Planet Business

Things that made the news this week

THE NUMBERS

£1 million
- the fine handed down to the UK's Nationwide Building Society last year after a laptop containing confidential customer data was stolen from an employee's home. Labour Party finance spokeswoman Joan Burton called for similar sanctions against Bank of Ireland, which has admitted the theft of four laptops.

55 per cent
- the proportion of final salary pension schemes that are closed to new members, say benefits experts Mercer. Their closure creates two-tier workplaces where younger/newer workers are paid substantially less valuable pension benefits than their older/longer-serving colleagues. And, as it is snooze-tastic pensions, they probably don't even know it.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"It's a strange day for the Labour government when it is advancing billions of pounds to the banks and at the same time it is taking billions of pounds away from the lowest-paid taxpayers." - Liberal Democrat shadow finance spokesman Vincent Cable can't square the Bank of England's £50 billion bailout for the banks with the (now abandoned) scrapping of Britain's 10 per cent tax rate.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK II
"We found that there was one design of shirt that chafed. We had to get rid of it because we didn't want our boys' or girls' nipples chafed." - Fashion designer-to-the-stars Bruce Oldfield explains to BBC Breakfast how his first attempt to create new uniforms for McDonald's staff may have rubbed a few people up the wrong way.

GOOD WEEK

Public service broadcasting
Channel 4 recorded its first operating loss last year since 1992, while the overall Channel 4 group (including digital channels E4 and More4) saw its pretax surplus shrink to breakeven point. So that's subsidised bubbly all round then, as the corporation's deliberate plan to "maximise creative investment" (spend more cash making telly) and leave the coffers empty will come in nice and handy as it enters negotiations for more public funding.

Wiki books
Bertelsmann is publishing a paper edition of the German-language Wikipedia website, transforming the user-edited free encyclopedia (or die freie enzyklopädie) into a weighty tome of the most popular search terms costing €19.95. The German Wikipedia has a good reputation for accuracy, but how on the money is it about Ireland? Well, the entry says this: "Vor allem in den Midlands geschieht relativ wenig." (In particular, very little happens in the Midlands.)

BAD WEEK

Fred the Shred
His chairman insists there won't be any "sacrificial lambs" in the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boardroom. But after its £12 billion (€15 billion) cash call - the biggest in corporate history - furious shareholders may yet demand that RBS chief executive Fred Goodwin lies down on the altar of corporate sacrifice. Goodwin would probably be best off siphoning some of the money into his own golden goodbye fund before things get really grim and he has to take a pay cut or something.

Rice prices
The international price of rice has jumped 70 per cent since the start of the year, hitting new highs this week as fears mounted that Thailand, the world's largest producer, would follow India and Vietnam in placing curbs on exports to protect domestic supply. Rice supply concerns are intensifying the global food crisis, which the UN dubs a "silent tsunami".