Any other business

The fallout from Carillion’s bankruptcy spreads in slow motion — just as the outsourcing and construction giant’s finances gradually stretched to breaking point over the months before it went down in January. The company’s auditor, KPMG, was rightly under the spotlight this week. But the impact on the ground seems to have been less disruptive

The Serious Fraud Office has upped the stakes in the case of the controversial $3 billion Qatari financing that saved Barclays from a taxpayer bailout in 2008, by extending the charge of ‘unlawful financial assistance’ to the operating company, Barclays Bank plc, as well as the parent, Barclays plc. Four senior former Barclays employees, including

If you were the incoming or retiring chairman of the Federal Reserve, you might be quietly pleased to see stock markets plunge on the day of the handover. As Jerome Powell was sworn in on Monday to succeed Dr Janet Yellen as head of America’s central bank, the Dow Jones index of leading US stocks

I visited St Thomas’ Hospital on Monday, to discuss fundraising for a cardiology research project. On the way in, I spotted an acquaintance taking her little boy for tests; she was busy explaining why the doctors needed to do what they were about to do, so I didn’t interrupt. I also spotted a block on

This column has long been a sucker for a grand projet. ‘Time for a trip to Boris Island,’ I gushed in 2010 when London’s then mayor came up with his much-mocked (though in engineering terms not unfeasible) wheeze to shift Heathrow to a giant man-made landing strip in the Thames estuary. But even I could

Carillion is a disaster on all fronts, but my sympathies go first to the fallen contracting giant’s sub–contractors. Upwards of 30,000 smaller firms were already facing 120-day payment delays and may now have to fight court battles to get paid at all, driving many hard-pressed entrepreneurs to bankruptcy. But the political spotlight won’t help them,

I once commissioned Michael Wolff —currently the world’s most talked-about journalist as the author of the White House exposé Fire and Fury — to write for The Spectator. It was just before the 2004 presidential election in which Republican incumbent George W. Bush looked set to see off the Democrat challenger John Kerry, and I

New Year’s Eve was certainly a day for celebration in the household of 53-year-old Jeff Fairburn, chief executive of the housebuilder Persimmon. He was due to receive the first £50 million tranche of shares under a bonus scheme that has won him total entitlements of £110 million. He must have done a terrific job, you’ll be

The revenge tragedy at the London Stock Exchange whose plot I outlined last month has reached its third act, but the carnage may not be over. Chief executive Xavier Rolet has left the building, rather than staying one more year as the LSE first announced, and declared that he won’t come back under any circumstances.

One week you’re fighting to survive the dance-off amid vicious backstage rivalries, the next you’re scoring a perfect ten from Bruno Tonioli for your shimmering tango. As it was on Strictly for Debbie McGee, so it was — well, almost — for Philip Hammond at the despatch box. Unlike many of the Budgets of his

The Chancellor sounded purposeful when he declared that he’ll do ‘whatever it takes’ to boost the rate of housebuilding — including pushing developers and councils to use up land banks and act on existing planning permissions — with a view to hitting a politically symbolic target of 300,000 units per year. But I wonder whether

Numerous readers told me they liked my recent tale — offered as an antidote to ‘media sniping at corporate capitalism’ — about the temporary school built by Porta-kabin after the Grenfell Tower fire. I’m on the lookout for other business stories that celebrate the positive, and I had it in mind to write about an

Perhaps we should be relieved that Donald Trump has made a dull appointment to succeed Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank. He might have picked another alt-right wacko or Kremlin stooge — or his Las Vegas buddy Phil Ruffin, the casino owner he allegedly thought of sending as envoy to

In connection with the receding possibility of a London Stock Exchange listing for Saudi Aramco, I wrote that the City authorities’ apparent eagerness to accommodate companies ‘from places not best known for their accounting standards, business probity or general attachment to democracy and the rule of law’ smacked of Brexit-driven desperation. Russia was one of

Another week, another blue-chip in the dock. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has brought fraud charges against London-based mining giant Rio Tinto and two former executives in relation to an ill-starred coal venture in Mozambique. Whatever its legalities, this was a colossal corporate cock-up. In 2010, Rio paid $3.7 billion for Riversdale, an Australian

How did we mislay half a trillion pounds? Revised data from the Office for National Statistics has just reduced the UK’s ‘net international investment position’ from a surplus of £469 billion to a deficit of £22 billion. Downing Street dismissed this as ‘a technical revision’ — and in truth it’s not as bad it sounds,

Monarch Airlines was the ghost of an earlier age of holiday travel. When I used to see its planes lined up at Leeds-Bradford airport alongside those of Ryanair and its brash northern rival Jet2, I sometimes wondered why Monarch was still there. Now it has been brought down by a combination of the weak pound,

An Uber insider tells me not to write off the ride-hailing giant too soon, because it’s a very smart company for all its faults — and because the numbers of drivers and users for whom it is part of daily life will make it difficult for Transport for London to uphold its licence withdrawal on