided the "panic...that [goes] beyond what is medically rational". A few weeks later he boasted about shaking hands with covid patients, and in a private meeting dubbed ventilator procurement "Operation Last Gasp". The virus was at best a throwaway joke and at worst a tedious distraction. For Johnson, governing is entertaining and this was not part of the bill.

Language has since taken on a more important role. Key to this is the focus on war. At the start of the crisis Johnson vowed to "defeat the enemy", then last week decried the "unexpected and invisible mugger". The problem is this isn't a war, and if it was, the enemy should have been expected and we should have been prepared for it. This is not about short-term heroism but years of hard work.

But of course the cynicism goes far deeper. Sometimes it seems the most significant battle is against information itself. Taking its cue from Brexit, the government has deployed a succession of empty phrases and slogans to promote its accomplishments. 'Take back control' and 'get Brexit done' have become 'ramping up testing' and 'following the science'. The scale of the virus, we are constantly told, could not have been foreseen, as though ministers simply hadn't heard about the earlier disasters in China and Italy. The purpose of these slogans seems clear enough: to rot our brains and keep us quiet.

The most insidious weapon of language is to conceal the reality under our noses. On Thursday Johnson had the audacity to declare that "we have so far succeeded in the first and most important task we set ourselves as a nation – to avoid the tragedy that engulfed other parts of the world". In reality, the UK accounts for less than one in a hundred of the world's population and one in eight of its deaths. Our death toll is now eclipsed only by the United States. The government can wave its hands, point elsewhere and cloak inadequacy as competence, but cannot change the truth of how it failed.

The fundamental problem is the government defines success less by what it does than how it communicates. Ministers do not need to flatten the curve so much as flatten the criticism. In the intersection of exceptionalism and misinformation, it can boast of false achievements and project real blame.

Ultimately we will hear any number of distractions, distortions and dead cats to cover up a single question: why a rich country gifted with time and resources became completely overwhelmed when so many of its counterparts did not.

[thatdiabolicalfeminist]

‘The retailer, which last year made more than £6bn of revenues in Britain, has a disciplinary system under which points are accrued for illness. Workers are issued a penalty point for each episode of sickness.

Workers are told that more than one point will result in a “series of counselling and disciplinary meetings” and between four and six points can result in dismissal.

In one case, a woman who spent three days in hospital with a kidney infection was docked two points, reduced to one on appeal, despite providing a hospital note.

The system has been revealed in an investigation by The Sunday Times at Amazon’s sorting depot in Dunfermline, Scotland.

The undercover reporter was paid £7.35 per hour by an agency that supplies workers to Amazon, but was left with less than the minimum wage after paying £10 for the agency’s bus which took her to the site 40 miles from her home in Glasgow.

It emerged this weekend that some low-paid workers are camping out in woodland near the sorting depot to avoid paying the bus costs and ensure they are left with more than the minimum wage...

The reporter obtained a job with PMP Recruitment, one of the two main agencies that hires and supervises workers at the Dunfermline depot. The investigation found:

Workers being threatened with dismissal if they accrued too many points for illness, late attendance or absence, or for making too many errors or failing to hit productivity targets.

A claim from a worker in Amazon’s on-site first-aid clinic that workers were under pressure to hit targets and were suffering injuries in the rush to collect products

Workers were expected to cover more than 10 miles a day in the warehouse collecting items, but water dispensers to ensure they avoided dehydration were regularly empty

The reporter was told she had to sign an opt-out of the working time directive, which limits weekly hours to 48, in order to get a job.

The reporter was employed as a “temporary warehouse operative” at Amazon’s vast plant in Fife. She worked in the “picking” department, which involved retrieving items from across several floors of the sprawling warehouse, according to orders displayed on a handheld scanner she was given. She worked at least 10 hours a day, with an unpaid 30-minute lunch break and two 15-minute paid breaks....

Under the system set out in the Amazon temporary associate handbook, half a point is issued to recruits who are late to work or late back from a break; one point for “one period of sickness”; and three points for “no call, no show”. The undercover reporter was told that anyone who was more than 30 seconds late in arriving at work or returning after a break would be subject to the half-point penalty.

Workers were also told that if they made more than one error a week in collecting items or failed to hit productivity targets they could be subject to a disciplinary process, which could result in dismissal.’

[robertreich]

Dimon in the Rough

In his annual letter to shareholders, distributed last week, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took aim at socialism, warning it would be “a disaster for our country,” because it produces “stagnation, corruption and often worse.”

Dimon should know. He was at the helm when JPMorgan received a $25bn socialist-like bailout in 2008, after it and other Wall Street banks almost tanked because of their reckless loans.

Dimon subsequently agreed to pay the government $13bn to settle charges that the bank overstated the quality of mortgages it was selling to investors in the run-up to the crisis. According to the Justice Department, JPMorgan acknowledged it had regularly and knowingly sold mortgages that should have never been sold. (Presumably this is where the “stagnation, corruption and often worse” comes in.)

The $13bn penalty was chicken feed to the biggest bank on Wall Street, whose profits last year alone amounted to $35bn. Besides, JPMorgan was able to deduct around $11bn of the settlement costs from its taxable income.

To state it another way, Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs helped trigger the 2008 financial crisis when the dangerous and irresponsible loans their banks were peddling – on which they made big money – finally went bust. But instead of letting the market punish the banks (which is what capitalism is supposed to do) the government bailed them out and eventually levied paltry fines which the banks treated as the cost of doing business.

If this isn’t socialism, what is? Yet it’s a particular form of socialism. Millions of homeowners who owed more on their homes than the homes became worth didn’t get bailed out. Millions of workers who lost their jobs or their savings, or both, didn’t get bailed out. No major banker went to jail.

Call it socialism for rich bankers.

It’s a gift that keeps giving. Dimon took advantage of the financial crisis to acquire Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, vastly enlarging JPMorgan. America’s five biggest banks, including Dimon’s, now control 46% of all deposits, up from 12% in the early 1990s.

And because they’re so big, Dimon’s and other big Wall Street banks are now considered “too big to fail”. This translates into a hidden subsidy of some $83bn a year, because creditors who face less risk accept lower interest on deposits and loans.

More socialism for rich bankers.

After the financial crisis and bailout, Congress enacted a milquetoast version of the Glass-Steagall Act, a banking law from the Great Depression that bankers killed off in the 1990s. The replacement was called the Dodd-Frank Act.

Ever since, Dimon has pushed to weaken Dodd-Frank.

When Obama’s regulators wanted to extend Dodd-Frank to the foreign branches and subsidiaries of Wall Street banks, Dimon warned it would harm Wall Street’s competitiveness.

This was the same Jamie Dimon who chose London as the place to make highly risky derivatives trades that lost the firm some $6bn in 2012 – proof that unless the overseas operations of Wall Street banks are covered by US regulations, giant banks like his will move more of their betting abroad, hiding their wildly-risky bets overseas so U.S. regulators can’t see them.

More recently, Trump’s bank regulators have heeded Dimon, and rolled back Dodd-Frank.

Dimon was also instrumental in getting the big Trump tax cuts through Congress. They saved JPMorgan and the other big banks $21bn last year alone.

Dimon was paid $31m last year. He is estimated by Forbes to be worth $1.3bn.

Ironically, a few weeks ago Dimon warned that income inequality is dividing America. He said that a “big chunk” of Americans have been left behind, and, announcing a $350m program to train workers for the jobs of the future, lamented that 40% of Americans make less than $15 an hour.

True, but $350m over five years isn’t even a drop in the ocean for the Americans left behind.

Wall Street bonuses totaled $27.5bn last year, which is more three times the combined annual earnings of all American workers employed full-time at the federal minimum wage. That’s more than 600,000 low-wage workers.

If Dimon were serious about the problem of widening inequality, he’d use his lobbying prowess to help raise the federal minimum wage. He’d also try to make it easier for workers to unionize, and to raise taxes on the super-wealthy like himself.

But, of course, Dimon isn’t really concerned about widening inequality. He’s not really concerned about socialism, either.

Dimon’s real concern is that America may end the kind of socialism he and other denizens of the Street depend on – bailouts, regulatory loopholes, and tax breaks.

These have made Dimon and his comrades a fortune, but they’ve brought the rest of America stagnation, corruption, and often worse.

[shawn-does-stuff]

Shawn Mendes: ‘I’m 20. I want to have fun’

by Michael Cragg

Shawn Mendes is the red-hot poster boy of pop. His videos have been viewed 6bn times and he has more than 42m followers on Instagram. But don’t worry if you haven’t heard of him… just ask a teenager

Shawn Mendes is standing in his underpants in a suite on the fifth floor of a London hotel as a 200-strong crowd of screaming teenage girls gathers outside. “Everyone who doesn’t need to be in the room, leave the room,” he says politely but firmly, in a soft Canadian drawl. Pop’s current poster boy should be used to causing a stir. His #MyCalvins campaign (following in the footsteps of Justin Bieber in 2016) broke the internet earlier this year, inching the 20-year-old teen phenomenon – three US chart-topping albums, 30m monthly listeners on Spotify, more than 6bn video views – closer to tabloid supremacy and global domination.

At the Brit Awards that night, Mendes will cringe as presenter Jack Whitehall ribs him about “suspicious packages”, so it’s curious to hear him describe the Calvin Klein opportunity – and the subsequent results pored over by his 42m Instagram followers – as “a goal of mine at the top of 2018. As much as it’s a stepping stone for me to play a stadium, it’s a huge moment for me to step in front of a camera and take my shirt off. I don’t see one being less meaningful than the other.”

The air is thick with earnestness as we sit down for lunch in the hotel restaurant. I blurt out a question about whether he had to wear extra padding. “No,” he says, eyebrow raised. “They’re really good underwear.” Did they send you some free ones? “Yeah, I have boxes of them at home.” He lifts up the bottom edge of his T-shirt and pulls at the waistband of his underwear before quickly pulling his shirt back down. You’re not wearing them today are you? “Not right now,” he says sheepishly. “I should be.”

Mendes’s boy-next-door appeal and laser-guided ambition feels rather wholesome, with his sensitive, heart-on-sleeve pop-rock bops such as 2015’s UK chart-topper Stitches, positioning him as perfect boyfriend material in pop’s all important fantasy world. If Bieber is the unknowable loose cannon, then Mendes is pop’s picture-perfect head boy. But it’s clear that exposing himself so literally has its downside. “The last 48 hours have been so consuming, just reading what people are saying about me [on social media],” he sighs. Do you have to read it? “No, but there’s something about being human that makes you. I’m scared of social media and how much it affects me,” he continues. “It’s literally become infused with who I am.”

Last October he apologised to his 21m Twitter followers, claiming he was worried that what he was posting wasn’t meaningful enough. “For the first time I realised how many people are listening,” he says. He now monitors how often he goes online and tries to take regular breaks, using meditation to relax. “I don’t think of myself as conceited, but I definitely spend a lot of time reading about myself,” he says.

Mendes famously has three daily rules – going to the gym, two vocal lessons and never saying no to a selfie with a fan. He’s managed the first two so far and “took about 200 selfies yesterday”. Despite this, his rise has chimed with a shift in the upper echelons of pop – its recent exponents being anti-pop stars Adele, Ed Sheeran and (with her goofy dancing style and eternal quest for relatability) Taylor Swift, who’s now a friend. Even One Direction – whose blend of teen-orientated, guitar-led pop paved the way for Mendes – always felt like they were trying to play down the pop star element.

“The more open the world is getting, the more people are craving real,” he says. “I don’t think people want to see a made-up person. [In the past] there’s been a lot of dressing up, and I still think that stuff is amazing – like I’ll wear a sleeveless top – but at the end of it, when it comes down to you, I think it’s about being authentic.” For all this talk of authenticity and being like everyone else, I tell him, you’re also a pop star begging people to look at you. Do you have to believe your own hype? “Of course,” he says, his eyes darting over my shoulder to the mirrored wall behind. “You have to. If you wake up every day and say, ‘I’m OK,’ you’re going to just be that. If you wake up everyday and look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I’m great, let’s go sell out that stadium,’ then you will.”

You could say he’s been in motivational training for a while now, having started out as a 14-year-old YouTube star, uploading acoustic covers of songs (Bieber, among others), before switching to the now defunct social media platform Vine. He taught himself to play the guitar via YouTube tutorials at home in the small town of Pickering, Ontario, while one of his first public performances was in a plaza in Portugal where his family – mum Karen, a British estate agent, dad Manny, a Portuguese businessman, and younger sister Aaliyah – were holidaying. While his parents were shopping, Mendes hopped up next to a statue and belted out a Bruno Mars song. “I was sweating and I thought, ‘Dude, if you want to be a singer, you’ve got to at least be able to stand on this statue and sing,’” he says of that moment.

Where was that pressure coming from? “It was from myself, which is pretty much a big statement on my personality at 14 years old.”

While he says he loved school, his early fame – after signing to Island Records his debut single, Life of the Party, was released when he was just 15 – meant he was bullied. “People were cruel at first,” he says, clearing his throat and fiddling with the rim of a cup of green tea. “They just thought it was so stupid.” He’d skip school every Friday to attend influencer events in which social media stars met fans who already assumed they were friends. “I was taking 1,500 selfies a night,” he laughs. “You quickly learn that what you love to do is a job, but I don’t resent what I do. I don’t hate taking selfies.”

Success was rapid, with his third single Stitches breaking the US top five and peaking at number one in the UK. That same year he supported Swift on her 1989 stadium tour. How did he cope? “This life is more real to me than anything,” he says. “If I were to walk down the street and no one recognised me, I’d feel something was wrong. When I was really young [fame] morphed who I was. If it was to become normal, it would feel un-normal to me.”

From the outside, I say, the other recent pop artists who can relate to that are Britney Spears or Bieber, people who have had issues with growing up in the spotlight. “A couple of times I’ve worried about that, too, but outside of all this I live a really normal life,” he says slowly. “You have to make an effort to carry your own bags, drive your own car and not be afraid of the public. I don’t blame people at all who stay inside. I understand how it could be terrifying to go to a restaurant and eat because you’re scared someone’s going to take a photo of you.”

Is that more intrusive than a selfie? “I’ve been so lucky that fans have been taking photos of me eating since I was 15, so I’m a little bit numb to it,” he says, his tone rarely deviating from preternaturally calm. There’s probably an Instagram account called Shawn Mendes Eating, I joke (I check later and while there’s no account, there is a hashtag to follow). Can it feel as if he’s being watched? “I’m inherently [aware of] that all the time.” If it ever gets too much, he leaves rather than making a scene. Are you a people-pleaser, I ask? “Yeah, is that bad?” he smiles. “It can lead to failure, but if I fail trying to please everyone, then that’s OK.”

Mendes spends a lot of time contemplating people’s perceptions of him. Last year he publicly criticised a Rolling Stone cover story, expressing his regret that “the positive side of a story doesn’t always get fully told”. I assume it’s because the piece mentioned his penchant for smoking weed, a detail that had upset some fans. “That didn’t bother me,” he smiles. “Actually, I was happy about that because maybe it’s OK for them to understand that weed’s not a big deal.” He says he hasn’t smoked in three months.

Another part of the story focused on rumours about his sexuality. “For me it’s hurtful,” he says. “I get mad when people assume things about me because I imagine the people who don’t have the support system I have and how that must affect them.” (In late 2017 he posted an emotional Snapchat story: “First of all, I’m not gay. Second of all, it shouldn’t make a difference if I was or wasn’t.”) He sighs and says: “That was why I was so angry, and you can see I still get riled up, because I don’t think people understand that when you come at me about something that’s stupid you hurt so many other people. They might not be speaking, but they’re listening.”

He says the reason he criticised the article was over a small detail in which he mentioned Dua Lipa and her boyfriend, and how amazing it looked to be in love. “It made me seem so creepy,” he says. “If anything, the article made me realise your career isn’t over if people think you’re not perfect.” You could see how the creepy singleton tag might irk him, and also why it might stick – a lot of Mendes’s biggest singles play on the idea of him as the emotionally needy bloke who gets messed around and comes back for more.

Are you bored of being The Nice Guy? He splutters, clears his throat and sits bolt upright. “Yeah, I am! It sounds so stupid – to be a nice person is the best thing in the world – but, yeah, I’m 20 and I just want to have fun. What I don’t want to do is live the rest of my life thinking, ‘I wouldn’t do that because I’m known as Prince Charming.’ The second that someone corners you into a personality, you don’t want to be that person any more.”

Two weeks later, Mendes is onstage in Amsterdam. In keeping with the floral artwork for his recent self-titled album, a 50ft rose snakes up to the ceiling from the so-called B-stage where he’ll later serenade the throngs of teenage fans and nodding dads with a handful of ballads. Replica light-up roses (€20 a pop at the merch stand) bob about in the dark as Mendes runs through a hugely entertaining, PG-13 simulacrum of a rock show to ear-bleeding screams (“God I’m so old,” a woman sitting behind me yells as she surveys the crowd).

Keen to further align himself with the pantheon of rock’s smiliest exponents, tonight Mendes segues from a cover of Coldplay’s big-hearted anthem Fix You into his own, the Kings of Leon-esque In My Blood, a song that surprised fans by touching on depression. Tonight it’s transformed – with the help of a ticker tape explosion – into something close to catharsis.

“There’s nothing like being on stage – you feel like Superman!” he’d said earlier, claiming it to be better than sex or any high. “My goal now is to enjoy what I do more and more because otherwise it doesn’t fucking matter. I used to think it was all about the crowd, but I have to be happy within myself.” As he takes his millionth selfie, his face radiating pure elation, you believe he might be.

Shawn Mendes plays London O2 on 16, 17 and 19 April

Fashion editor Helen Seamons; grooming by Anna Thompson using Bobbi Brown and Monat; lighting by Michael Furlonger and Tilly Pearson; digital operator John Munro; fashion assistant Penny Chan; shot at 12th Knot, seacontainerslondon.com

[vagabondretired]

Pushing & shoving. Iran has been hit by yet another terrorist attack. At least 29 people were killed in the southwestern city of Ahvaz when gunmen opened fire on a crowd watching a military parade on Iran's equivalent of Memorial Day. But unlike previous terror attacks, this one may spark a much larger regional conflagration - involving not just regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, but also the United States. In fact, it may have been designed to trigger just that. The terrorist attack, which was first claimed by an Arab separatist group with alleged connections to Saudi Arabia, the Ahvaz National Resistance, did not occur in a vacuum. Iran's regional rivals, particularly Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have increasingly taken their decades-long behind-the-scenes pressure on the US to bomb Iran into the open. What used to be said in private is now increasingly declared in public. Moreover, these monarchies are no longer limiting themselves to pushing the US to take military action, but are announcing their own readiness to attack Iran. Only a year ago, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman explained in an interview that Saudi Arabia would take the fight to "inside Iran". "We won't wait for the battle to be in Saudi Arabia," he said. "Instead, we will work so that the battle is for them in Iran." His statement was widely interpreted as a sign that Riyadh would dramatically escalate tensions with Iran and intensify its support for various armed groups opposing the government in Tehran. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an adviser to the Abu Dhabi government, justified the Ahvaz attack on Twitter, arguing that it wasn't a terrorist attack and that "moving the battle to the Iranian side is a declared option". Attacks of this kind, he ominously warned, "will increase during the next phase". If the terrorist attack in Ahvaz was part of a larger Saudi and UAE escalation in Iran, their goal is likely to goad Iran to retaliate and then use Tehran's reaction to spark a larger war and force the US to enter since Riyadh and Abu Dhabi likely cannot take on Iran militarily alone (indeed, after spending roughly $6bn a month, they have failed to defeat the Houthi guerillas in Yemen). If so, the terrorist attack is as much about trapping Iran into war as it is to trap the US into a war of choice. As former secretary of defense Bob Gates said in 2010, the Saudis "want to fight the Iranians to the last American". But the Trump administration may not be innocent bystanders to such a scheme. Trump's own actions and the close coordination we have seen between his administration, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Israel on Iran raises the prospects of a different explanation: one in which the US itself is actively pushing its allies and being pushed by its allies towards war with Iran. The Ahvaz attack comes only one day after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a strong threat to Iran, declaring it would be held "accountable" if there were any more attacks on US consulates in Iraq. The US consulate in Basra, Iraq, has come under attack in the past week allegedly by Iraqi Shia forces close to Iran. The Trump administration has not presented any evidence that Iran had any involvement in that attack, but has declared that it will attack Iran if any more such attacks take place.

[marketanalysisreports]

Snap Market Analysis Report - Company Market size - Company profile

This year Vice Media found itself worth almost $6bn. How can this be the case?

CEO and prime supporter Shane Smith says he jumps at the chance to gather together the $5.7bn valuation Vice got after confidential venture company TPG tossed $400m their way.

That is practically the meaning of a misleadingly swelled valuation.

Whether Vice Media is really exaggerated overall is difficult to say.

It very well may be the side effect of a millennial media air pocket, or Vice may very well be receiving the benefits of being top of the pack.

There's income coming in and, in the event that Smith can be accepted, bounty a greater amount of it in Vice's short term.

Customary media versus new media

Customary media organizations are unquestionably keeping watch for better approaches to trap the consideration of recent college grads, whoever they are.

In 2015 general amusement monster Disney multiplied down on its past interest in Vice, furrowing $200m into the organization to knock its stake up to 20 percent.

Fox purchased in for $70m in 2013 (however has not shown a lot of interest since).

Promoting monster WPP purchased a cut in 2011, as the lines obscured between online video and web based publicizing, and presently controls around 8.5 percent of the organization,

Customary media's advantage in something like Vice is not the slightest bit secretive.

Without a strong definition, fixed address, stable pay, landline phone or steady upright structure, the millennial age are famously difficult to market to.

Setting a segment simply by an age section makes a tragically general classification, as twenty to thirty year olds themselves like to grumble.

A similar analysis would apply to the post-war age, obviously.

George W Bush and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead were both in fact Boomers, which doesn't actually educate you much regarding Boomers.

In numerous ways, this new age is the same as those past: different, with shifting interests and values, lumped together in just the most reductive sense.

The genuine distinction between the recent college grads of today and the boomers, bums, and troublemakers of days of old is an outside one: decision.

It's not difficult to fail to remember how as of late your decision of diversion was restricted to what others needed to play you.

Many individuals who experienced childhood during the 90s will recall Harold Bishop and Paul Robinson exclusively in light of the fact that the drama Neighbors was planned before the significantly more famous energized parody The Simpsons.

For a similar explanation, many would endure the 6:30pm news until Futurama - one more well known parody show - came on at 7pm.

All that time organizations could sit serenely in the information that promoters were getting the eyeballs they so beyond all doubt pine for.

Indeed, even during the 80s, whose characterizing picture was glaring teens stayed in their room with "their" channels, the choices were restricted.

Children might have sneaked away from their folks' feed however there's no avoiding it that those elective channels were given from a similar help.

Indeed, even the web for quite a bit of its presence didn't posture such an existential danger.

BBS and Usenets might have been energizing (or so I've been guaranteed) however the web couldn't convey web based video, the widely adored design, nor did advanced instruments exist to bring creation financial plans inside the compass of free makers.

Quality was low and it were high to support times.

There is little need to make sense of how the media scene has changed to what lays before us now.

While more established ages squabble about string cutting, supposed advanced locals scarcely even understand what the rope is.

The cutting edge media buyers

Shoppers of present day media not just approach anything that content streams they need, they likewise have the opportunity to switch between them freely.

Snap - the maker of vanishing informing application "Snap Market Analysis" — cases to fix their client's consideration for 30 minutes out of every day.

That might sound noteworthy to the purported Ritalin age, yet it's nothing contrasted with the seven hours every day the typical family consumed in 1996.

This is the existential pickle media organizations regard themselves as in.

As eyeballs meander randomly over different screens the aggregate consideration is cracked, and promoting really gets more diligently.

Consider it, how frequently have you exchanged over to an alternate tab while Youtube plays a promotion?

Sponsors esteem a mindful crowd and nowadays it's difficult to say unhesitatingly that anyone is really focusing.

Publicists then, at that point, are undeniably less able to pay a premium for online land.

This places the large media organizations in a challenging situation.

What's expected to keep recent college grads' consideration is speed, dexterity and adaptability, qualities Disney and Time Warner are not known for.

Many years have passed in which strength was a numbers game.

In that time those shared with put resources into the up and coming age of diversion neglected to develop the sorts of muscles they're frantically attempting to flex now.

The issues with putting resources into new media

It very well may be for media organizations there's no decision except for to furrow ahead into the straggling leftovers.

For an organization obliged to put resources into the up and coming age of media, the shortcoming of that age is somewhat immaterial. Organizations aren't permitted to resign however should drive - or possibly attempt - to rethink themselves.

Why old media organizations need to partake in organizations like Vice, Snap, and Buzzfeed is no secret. What is unsettled is whether these organizations are really worth the cash.

Beauchamp said a genuine indication of another media bubble isn't when demonstrated organizations, for example, Vice or Snap open up to the world, "it's the point at which the more modest ones begin to hurry, then you get the indication of the air pocket as you got in 2000."

In the Dotcom bubble, said Beauchamp, there were "a ton of organizations simply racing to IPO since they realized the time was somewhat correct and they realized they could the subsidizing they required."

Assuming that what you're building ends up being the #10 millennial brand, Kniaz makes sense of, there's tiny opportunity your image will get momentum, bring in cash and abstain from collapsing.

This is an issue for VCs, who don't actually tend to think about the thing the organization is attempting to do. They will more often than not become involved with a property just to sell it on later. That is where the edges are.

his organizations like TPG are depending on.

The expectation is that by pushing Vice as the millennial brand, with the certainty of its venture filling in as a sort of ad in itself, further driving up the valuation, a $400m stake can transform into $1bn or $2bn when one of the dinosaurs goes along and scoops Vice up.

Any organization - particularly to private value — is good for nothing other than whatever another person will pay for it.

Assuming that that cost is gotten from the income development and extended benefit of an organization, it's not unexpected sense. What's more, regardless of whether it's not, that mean it's anything but a wise speculation.

Download a Free Sample

[opticien2-0]

Amazon hails record Prime Day – and says it is now the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy

Amazon has hailed a record Prime Day, and says members of its Prime subscription scheme bought more and saved more than any previous Prime Day. During the course of the two day event shoppers bought more than 250m products, with the Fire TV Stick 4K with Alexa Voice Remote the most popular item bought.

  The growth came as this year’s event took place in 20 markets, up from 19 a year earlier. Since the event was held in June, Amazon Prime has now expanded to 22 markets.

  In the run up to Prime Day, shoppers spent $1.9bn (£1.4bn) with third-party sellers on the Amazon marketplace thanks to promotions. The retailer says Prime Day 2021 was the biggest two-day period ever for small and medium-sized businesses selling on its platform around the world.

  The update came as the retailer reported net sales of $113.1bn (£80.99bn) in the second quarter to June 30, 27% up from $88.9bn (£63.66bn) a year earlier. Net income of $7.8bn (£5.6bn) was up from $5.2bn (£3.72bn) a year earlier.

  Looking ahead, it now expects net sales to grow by between 10% and 16% to as much as $112bn (£80.2bn) in the third quarter, compared to last year, while operating income is expected to be lower than the $6.2bn (£4.4bn) it reported a year earlier, at between $2.5bn (£1.8bn) and $6bn (£4.3bn) after $1bn (£0.7bn) of Covid related costs.

  The retailer, ranked Elite in RXUK Top500 research, said during the quarter that it would create more than 10,000 corporate and operations jobs in the UK, while investing £10m over three years to train up to 5,000 employees in new skills.

  Amazon Fresh, the retailer’s grocery stores that feature ‘just walk out’ technology and remove the need to queue or to pay in-store now has five stores in the UK, the first having opened in March, and 15 in the US. During the quarter the technology was used on a full-size grocery store for the first time, with shoppers in Washington, US, offered the chance to skip the queue – or to queue and pay as normal.

The retailer and technology company has also added its Alexa voice assistant technology to devices from Ford cars, in a six-year deal, to Samsung fridges. In total, says Amazon, there are more than 900,000 registered developers, brands and device makers now building with Alexa.

  Amazon has now opened a disaster relief hub in an Atlanta fulfilment centre stocking more than 500,000 relief supplies that can be sent out to relief organisations when natural disasters hit the US, Caribbean and Central America. In India it airlifted in medical equipment including ventilators and oxygen machines during the Covid-19 surge there, and has committed to vaccinate 1m people, including members of Amazon’s staff, sellers and family members against Covid-19. In Nepal it is working with the United Nations World Food Programme to donate supplies to Covid-19 affected communities.

  Andy Jassy, chief executive of Amazon, says: “Over the past 18 months, our consumer business has been called on to deliver an unprecedented number of items, including PPE, food, and other products that helped communities around the world cope with the difficult circumstances of the pandemic. At the same time, AWS has helped so many businesses and governments maintain business continuity, and we’ve seen AWS growth reaccelerate as more companies bring forward plans to transform their businesses and move to the cloud.

  “Thank you to all of our passionate, innovative, mission-driven employees around the world for continuing to stay focused on delivering for customers—I am very excited to work with you as we invent and build for the future.”

  Amazon says it is now the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world, with 65% of energy used in its business now sourced from renewables – and it says it is on track to raise that to 100% by 2025, five years ahead of its 2030 target. It is also a leader of The Climate Pledge, which now has 112 members who are working to reduce corporate carbon emissions. In its own business, it has added five new categories to help shoppers find more sustainable products, enabling them to buy products that are approved in areas from animal welfare to organic, safer, and renewable materials.

  Industry reaction

Nigel Naylor-Smith, head of retail and hospitality at Fujitsu UK, says: “The retail sector has bounced back from the pandemic in recent months, so Amazon’s ongoing sale success – while consistent – isn’t all that surprising. What has, however, set tongues wagging is its constant innovation while the rest of the world was on pause.

  “After all, the impacts of Covid-19 will be ringing in the ears of tech investors for a long time yet and Amazon will need to do more than just hold firm to attract more buy-in. While it’s quietly powered ahead through lockdown, and been a pioneer in the space for a long time before that, there’s every possibility that giants such as Amazon and Facebook could yet face some share price volatility. It’s the reason why so many tech companies are moving into new sectors now restrictions are lifted and Amazon, for the very first time, is following suit.

  “But what matters now is not biting the consumer hand that fed them over lockdown. While Amazon’s ambitions to become a multi-level infrastructure where consumers can pay for goods and services using cryptocurrency could make it an even bigger success, its foundations – and vast majority of their sales – still rely on offering the typical, credit-and-cash customer the speed and convenience they can’t access offline. If they focus too much on innovating now that restrictions have eased, there’s a real chance that other retail giants will soon be biting at their heels.”

Hugh Fletcher, global head of consultancy and innovation at Wunderman Thompson Commerce, says: “Amazon’s Q2 earnings results was one of its most anticipated yet. With Prime Day, Jeff Bezos’ space flight, a multi-million pound deal with MGM, a potential cryptocurrency payment service and the return of consumer confidence in the high-street, investors will have been chomping at the bit. And for the retail marketplace that seemingly knows no bounds, its results did not fail to disappoint; with 14% of all online global spend passing through Amazon, it continues to hold the fort through its horizontal expansions, lucrative acquisitions and allyship with small businesses.

  “The challenge for the second half of the year will be sustaining growth and maintaining sales as physical shopping returns and Covid-19 restrictions ease – although over one third (36%) of global consumers are still fearful of shopping in store. Amazon also has some work to do to ease concerns around its sustainable and ethical work practices – while its services continue to set the benchmark, over half of global consumers say that Amazon should pay more tax. In the UK alone, near seven in 10 (69%) consumers support the idea of Amazon paying more tax.

  “Nonetheless, with more and more consumers comfortable with shopping online, and a potential second Prime day in October, Amazon will undoubtedly be a major player in retail in the second half of 2021. And while it’s hard to predict Amazon’s every next move, you can be sure they’re ten paces ahead of the rest of the chasing pack.”

from InternetRetailing https://ift.tt/3j7wQ0o via IFTTT

[ourprefers]

Archegos Capital fallout may wipe $6bn from global banks: Report

Archegos Capital fallout may wipe $6bn from global banks: Report

Losses at Archegos Capital led to fire sale of stocks after it failed to meet a calls for more collateral.

[diaspora9ja]

UK targets big business in latest move on tax avoidance

The British authorities has launched a crackdown on multinationals suspected of wrongly lowering their UK tax payments by shifting income to different nations, warning them of investigations and doubtlessly massive penalties.

HM Income & Customs has written to 1000’s of corporations since September demanding they evaluate their so-called transfer-pricing preparations — below which companies allocate income between totally different nations in an effort to minimise their tax liabilities.

The transfer by the UK tax authority comes in opposition to the backdrop of the large fiscal hole created by the coronavirus disaster, with chancellor Rishi Sunak in the end prone to require people and firms to pay extra tax to restore the general public funds.

HMRC this month estimated the two,000 largest companies with operations within the UK might owe an extra £34.8bn in tax regarding the 2019-20 monetary yr — up from £29.9bn 2018-19.

The UK tax authority’s letter despatched to multinationals, seen by the Monetary Instances, requested corporations how assured they had been that their switch pricing was “acceptable”.

Really helpful

HMRC instructed corporations to submit details about their switch pricing to its disclosure software, referred to as the profit diversion compliance facility, inside 90 days or face investigation.

“In investigations we’ve carried out to this point we are sometimes discovering that the UK income don’t mirror the worth created within the UK,” mentioned HMRC within the letter.

“We’re additionally discovering indications of careless or deliberate behaviour requiring penalties to be thought of.

“It will likely be too late to make an unprompted disclosure as soon as we open an investigation and penalties will probably be greater.”

Jon Claypole, companion at accounting agency BDO, mentioned corporations mustn’t ignore the HMRC letter, as a result of failing to behave would result in a “troublesome to handle and intrusive” probe by the tax authority.

The Chartered Institute of Taxation, an expert physique, mentioned that tackling revenue diversion by corporations was a “precedence” for HMRC, and it anticipated this to proceed for the foreseeable future.

It added that HMRC was “following up instantly with investigations” for almost all of companies that didn’t register with its disclosure software.

As certain as evening follows day, a stoop in tax revenues goes to be adopted by a extra lively agenda of tax investigations

HMRC’s £34.8bn determine is an estimate of so-called tax into account: a calculation of the utmost that corporations might must pay on a mixed foundation following investigations, though usually the quantity truly collected is about 40 per cent of this whole.

Of the £34.8bn, switch pricing preparations and “skinny capitalisation” accounted for £10.4bn in 2019-20 — up from £6bn the earlier yr.

Skinny capitalisation refers to a course of the place curiosity funds on borrowings from one a part of a bunch of corporations to a different can be utilized to scale back income within the UK.

Jason Collins, head of tax at regulation agency Pinsent Masons, mentioned there had been a “dramatic” rise in HMRC’s estimate of tax doubtlessly owed by corporations.

“Through the lockdown HMRC have been as useful as they’ll with corporations over tax payments and excellent money owed however that doesn’t prolong to tax avoidance and tax evasion,” he mentioned.

“As certain as evening follows day, a stoop in tax revenues goes to be adopted by a extra lively agenda of tax investigations.”

Multinationals are more and more being focused by HMRC, which has been strengthened in its skill to problem corporations by the introduction of the diverted profits tax in 2015.

That is designed to cease income being diverted away from the UK and is levied at 25 per cent — a better charge than company tax, which is ready at 19 per cent — to offer an incentive for good behaviour.

A spokesperson for HMRC mentioned: “HMRC’s position is to gather the correct amount of tax due below UK regulation and we rigorously scrutinise companies, together with to ensure they aren’t artificially diverting income away from the UK.

“We’re writing to some particular companies that we consider may very well be diverting cash away from the UK and inspiring them to make use of our new facility.”

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BREAKING:UK Court grants FG leave to challenge contract award.($9.6bn P&ID Case)

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/breakinguk-court-grants-fg-leave-to-challenge-contract-award-9-6bn-pid-case/

BREAKING:UK Court grants FG leave to challenge contract award.($9.6bn P&ID Case)

The Commercial Court of England, on Friday, granted the Federal Government of Nigeria leave to challenge the $9.6billion arbitrarily award to Process and Industrial Developments Limited, P&ID, over a botched gas supply and processing agreement.

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The Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mr. Abubakar Malami, SAN, who made the disclosure in a statement that was signed by his media aide, Dr. Umar Gwandu, described the decision of the English Court to allow Nigeria to challenge the judgement debt placed on it over three years ago, as “unprecedented”

According to the statement, the Court, allowed Nigeria to challenge the verdict, “well outside the normal time limits, due to the exceptional circumstances where the FRN has uncovered evidence of a massive fraud in procuring the award”. “The Court heard evidence from the FRN and the offshore shell company, P&ID, in relation to the gas supply and processing agreement (GSPA), which the parties entered into 10 years ago and which was never performed”, it added.

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Malami noted that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led administration, having inherited the dispute from the previous administration, “only recently uncovered evidence that the GSPA was a sham commercial deal designed to fail from the start, and that its subsequent arbitral award was based on fraud and corruption”. He said Nigeria relied on a number of ongoing investigations across multiple jurisdictions, including the US, to build its case.

“During the hearing, new evidence was presented to further support Nigeria’s challenge. “The FRN will now proceed to a full trial of the issues, where the FRN’s substantive application to finally set aside the award will be heard, thereby recording a major success considering the fact that the Federal Government exceptional circumstances application to have its challenge taken well outside the normal time limits is upheld on account of uncovered evidence of massive fraud in procuring the award.

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“The Federal Republic of Nigeria is pleased with the outcome from theHigh Court hearing today. “This is a major victory in our ongoing fight against the vulture-fund-backed P&ID, to overturn the injustice of the multi-billion dollar arbitral award.

“In light of the new and substantive evidence presented regarding P&ID’s fraudulent and corrupt activities, the Court has granted our application for an extension of time to hear our challenge out of normal time limits.

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“The Federal Government will now proceed to a full hearing of our fraud challenge in the coming months. “Investigations into the GSPA are ongoing, and we are firmly committed to overturning the award – no matter how long it takes – to ensure that this money goes towards Nigeria’s future, not into the pockets of millionaires trying to exploit our country”, the statement further read.

Sources: Vanguard