Best of travel: Rampaging through Dartmoor in an Aston Martin March 5, 2021 To tide us over until we’re able to travel again, we’re republishing classic travel stories from our archives. Today we revisit Adam Hay-Nicholls’ tour through the rugged terrain of Dartmoor in an Aston Martin Vanquish. ••• It’s the tail-end of dusk in Devon and silence is broken. Thundering down the twisting A382 from Exeter to [...]
Aston Martin revenue plummets amid ‘challenging period’ for luxury car firm July 29, 2020 Aston Martin more than quadrupled its operating loss for the first six months of 2020 as the luxury car firm reported a steep plunge in sales and revenue during the pandemic. The results Total retail sales sank 41 per cent to £1.77bn in the six months to June, down from £3bn in the same period [...]
Moss Bros to be taken private in £22.6m deal March 12, 2020 Suit retailer Moss Bros is on the brink of being taken private after the owners of Crew Clothing offered to buy it in a deal worth £22.6m. Brigadier Acquisition Company offered to buy the high street chain for 22p per share, a premium of 60 per cent on yesterday’s closing price. Crew Clothing owner Menoshi [...]
Insurer LV shifts focus to pension provision with new boss December 20, 2019 Pension provider LV has today announced a new chief executive as it shifts its focus away from insurance to savings and retirement. Mark Hartigan will move to the company from Zurich Insurance group. Current CEO Richard Downey this year lead the sale of LV’s general insurance division to Allianz and will step down at the [...]
Royal Navy shadowing Russian warships in the Channel and North Sea March 26, 2020 The Royal Navy has been tracking seven Russian warships after detecting “unusually high levels” of activity in the Channel and North Sea. “The Navy has completed a concentrated operation to shadow the Russian warships after unusually high levels of activity in the English Channel and North Sea,” the Royal Navy said. Nine UK warships were [...]
Pub companies urged to help tenants amid coronavirus crisis April 7, 2020 Pub companies have been ordered to do more to support tenants during the coronavirus crisis, after it was revealed that most regulated firms have not offered to waive rents. The Pubs Code Adjudicator, which regulates companies that own 500 or more tenanted pubs in England and Wales, said five out of six firms had not [...]
Businesses must find their purpose, or risk becoming the next corporate scandal July 14, 2020 In the midst of a pandemic, the corporate scandals keep coming. The most recent is Boohoo, a previously admired brand in the fashion industry that has been accused of sourcing clothes from a Leicester factory where workers were paid as little as £3.50 an hour. For many in the fashion industry, the darker side of [...]
Why we need to ditch the ‘Superwoman’ role model October 28, 2019 Is it right to make a straight-out judgement on “good” and “bad” role models? As a female chief executive working in a predominantly male industry, I am often asked if I had a female role model. And I have to be honest, it is not a question that I find easy to answer. From the [...]
Crypto AM shines its Spotlight on Blok BioScience September 16, 2020 There are many companies both large and small putting forward all manner of technology solutions to help manage the pandemic. Some are contact trace solutions while others are immunity passports. Some make clever use of modern database capabilities while others rely on DLT of various flavours. Some are centralized repositories with impressive analytical inference tools [...]
In memoriam: Ian Taylor 1946-2020 January 16, 2021 Ian Taylor, who died in June of last year, ran Vitol for two decades. He was well-liked in the City not just for his business acumen, but for his philanthropy – which, it was revealed last week, continued after his death. Bloomberg reported he left £1m to the Royal Opera House and significantly more than [...]