Planet Business

THE NUMBERS:
16– The number of Rolex watches belonging to convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff to be auctioned off by US authorities $500,000– The sum that the sale of Madoff's personal effects is expected to raise at the auction in New York tomorrow.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK:

“I was gutted, completely gutted . . . I was pulling my hair out thinking, ‘no, why me?’ It’s like telling someone their dog’s just died.”

- BBC Radio 1 listener Raz (25), one of the million Xbox users who have been cut off from Microsoft’s online gaming service for modifying (“modding”) their consoles so they can play pirated games.

GOOD WEEK:

Simon Cowell

AS WELL as being the most talked about chain-yanker of British television this week, Simon "this is a singing competition" Cowell has been named the highest-paid man on US prime-time television, with estimated earnings of $75 million (€50 million) last year. Forbes magazine ranked the slouching 50 year-old ahead of Donald Trump, the host of the US version of The Apprentice, and American Idolhost Ryan Seacrest, as a result of earnings from work as a judge on Idoland as the creator of America's Got Talent. Back in Britain, thanks to a talented publicity team, Cowell's show The X Factoris drawing audiences of a size increasingly improbable in a multichannel age.

Safe shopping

ANYONE WHO submits to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon will know that buying offline can be a dangerous business, but scuffling shoppers in the US may find that this year’s Black Friday, the traditionally retail-tastic day after Thanksgiving, is a more orderly affair than usual. A year after a discount-eager crowd trampled a worker to death at a Wal-Mart store, the retailer has developed a new crowd-control plan to avoid bottlenecks and frenzied dashes for flatscreen TVs. The strategy conveniently includes longer opening hours, so staff might not be trampled to death, but being worked into a coma is still a possibility.

BAD WEEK:

Kraft   

DISMISSED AS a “plastic cheese” company by Felicity Loudon, granddaughter of Egbert Cadbury, the American food conglomerate, which does indeed sell processed cheddar slices, had its hostile bid for Cadbury rejected by the confectioner’s board, which branded the £9.8 billion offer “derisory”. Meanwhile, Kraft handled its rejection by formally notifying the European Union of its unsolicited approach to Cadbury so authorities can work out whether a Kraft-Cadbury union would cause competition problems, just in case Cadbury changes its mind.

Gazprom

IT’S NOT all about having fun making Ukraine squirm every time it falls behind on its bills for Russian energy giant Gazprom, which has announced that its profits halved in the first half of the year to a mere €7.1 billion. The world’s biggest natural gas producer, which supplies a quarter of Europe’s gas, saw sales to Europe (most of which is piped through Ukraine) and its other export markets plummet 24 per cent in the first half of the year as recession eroded energy demand. The good news for Gazprom is that its profits are expected to be boosted by a colder-than-average winter.