Finanzas

Un investigador declara en el juicio que invirtió en el ladrillo uno 350 millones de 180.000 personas

BARRING a last-minute breakthrough, about 2,500 cabin crew members employed by British Airways (BA) will strike this week over alleged “poverty pay” at the airline. Workers originally planned walkouts for the Christmas period, but suspended the action to consider a revised pay offer. Having rejected that offer by a 7-1 margin, the strikes will now occur on 10th and 11th January. BA says the impact will be minimal, with 85% of cabin crew reporting for duty and just 12 return flights being cancelled each day. Passengers due to travel on those affected flights, which all leave from London Heathrow Airport, will be rebooked onto alternative services. Still, the slightest whiff of disruption will prompt howls of discontent in a week in which strikes on both London Underground and some national rail services into the capital are adding to the misery.

This is not the first time BA cabin crew have called industrial action. In 2010, a series of strikes caused 22 days of travel chaos. Then, cabin crew were angry about staffing cutbacks and the introduction of new contracts, dubbed “mixed-fleet” contracts, which offered inferior terms for new…Continue reading

FIRMS must tread lightly around the subject of their customers’ weight. It is a sensitive subject for many. Still, a lot of organisations would like to be able to size up those who use their services.

MasterCard, a credit-card company, has filed a patent application for what it describes as “a system, method, and computer-readable storage medium configured to analyse the physical size of payment accountholders based on payment transactions, and allowing a transportation provider to apply the physical size of payment accountholders to seating”. In plain English, the firm plans to estimate its customers’ size and weight based on their clothing and shoe purchases. It could then transmit this information to airlines (and other transportation providers, such as rail and bus companies) which might use it to assign seats.

Exactly how airlines would deploy this information is not known. In its application, MasterCard takes a charitable interpretation, writing that “for the comfort of their passengers, transportation providers should avoid seating physically large strangers next to each…Continue reading

Una sentencia del Supremo abre una vía para que los consumidores pidan la devolución de parte de los costes de constitución de estos préstamos

La emisión neta prevista ascenderá a los 35.000 millones, la misma cifra que el año anterior

El Gobierno británico todavía tiene el 73% del Royal Bank of Scotland, que atraviesa serias dificultades

El fiscal le acusa de un delito de administración desleal como máximo responsable de la entidad financiera

El conglomerado de propiedad estatal chino Citic (52%) y Carlyle Group LP (28%) se hacen con la participación mayoritaria de la entidad

El sistema actual de gobernanza ­no ha beneficiado a todos los sectores y ha dejado incluso efectos nocivos como desempleo, violencia y empobrecimiento

Si la inversión extranjera es un exponente de confianza en la economía del país receptor, la española refleja esa impresión a primera vista.