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Freephones not obstacles
introduced to protect consumers considered to be vulnerable.
Failure to observe these modifications will result in fines of between €150 and €10,000 for minor infractions and between €10,001 and €100,000 in cases deemed to be serious.
RECHARGE INDUSTRIES, the Australian company which rescued Britishvolt in February, failed to make the final payment on April 5. Although Britishvolt, based in Blyth (Northumberland), was worth £800 million (€926.18 million) before its collapse, Recharge Industries bought the business and its assets for £8.57 million (€9.92 million) in February.
“The final instalment remains unpaid and overdue. As a result, the buyer is in default of the business sale agreement,” Britishvolt’s administrators EY said.
“We dispute that we are in default,” declared Scale Facilitation, Recharge’s Manhattanbased parent company whose Australian offices were raided by police in June, following tax fraud allegations.
Lithium plans
CORNISH Lithium will extract an annual 8,000 tons of batterygrade lithium from a repurposed China clay pit at Trelavour Downs in Cornwall.
AIRLINES: Should provide freephone lines for customers, government said make one of these lines available, the Ministry said.
This stipulation came into effect following modifications to the Consumers’ Defence Law during the last legislation,
Time to Zoom back
VIDEO communications platform Zoom, which made it possible to work remotely during the pandemic, wants its employees in the office.
At one stage the company said staff could work from home “indefinitely” but announced recently that it now believed a “structured hybrid approach” was more effective.
The USbased company will introduce the new policy in August and September, with staff living within 80 kilometres of their office working there at least twice a week.
In the US where Zoom is based, 12 per cent of workers were fully remote in July, while 29 per cent split their time between the home and the office.
Meanwhile, Stanford University researchers found that working from home is much more common in the US and Englishspeaking countries but less usual in Europe and Asia.
In cases where the benefits to an airline not providing a freephone exceeded the amount of the fine, the sanction could be increased by between 200 and 400 per cent for minor infringements. When considered serious, the fine could be between 400 and 600 per cent higher.
