Planet business

By LAURA SLATTERY

Shop talk

“Sure you can’t shut Arnotts, it’s been here too long,” one of the department store’s workers said after news circulated that Anglo Irish Bank and Ulster Bank had taken control of the 167-year-old retailer.

Soon, Twitter was awash with jokes that Alan Dukes would be taking over haberdashery, while there would be a new deal on offer: buy your furniture from Arnotts, get a middle-of-nowhere apartment free. But as shocking as the idea is that the cursed Anglo has got its Government-controlled hands on the much-loved company, the “sure you can’t shut Arnotts” line of thinking luckily appears to be holding sway at the Department of Finance. The bargain basement remains open for now.

Pay day

One51 leader-in-chief Philip Lynch declared to shareholders that he had “no problem telling you I was paid €1.4 million last year” at its fractious agm this week.

While some shareholders remained faithful that One51’s performance would come good, others shifted in their seats at the thought that their underwater investments were subsidising his lifestyle. Lynch put them straight. He’d have loved to have been “in South Africa at the World Cup, or St Andrew’s at the golf, but I wasn’t there”, so hard was he working to get their money back. Never mind: there’s bound to be some change from €1.4 million by the time Brazil World Cup 2014 comes around.

$ 30bn- Aspiring oligarchs can look forward to a Russian asset sale worth this much in 2011.

Factory blues:Foxconn, the iPhone manufacturer, has had to shut down a plant in India after around 250 workers fell sick, possibly as a result of pesticide poisoning.

Ritz put-on:An unemployed lorry driver who duped people into giving him £1 million (€1.19 million) in a scam purporting to sell them Londons Ritz Hotel has been jailed for five years.

Doggy bank:Metro, a new high street bank in Britain, has become the first bank there to allow dogs through the door - canine current accounts are sadly not available.

The Question: Should I pre-order Gordon Brown's book on the economic crisis now?

Planet Business wasn’t going to mention the “C” word, but as retailers have astonishingly already begun hyping up a traditionally sales-tastic winter festival that begins with that letter and ends with “supposed to be a spiritual occasion”, the annual alarm bells have been set in motion. How do you weigh down the stocking of the financially literate man or woman in your life? Well, making his bid for bestseller status is none other than former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who will release a tome about the global financial crisis (GFC) in November, according to publishers Simon Schuster.

Technically, the answer to this week's question is no, as with no title yet assigned to Brown's blockbuster, it is not yet available for order on Amazon - although you can pick up the intriguingly titled Gordon is a Moron: The Definitive and Objective Analysis of Gordon Browns Decade as Chancellor of the Exchequerinstead.

Brown's cunning move to go tête-à-tête with Gillian Tett ( Financial Timesjournalist and author of GFC frontrunner Fool's Gold) in the books market could still be worth a few bob, however, as this is the first inside account of world leaders' genius plan to stop capitalism from officially imploding. Better still, Simon Schuster promises that the book "will also offer measures Brown believes the world should adopt to regain fiscal stability". Of course, who needs to be prime minister when you can be a pundit?

"I will always feel a deep responsibility, regardless of where the blame is ultimately found to lie" -File this parting shot from BP's Tony Hayward next to the bankers' canon of non-apology apologies.