Boat of Garten: July 26th, 2007 Sitting on the banks of an unusually full River Spey, Scotland’s greatest salmon river, my heart bleeds for Simon Nixon. With a little help from the investment bankers Credit Suisse, the undoubtedly gifted internet entrepreneur has this morning floated his price-comparison website business for some £843 million. This is [...]
By Ian Fraser The Herald July 23rd, 2007 The chief executive of the Law Society of England and Wales has attacked Scotland’s lawyers for being “unjustifiably negative” in their stance on the Clementi reforms that are currently passing through Parliament, and accused his Scottish counterpart of “scaremongering”. The Law Society of Scotland is against the [...]
July 16th, 2007 It’s become a case of the blind leading the purblind in the financial markets, according to a research note from State Street Global Markets. The two-page document — ominously published on Friday, 13th July — opened like this: London is now reckoned to be a culinary capital to rival Paris. The palates [...]
By Ian Fraser The Herald July 16th, 2007 One of the biggest challenges facing China’s fast-growing economy is to ensure the reliability and transparency of the country’s financial reporting and corporate accounting. To achieve this, the People’s Republic recognises that building a cadre of responsible, ethical and properly-trained accountants is critical. The Chinese Institute of [...]
July 14th, 2007 IN their quest for assets and fees, certain fund management groups appear to have few qualms about luring retail investors lemming-like over a cliff. This is my way of explaining the behaviour of certain fund management groups which, over the past six months, have continued to hype up the virtues of commmercial [...]
July 12th, 2007 THE policy of handing out sweeteners and other incentives to overseas electronics firms to persuade them to locate “screwdriver” plants in Silicon Glen is now totally discredited. Okay, it had the virtue of persuading dozens of mainly US and Japanese electronics manufacturers to open plants and create jobs in “Silicon Glen” for a [...]
July 10th, 2007 In a bizarre turn of events, it seems that the United States is actually taking a lead on eco policies. Environmental groups have long argued that bottled water is a ridiculous luxury at a time of global warming. The product has a huge environment footprint, given the fuel required to ship vast [...]
July 9th, 2007 Satellite image courtesy of Nasa Visible Earth The political map of the UK is shifting rapidly at the moment, with nationalist governments in power in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – where the nationalist Sinn Fein is sharing power with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party. But our new prime minister Gordon Brown, [...]
By Ian Fraser The Herald July 9th, 2007 BRECHIN Tindal Oatts, the Glasgow-based commercial law firm, has hired three lawyers its bigger rival Dundas & Wilson, and is confident it can grow its turnover by 11% to £10 million in the current year. Dundas’s Mark Morton, who is poised to start at Brechin Tindal as [...]
By Ian Fraser The Herald Monday, 9th July, 2007 Is recycled motor oil a “product”? Or does it constitute another form of “waste”? This question is one which has been exercising some of the finest legal minds in the land for the best part of two years. Last week, a decision was finally reached. In [...]