Planet Business

A round-up of the business news in brief

THE NUMBERS

9,800

- New debt-burdened clients seen by the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (Mabs) in the first half of the year.

€15,100

- Average debt owed by the new Mabs clients.

QUOTES OF THE WEEK

"These companies have nowhere else to go but liquidation."

- Rossa Fanning, barrister-at-law for ACCBank, spells out the endgame for the two of the companies in the Zoe group, Vantive Holdings and Morston Investments.

 "The Quinn sponsorship is a great fit for the 'Late Late Show'. Both are established, quality Irish brands with a massive resonance for consumers."

- RTÉ television sponsorship manager Gerry McGuinness welcomes the beginning of beautiful friendship, after the broadcaster's flagship show signs up a new sponsor to usher in the Tubridy era.

GOOD WEEK 

Volkswagen

Coffee brand Carte Noire's "are you sitting comfortably" advertising campaign with an admirably straight- faced Dominic West (aka

The Wire's

Jimmy McNulty) reading extracts from classic novels would run away with our advertisement of the year award if we had one, but this week's winner is ad agency DDB London for allying the historically creative Volkswagen brand with a cult 1998 Coen brothers film.

A new VW advertisement, designed to promote VW's support for independent cinemas (and thus its appeal to the more open-minded, cultured driver), features a devotee to Dudeism, the "religion" inspired by "the Dude" character from

The Big Lebowski

.

Bonuses

At home, the people in office are still desperately trying to work out the biggest Nama "discount" they can grant. However in transatlantic and cross-channel circles, they're already welcoming back annual bonuses, golden hellos, even glossier golden parachutes and those lovely "performance-related" packages, as both the White House and the UK Financial Services Authority moved to water down political promises on limiting excessive pay and the short-term bonus culture in the financial sector. Various industry chiefs shamelessly ruminated on the risk of pushing "key talent" to seek out more generous jurisdictions. Is this the same "key talent" that created those charming collateralised debt obligations (CDOs), mortgage-backed securities and opaque derivative products that got us here?

BAD WEEK

Sweet-toothed consumers

Raw sugar prices jumped to their highest point this week since 1981, which, according to the history of chocolate, is the year confectionary-loving consumers welcomed the velvet-textured arrival of Cadbury's Wispa bar. Hmm. Cadbury has just recently boosted its sales with the shifting of 60 million Wispa bars since its relaunch. A coincidence, or is there enough sugar in those innocently aerated milk chocolate bars to create a not-so-sweet price spike on global commodity markets? Ah . . . apparently the prices have soared largely because the monsoon in India turned out to be a bit drizzlier than normal and this is expected to result in a 45 per cent drop in its sugar crop.

Bloomsbury

The publishing house has been forced to back down on the cover for a novel about a black girl, whom its jacket designers turned into a white girl. After the upset author blogged that publishers were "really only in the business of selling books to white people", Bloomsbury, best known for publishing the

Harry Potter

books, announced it would release a new hard- back version featuring a black girl. It said its "original creative direction" for the book had been "intended to symbolically reflect the narrator's complex psychological make-up" and it was a shame some people had interpreted this as "a calculated decision to mask the character's ethnicity". Indeed.