1 minute read
Taxed to death
SIR JIM RATCLIFFE, one of Britain’s richest men, warned that the UK government’s windfall tax could destroy the North Sea’s oil and gas industry.
“Taxes are so high that profits no longer fund future investments,” the Ineos chemicals group founder told a UK news source.
The government resorted to ‘primitive politics’ when Rishi Sunak, who was Chancellor at the time, put an extra 25 per cent tax on industry profits following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This was later raised to 35 per cent by Jeremy Hunt, who took over as Chancellor.
Ratcliffe argued that the levy in effect a 75 per cent tax on North Sea profits which helps to fund government support schemes for household fuel bills jeopardised the energy industry. No thought was given to the longterm consequences of this “tax it to death” concept he said.
Knotty Banco Popular tangle
THE European Central Bank (ECB) had never expressed concerns about the situation of the defunct Banco Popular.
José María Sanz Olmeda, a PwC audit partner who examined the Banco Popular books between 2009 and 2015, told an investigating National High Court judge that he detected “no anomalies” during this period. Meanwhile, the ECB decided on June 6, 2017 that Banco Popular was “failing or likely to fail” and noti fied the Single Resolution Board. According to the financial daily, Cinco Dias, legal sources familiar with the proceedings maintained that this was one of the cases “most relevant testimonies.”
This, they say, could clarify contradictions in various reports from expert witnesses regarding whether or not the Banco Popular should have reflected losses before the 2016 capital increase of more than €2.5 billion.
SPAIN’S mobile phone operators announced their first quarter accounts in a period that was dominated by fierce competition from the lowcost segment.
Romania based Digi again demonstrated its strength compared with the bigger companies’ modest growth while the sector is at fever pitch owing to the MasMovilOrange merger and the Vodafone crisis.
Digi, meanwhile, increased its earnings by 29.4 per cent to €143.3 million, owing to its aggressively low tariffs. At the same time, the company’s commercial aggressiveness also reduced the average spend per client by 4.1 per cent to €9.3.
