Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. He writes the weekly Any Other Business column.
Pfizer will almost certainly have to offer more than its second bid of £50 a share for rival drug giant AstraZeneca, but the American predator seems to be winning the game of spin so far. For a start, Pfizer chief Ian Read turns out to be a Scottish-born graduate of Imperial College London who has
The pattern of the global pharmaceutical industry has long been towards cross-border mergers that combine research strength, market access and the capital needed to sustain new drugs through multinational approval processes.The UK has done well in this game, with excellent laboratory work and two giants still headquartered here, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. The latter is part-Swedish
A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion of Barclays shareholders against the bank’s decision to pay increased bonuses of £2.4 billion, far outstripping dividends to shareholders and despite a fall in profits. At last week’s AGM, 34 per cent of shareholders refused
The popular pastime for financial commentators this season is sticking pins in George Osborne. To those on the left who hate everything about him, to those on the right who think he should have used the fiscal crisis as an opportunity to slash state spending far more than he did, to those in the middle
‘Care, respect, clarity and reassurance’ are what the Co-operative funeral service says it offers the bereaved, and the parent Co-op Group may soon find itself in need of just such support to help it come to terms with the resolution of the Co-op Bank. ‘Resolution’ is modern banking jargon for an orderly burial, involving powers
‘Care, respect, clarity and reassurance’ are what the Co-operative funeral service says it offers the bereaved, and the parent Co-op Group may soon find itself in need of just such support to help it come to terms with the resolution of the Co-op Bank. ‘Resolution’ is modern banking jargon for an orderly burial, involving powers
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling after Easter. Meanwhile, Labour’s irritatingly smug business spokesman Chuka Umunna continues to score points by claiming that last October’s flotation was ‘botched’, costing taxpayers a notional £750 million as the shares leapt from the issue
Vince Cable and Michael Fallon, ministers responsible for the Royal Mail sell-off, have been summoned for another select committee grilling after Easter. Meanwhile, Labour’s irritatingly smug business spokesman Chuka Umunna continues to score points by claiming that last October’s flotation was ‘botched’, costing taxpayers a notional £750 million as the shares leapt from the issue
‘Full employment’ usually means the lowest achievable rate of unemployment — somewhere south of 5 per cent compared with 7.2 per cent today, or to put it in numbers, fewer than 1.5 million compared with 2.3 million last month. You might think it ought to be a target of every Chancellor of the Exchequer. Only Norman
The Budget contained eye-catching measures to stimulate business investment, which has been lagging badly behind the current recovery, and to encourage exporters, whose performance has trailed off after a promising mid-recession uptick when the pound weakened. But there was little to address the scandalous unfairness of business rates about which I regularly hold forth. These
At the beginning of the last decade, a young man who claimed to be my ‘premier banker’ paid me a visit. He was accompanied by his boss, evidently there to assess the junior’s performance. Once upon a time — at least in popular imagination — bank managers were kindly, cautious, long-term advisers, but by the
Malaysian Airlines, whose flight MH370 has strangely disappeared, is a national flag-carrier in the broadest sense — a symbol, along with the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur and the Proton car, of its home nation’s aspirations as an Asian Tiger. Hived off in the early 1970s from the former Malaysia-Singapore Airlines, it became, in 1984,
I’m sure HS2 chairman Sir David Higgins is right to argue that if we’re serious about building a new north-south rail network, we should get on with it. The greater the number of general elections between conception and completion of any infrastructure scheme, the less likely it is to happen. Lord Mandelson revealed last year
Last Saturday was International Women’s Day, but we celebrated early in Helmsley when my Yorkshire home town was featured in national news last month as a beacon of recession-beating female entrepreneurship: 60 per cent of our new ventures have female owners. This is shaping up to be a good year for women in business generally,
Strange goings-on at the crippled Co-op, where chief executive Euan Sutherland was reported to have tendered his resignation in anger at a leak of plans to pay him £3.6 million for his first year’s work — vastly more than his predecessor, and despite group losses of £2 billion resulting from a black hole in its
To have written last month that the headline ‘Kiev in flames’ looked like a black swan on the economic horizon hardly makes me Nostradamus — but sure enough, the tension between Russia and Ukraine have caused stock markets to quiver and the price of UK gas for one-month delivery on the ICE Europe futures exchange
Dividends paid by listed companies around the world passed $1 trillion for the first time last year, we learn from a report by Henderson Global Investors. The total is 43 per cent higher than it was in 2009, and a breakdown shows that US companies account for about a third of all dividends paid, while
Imagine if the BBC’s excitable commentators had been asked to cover the building of Sochi’s facilities, rather than the Winter Olympics themselves. ‘Yeesss!!’ Ed Leigh might have yelled, ‘That’s the 21st construction contract for the big lad from St Petersburg, Arkady Rotenberg. Seven point four billion dollars’ worth, a new Olympic record — more than
A reader likens me to Dr Pangloss, the quack philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide who insisted that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ even after he was reduced to a syphilitic beggar. It’s true that I tend to regard positive indicators — a 22-year high in the BDO index of
Tom Bower’s first biography of Sir Richard Branson, in 2000, was memorable for its hilarious account of the Virgin tycoon’s accident-prone ballooning exploits — and for its trenchant thesis that he had ‘toppled from his perch onto a slippery, downward path’, both in business and personal reputation. But what Bower depicted as ‘the beginning of
