Planet business

LAURA SLATTERY peruses the week in business

THE NUMBERS

€563

- example of the cost of annual property tax on a house worth €150,001-€300,000, under proposals made by the Commission on Taxation.

€12,250

- the amount of stamp duty payable by owner-occupiers purchasing a house worth €300,000, under the current rules - 21 years' worth of annual property tax.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

"I've been pummelled, I've been dumped on, and it's all going to happen again. I can handle it . . . You know what, my mother loves me."

- Dick Fuld, former chairman of Lehman Brothers, isn't looking forward to media coverage of the one-year anniversary of the investment bank's collapse.

"It's human nature - unless somebody can find a way to change human nature, we will have more crises."

- All this has happened before and all this will happen again, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan tells the BBC's credit crunch documentary The Love of Money.

GOOD WEEK

Allergan

The Obama administration has already backed off suggestions that it might introduce a "Botax" on cosmetic procedures such as injections of Allergan's Botox drug. But even if it does get around to taxing people for freezing their facial features, Allergan has declared another use in mind for the drug: to prevent chronic migraine. Scientists aren't quite sure how Botox, a purified form of the deadly poison botulinum, actually works to prevent extreme headaches - the drug may stop pain messages from reaching the brain - but, if approved, the use of the drug for that purpose could be worth a potential $1 billion in sales to Allergan.

Carlsberg

The drinks group cheekily signed a new four-year deal to sponsor the England football team on the same day that the British Medical Association published a report on the damaging effect of alcohol marketing on young people and called the sponsorship of sport by drinks companies to be banned - a move that, if it were to be enacted here, would have consequences for C&C, which sponsors the Magners League, and Diageo, which sponsors GAA hurling via Guinness.

BAD WEEK

Kraft

Chocolate wars have erupted between US food conglomerate Kraft, the makers of Oreo cookies and Dairylea cheese, and British confectioner Cadbury Schweppes, after the Cadbury board passed on Kraft's not-so-sweet offer of a $16.7 billion takeover bid for the group. Polite refusal has not dissuaded Kraft from pursuing its target, but it may now have to tussle with more palatable bids from rivals Hershey's and Nestlé. Cadbury, meanwhile, quite fancies remaining independent, as it has done rather successfully for 185 years.

The Madoff estate

As a property portfolio, it encompassed a 4,000sq ft penthouse on New York's Upper East Side, a 3,000sq ft beach house in Montauk, Long Island, a 55ft yacht called The Bull, a vintage Aston Martin and a Florida mansion in Palm Beach that came with its own dock. But now the estate of jailed Ponzi scheme operator Bernard Madoff is to be broken up, with the US Marshals service putting his assets up for auction and distributing the proceeds among his victims. Anyone got a spare $10 million?