Babcock still in hunt for VT in spite of share pressure

By Amy Wilson

Published: 10:34PM GMT 07 Mar 2010

Insiders said Babcock could afford to fund a deal, despite the pressure on its
cash-and-shares offer after the drop in its share price. At the end of last
week, Babcock was worth £1.2bn, following a 6pc fall in its shares since its
interest in VT was made public. VT, by contrast, edged ahead to close the
week worth £1.23bn. The company’s shares climbed after a takeover became
more likely and VT dropped its own bid for support service group Mouchel.

Shareholders in both companies say Babcock’s examination of VT’s books could
turn up cost synergies of close to £50m, doubling Babcock’s estimate of £27m
of savings when it first announced an offer last month. VT quickly rejected
that approach, worth 634p a share, and then turned down a raised bid of
between 680p and 715p a share, which values the company at £1.3bn.

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New tax bombshell: 20% VAT

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A rise in VAT is looming whichever party wins the general election, as Labour
and the Conservatives draw up plans to balance Britain’s books.

Alistair Darling and George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, are both
considering raising VAT to as high as 20 per cent — the European average —
from the current rate of 17.5 per cent, The Times has learnt.

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Company director jailed for re-selling cheap supermarket food as expensive organic produce

By
Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 6:27 PM on 23rd September 2009

The director of a food company which provided pies to an upmarket shop which supplies Buckingham
Palace has been jailed for re-packaging cheap
supermarket goods as organic.
Neil Stansfield, 51, bought food from non-organic sources including
Tesco and Waitrose and sold it at twice the price netting 500,000 in
his six-year fraud operation.
His firm Onefood - which stood for ‘Organic, Natural and Ethical’-
sold a 20 Waitrose salmon for 51 while pork pies bought from a local
butcher for 1.30 were sold for 2.50.
Non-organic: Food from Onefood - who repackaged supermarket food and sold it as organic - could have ended up on the dinner table at Buckingham Palace

The non-organic pork pies were bought repackaged and shipped off to
the London fine foods store Fortnum & Mason, which supplies the
Royal Family at Buckingham Palace. Stansfield, who also traded as Swaddles Organic in Daventry, Northants, regularly told his staff to dispose of supermarket wrapping from pork pies and chickens.Invoices were faked from organic suppliers and non-organic chickens were entered into the company’s books as ‘game’, which cannot be certified as organic.Other purchases were listed as ‘non stock’ to help evade scrutiny from the Soil Association and Organic Farmers and Growers Ltd.Both Stansfield of Daventry and his wife, company secretary Kate Stansfield, 44, pleaded guilty to fraudulent trading at an earlier hearing at Northampton Crown Court.Operations manager Russell Hudson, 40, from Daventry, also admitted the same offence.
Upmarket: Neil Stansfield’s bogus organic food company supplied upmarket shop Fortnum and Mason
Appearing for sentence on Tuesday, Matthew Lowe, prosecuting, said Stansfield was the ‘prime mover in the subterfuge’.He said: ‘Staff said Neil Stansfield was making two to three trips to Tesco and Waitrose each day.’He was able to exploit the premium prices that are attached to organic food.’A significant amount of marketing and advertising of this company stressed its ethical standpoint.’  The deception was revealed when Trading Standards officers bought an ‘organic’ salmon from Onefood for 51 in a test purchase operation.They discovered it had actually been bought from Waitrose the day before for just 20, while pork pies traced to Sauls of Spratton had been marked up from 1.30 to 2.50.The company, which employed up to 12 people and had recorded annual sales of between 500,000 and 2.5 million, went into liquidation last year.Judge Richard Bray jailed Stansfield for 27 months, and disqualified him from working as a company director for six years.He said: ‘I have to sentence you for fraudulent trading.’You were involved in the running of a company which was persistently and deliberately involved in marketing ‘organic’ food in order to exploit the premium profits.’  Judge Bray commended Trading Standards for their ‘thorough’ investigation.Kate Stansfield was sentenced to 50 weeks jail suspended for two years and banned from being a director for three years, while Hudson received a 40-week jail sentence suspended for two years.Both were ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work.When Fortnum & Mason first started stocking his ‘Swaddles Organic’ pies two years ago, Stansfield boasted it was because his produce was ‘the best in the UK’.He told a local paper: ‘Fortnum and Mason searched for the finest British classic pie throughout the UK and after arduous searching they came upon Onefood and Swaddles, sampled the product and found it to be the best in the UK.’We’re impassioned by supplying natural, ethical and unadulterated food and we’re here to help educate consumers about the well-being that comes from choosing British-grown organic meat.’  Butcher Christopher Saul, 63, who unwittingly had his pies mis-sold as organic by Onefood to official Royal suppliers, said supplying the Palace had ‘always been an ambition’.He said: ‘I would love for the Royal Family to come to us for an order, but clearly I would have loved for it to be done in the proper way.’  The company claimed to supply ‘food without compromise’, with more than 2.500 organic food lines from fruit, veg and dairy basics to a la carte meats, cut, trimmed and packaged to order.Prepared veg dishes include honey-glazed carrots, pommes dauphinoise and rustic peperanata, a fresh tomato sauce with bell pepper, fennel seed and sweet paprika.In previous years Swaddles has been recommended in a host of national publications for its Christmas hampers and delicious foods.

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Britain ‘facing immediate risk of full-blown financial crisis’

By
Political Editor
Last updated at 1:13 AM on 18th September 2009

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne described the report as a ‘wake-up call’
Britain faces a ‘clear and present danger’ of a full-blown fiscal crisis, a City report warned yesterday.
Analysts at investment bank Nomura cautioned that the public finances are ‘plunging deeply into the red in a spectacular and frightening way’, leaving the UK far more vulnerable than the United States.
They said international markets could refuse to buy Government debt, warning the ‘possibility of failed auctions is not trivial’.
Shadow Chancellor George Osborne described the report as a ‘wake-up call’ and warned Britain’s ‘international reputation’ was at stake.
The alert came as Chancellor Alistair Darling was accused of planning to sweep 32billion of debt out of public view.
Former Treasury adviser David Heald claimed there was a 32billion gap between published government figures on debt and internal assessments. He told the magazine Accountancy Age that 87 per cent of public/private partnerships and private finance initiatives would be left off the Government’s books.
Tory Treasury spokesman Philip Hammond said: ‘Yet again, Labour is taking the public for fools. If they can’t be straight about the scale of the problem, how will they ever solve Britain’s debt crisis?’
A Treasury spokesman said it was the decision of the Office of National Statistics which figures were publicly available.

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Mandelson faces embarrassment over KeTech’s pension black hole

By Richard Tyler, Enterprise Editor

Published: 9:46PM BST 01 Sep 2009

Lord Mandelson’s Business Department said its agency, Capital for Enterprise
Limited, was seeking answers from one of the £75m fund’s two managers,
Octopus Capital.

A
Daily Telegraph investigation has found that the subsidiary
of Bedford-based engineer KeTech Group
, called Key Radio Systems, did not pass on staff pension contributions
to their group personal pensions run by Aegon Scottish Equitable.

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RBS £60bn takeover of ABN under investigation

The Financial Services Authority (FSA) has begun an investigation into Royal
Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) disastrous acquisition of ABN Amro and its
subsequent £12 billion rights issue.

The regulatory inquiry was revealed in a footnote in RBS’s interim results
this month.

“In April 2009 the FSA notified the group that it was commencing a
supervisory review of the acquisition of ABN AMRO in 2007 and the 2008
capital raisings. The group and its subsidiaries are co-operating fully with
this review,” was all RBS said of the matter.

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More fishermen are eyeing the pond

Stephen Hester, the newish chief executive of RBS, says it will take the bank
two years at least to get out of the mire. That sounds awfully like a
two-way bet. Either RBS does take two years to become sufficiently
attractive to be taken off the State’s books, in which case he says, I told
you so. Or it happens rather quicker than that, in which case he says,
didn’t I do well?

The past couple of months have shown how fast fortunes can turn around in
banking. At the start of the week, Barclays shares were a couple of pence
more than £3. They closed last night at 365p. The figures weren’t that good,
were they?

Meanwhile, incorrect reports suggest Mr Hester, who joined RBS late last year,
is already on track to earn his £6 million bonus based on the rise in the
bank’s share price. Reports that are not so much untrue as premature, one
suspects.

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More fishermen are eyeing the pond

Stephen Hester, the newish chief executive of RBS, says it will take the bank
two years at least to get out of the mire. That sounds awfully like a
two-way bet. Either RBS does take two years to become sufficiently
attractive to be taken off the State’s books, in which case he says, I told
you so. Or it happens rather quicker than that, in which case he says,
didn’t I do well?

The past couple of months have shown how fast fortunes can turn around in
banking. At the start of the week, Barclays shares were a couple of pence
more than £3. They closed last night at 365p. The figures weren’t that good,
were they?

Meanwhile, incorrect reports suggest Mr Hester, who joined RBS late last year,
is already on track to earn his £6 million bonus based on the rise in the
bank’s share price. Reports that are not so much untrue as premature, one
suspects.

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Cameron toughens up on public finances as he warns of savage spending cuts ahead

By
Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 12:35 PM on 26th July 2009

David Cameron today warned the country faced a ‘daunting’ challenge to wrestle control of public finances. The Tory leader said he was fully prepared to look voters in the eye and tell them spending would have to be slashed.’It’s incredibly daunting the scale of the challenge, and the mess
that’s being left in terms of the economy and particularly the budget
balance,’ he said.
At war: Alistair Darling (left) and David Cameron lay out their public spending agendas on the Andrew Marr Show’And that’s why I’ve said, and I can’t remember and opposition
leader who in opposition has looked the British public in the eye and
said, we are going to cut public spending.
‘We have to do that, we have to be clear about that.
‘But I think the British people recognise this and are crying out
for someone who’s going to lead them and is going to say right, we are
all in this together, we’ve got to take these steps together.’

Mr Cameron also pledged more detail to come about his
party’s spending plans, but insisted he was ahead of Labour already in
what he had set out.
Apart from the health and overseas aid budgets, which are to be
ringfenced, he said there would be ‘very proper savings‘ in
departmental budgets.
Money would also be saved from things the Tories wanted to axe, including identity cards and regional government.
The party was now looking at areas where else savings could be made.
‘That is the next stage, the work is underway, we will have more to say about that,’ he said.
‘But I would argue we are well ahead of where the Government is and ought to be, and yet they are still arguing.’Alistair Darling has also laid out his agenda on public spending today, promising to begin  spelling out the ‘hard choices’ Labour will make as early as this autumn.The Chancellor said all the parties would have to detail their plans for re-balancing the country’s books before the next general election.’You have to set out those priorities,’ he said.’Apart from anything else, the next election could see a government elected until 2015 - it will need a mandate for the hard things it’s got to do as well as the things it wants to do to improve the country.’Politics is about choices, and people when they go to the polls - whenever it is - will want to know where all three political parties stand.’His comments come after weeks of rowing between Labour and the Tories about their respective plans for public spending beyond the next election, which is expected early next year.The Institute of Fiscal Studies has predicted that whoever is in power will have to introduce significant cuts in order to bring down massive national debt.Mr Darling said the current economic uncertainty meant it was impossible to ’settle everybody’s budget down to the last tray of paperclips between now and 2013′.But he added: ‘I did say we would need to come back to this at the Pre-Budget Report because … we are committed to the finances in this country being sustainable.’Mr Darling was emphatic that VAT would be returned to 17.5 per cent at the end of this year, despite recent speculation that he might review the proposed rise.VAT was reduced to 15 per cent last year as a temporary recession-fighting measure.Business leaders have complained that its planned restoration on January 1 could hamper any economic recovery.But, asked today whether it would return to 17.5 per cent then, Mr Darling said: ‘It will, it will do, yes.’Speaking on BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show he said: ‘The reason I cut VAT was to bring forward spending this year as part of the process of helping our economy get through it.’But when you consider it costs almost £1 billion a month, I was quite clear at the Budget and when I announced this last November that the VAT rate would return to the 17.5 per cent at the end of this year. That remains the case.’

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Labour under pressure as UK debt soars to £13bn

Britain’s debts surged in June as dwindling tax receipts hit the Government
coffers, nearly doubling public borrowing to £13 billion.

The rise in borrowings, up from £7.5 billion in June last year, has raised
concerns that the Chancellor may exceed his own forecasts and be forced to
borrow more than £175 billion this year.

Public sector net debt rose to £798.8 billion last month, equal to 56.6 per
cent of GDP — the highest level since records began in 1974.

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