Planet business

LAURA SLATTERYperuses the week in business

The numbers

$5 million

– the sum Woody Allen will receive from clothing magnate Dov Charney in compensation for the unauthorised use of his image, after the American Apparel boss used a picture of the actor-director dressed as a Hasidic Jew in a billboard advertising campaign for reasons too tortured to go into here.

$1 million

– the monthly cost of running “Britney Spears Inc”, once all the flunkies’ salaries and 24-hour security costs are taken into account.

69

– the percentage of small-business owners who work at weekends more than once a month, according to a TNS mrbi poll. But surely not when Britain’s Got Talent is on?

21

– the percentage of small-business owners who say they are contacted by the office every day while on holiday, according to the same poll. Are they sure it's not the other way around?

QUOTE OF THER WEEK

'Talking about Aer Lingus being out of money, being bankrupt in 18 months - total, total rubbish.'

– Aer Lingus may be burning through its cash reserves faster than you can burn your tongue on an in-flight panini, but it will still have some fuel left in its engine at the end of this recession, says chairman and acting chief executive Colm Barrington.

GOOD WEEK

The Cook Islands

Press release of the week comes courtesy of a double-hander from Cook Islands Tourism and Air New Zealand, which silences the "green shoots" debate with this opening gambit: "The Cook Islands government today announced that the nation has officially decided not to take part in the worldwide recession, making it the world's first Recession Free Oasis." If you're weary of downturn drama, you now have "the opportunity to escape the recession by coming to a country where it doesn't exist", says the Pacific Ocean country's tourism minister. Note to editor: The islands enjoy an average of 2,200 sunshine hours each year.

Chelsea Flower Show

After the English festival of horticulture saw its sponsors drain away and the number of exhibitors withering as a result, it was good to see that the gardeners who did show up this week were still capable of some trowel-in-cheek moments. One exhibitor, designing a range of bankers' gardens, came up with a moat-like front yard called . . . the Offshore Garden, complete with miniature yacht floating its way towards the front door. But what does the Garden of the Repossessed look like?

GOOD WEEK/BAD WEEK

Myleene Klass

It was a tale of two promotion deals for musician- presenter and celebrity mother Klass: a 40 per cent plunge in profits at Marks Spencer means she has had to take a 25 per cent pay cut on her £1 million (€1.14 million) contract to be the "face" of the retailer. On the plus side, Mothercare announced a tenfold rise in profits and declared that the exclusive Baby K range designed in conjunction with Klass had successfully shifted. (The spring range, for anyone who's interested, favours grey tartan and fire-engine red for the boys and frilled lemon rompers and hot-pink velour for the girls.)

BAD WEEK:

Hedge funds

They were supposed to be able to beat the market, but hedge funds and their exorbitantly remunerated managers capitulated to the equities collapse just like everyone else. Now new research lays into the “hedgies” for failing to spot the rally. According to Hedge Fund Research, hedge funds gained 2.7 per cent in March and 5.7 per cent in April. However, the FTSE 100 has climbed more than 20 per cent since March 9th, meaning that hedge-fund clients went short alright, but not quite in the way they had envisaged.

Google 

At the search engine’s Zeitgeist conference, co-founder Larry Page confessed Google had dropped the baton to microblogging site Twitter in the bid to cater for people who want to “do stuff real time”.

Google, Page admitted, had “done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis”, which is the speed at which all conversations, relationships and careers must now be conducted, apparently.