TAURUS

Durante los meses de verano se han creado 226.500 puestos de trabajo

Incluso cuando la situación económica permite acceder a una vivienda en propiedad, arrendarla también ofrece ventajas

Abanca obtuvo un beneficio neto de 267 millones de euros en los nueves primeros meses del año, un 0,4 % más que en el mismo periodo de 2015, ha informado la entidad en un comunicado. Leer

La operación debe recibir el visto bueno de los socios de la eurozona. Leer

La integración del británico TSB, culminada en junio de 2015, condiciona la comparativa frente al pasado ejercicio. Leer

Apenas generará beneficio, teniendo en cuenta las pérdidas esperadas pendientes de reconocer en el último trimestre. Leer

Contabilizará gastos de explotación extraordinarios por 125 millones ligados al plan de bajas voluntarias que va a poner en marcha. Leer

ONE thing right-wing populists and left-wing progressives can agree on is that society is too soft on white-collar crime. Conservatives abandon their admiration for business when it comes to “crooked bankers”. Left-wingers forget their qualms if locking up “corporate evil-doers”. Hillary Clinton’s line that “there should be no bank too big to fail but no individual too big to jail” would go down equally well at a Donald Trump rally.

But is society really soft on corporate wrongdoing? And would locking up bankers and businessmen and throwing away the key really solve any problems? Two new books try to inject reason and evidence into a discussion more commonly driven by emotion and hearsay: “Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal” by Eugene Soltes, of Harvard Business School, and “Capital Offenses: Business Crime and Punishment in America’s Corporate Age” by Samuel Buell, the lead prosecutor in the Enron case, who now teaches at Duke University.

Messrs Soltes and Buell both demonstrate that America is getting tougher on business crime. Between 2002 and 2007 federal prosecutors convicted more than 200…Continue reading

Innovator at work

BIG Tobacco is about to get even bigger. On October 21st British American Tobacco (BAT) announced that it had bid $47bn for the 58% of Reynolds American that it does not already own. Though Brexit has weighed on some British companies, BAT is unencumbered, with most of its revenue earned overseas. Many investors expect the deal to go ahead, although BAT might need to puff up its offer. BAT would then become the world’s largest tobacco company by sales and profits.

As in other volume businesses, like beer, some of the merger logic is simply to cut costs. With consolidation, BAT reckons its deal would generate $400m of annual savings. However, it also underscores two big, long-term changes for cigarette-makers.

The first is that America has become an attractive market for tobacco firms and buying Reynolds, whose brands include Camel and Newport, is the easiest way for BAT to grow there. This is a reversal from the recent past. Not long ago America seemed stale and overrun by lawsuits, particularly compared with fast-growing economies. Cigarette firms quarantined their American businesses. In 2004…Continue reading

“WE THOUGHT we knew our story, and we knew it wasn’t great,” says Maurice Brenninkmeijer, chairman of COFRA Holding, which owns C&A, a 175-year-old Dutch clothing retailer with over 2,000 stores globally. Yet the full account of how the German branch of his family behaved in the second world war “tore through your heart when you heard it”, he adds. Mr Brenninkmeijer’s ancestors—considered to be genial, virtuous, Catholic and reserved—turned out to have been avid Nazi collaborators. Old letters revealed cosy, corrupt, ties to Hermann Goering. From 1942 onwards C&A and Siemens, a German engineering firm, together exploited forced Eastern European labourers in Germany, keeping them in such a wretched state that malnutrition killed several women and children. C&A profited from “Aryanisation”, grabbing business and property from terrified Jewish owners. Perhaps worst, it used Jewish tailors and leather-workers, corralled in Lodz, a dreadful ghetto in Poland. Of some 200,000 people trapped in inhumane conditions there, only 1,000 survived to liberation.

Such grim details are now public thanks to Mark Spoerer, a historian in Regensburg who specialises in archival research to assess companies’ dark pasts, putting “immoral business behaviour” into historical context. Remarkably, his new book “C&A: A family business in Germany, the…Continue reading