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BUSINESS EXTRA Bagged it MULBERRY GROUP sales improved in the second half of its finan cial year, partly due to demand for luxury goods as China’s econo my reopened. The firm slumped during the first half on reporting £4 million (€4.5 million) losses for the six months ending 1 Octo ber 2022.
AI is best ROUGHLY half of Span ish bosses said they would prefer artificial intelligence to make de cisions for them, a study by technology firm Oracle found. Fortyfive per cent of managers said that an overabundance of data and their inability to handle it efficiently had led to a greater reliance on machines.
27 April - 3 May 2023
Housing for all Linda Hall SPAIN’S government will use European funds to finance 43,000 new homes for use as social housing at reasonable rents. This will add up to a total of 93,000 properties when tak ing into account an additional 50,000 properties which now belong to Sareb, Spain’s ‘bad bank’. Speaking in parliament on April 19, Pedro Sanchez, presi dent of the Spanish govern ment, explained that some of the properties would be new builds while others would be renovated.
Photo credit: Pool Moncloa
FINANCE
RAQUEL SANCHEZ: Spain’s Transport and Urban Agenda minister.
The cost would be covered by €4 billion in EU funding which will be made available
through Spain’s Official Credit Institute (ICO). “Public and private develop
In-person preferred A RECENT survey found that a third of the UK population prefer to do their banking in per son. Meanwhile, high street banks maintain inperson services are underused although the survey found that people wanted personto person advice even when they were comput erliterate and could obtain it online. Fortyfour per cent of over55s said they would rather visit a branch but the survey by
professional services company, Accenture, found that not only older generations were averse to change as the 1834 age group also hesitated to switch entirely to online banking. More people were using the Post Office to manage money as a result of branches closing, which often made it the only location where consumers and businesses could do their banking.
ers will have access to this funding on the understanding that the properties will be available as social housing for at least 50 years,” government sources said. Not all of the 50,000 properties acquired by Sareb when the 2008 property bubble burst will be immedi ately available, however. Twentyone thousand of the Sareb homes are finished and the bank possesses enough land to build 15,000 more, but a further 14,000 are at present occupied by squat ters. Raquel Sanchez, Trans port and Urban Agenda minis ter, explained during a La Sexta television interview, that where possible the govern ment hoped to be able to “le galise the situation” of the squatters. The minister did not men tion that only 2,230 of Sareb’s properties were located in Madrid, Valencia, or Barcelona whose respective rents had risen by 10.4, 18.4 and 19.1 per cent since March 2022.
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EY cull LONDONBASED accountancy firm Ernst & Young (EY) is cut ting 3,000 US jobs, citing over capacity. Days earlier, EY aban doned plans to separate its auditing and consulting divi sions although the company maintained that the reduc tions were unrelated. The cuts affecting approximately 5 per cent of its US workforce were part of its ongoing manage ment of the business, said EY, promising “comprehensive support” to those affected.
Cheap deal THE National Competition and Markets Commission (CNMC) is investigating 35 of Spain’s small and mediumsized elec tricity suppliers. The CNMC suspects that Holaluz, Cox, Fe nie Energia, Alpex Iberica, Al terna, Neuroenergia and Som Energia amongst others, have taken advantage of the Iberian exception, buying cheap elec tricity on the Spanish market and selling it to France. As al ways, the CNMC said it could not provide any further details.
