Some of the great and the good from private enterprise - including Risk Capital's Luke Johnson, the ex-Channel 4 chairman, and Better Capital's Jon Moulton - pitched up at the House of Lords last night for a London Entrepreneurial Exchange event hosted by Lord Bilimoria... more
Serial entrepreneur Luke Johnson has taken a 9 per cent stake and joined the board of film distributor Metrodome as it snapped up a library of more than 600 films, including The Godfather and Psycho... more
Endemol's UK subsidiary has missed a June 30 deadline to file its annual accounts to Companies House, raising fresh questions about the heavily indebted Dutch TV production behemoth that makes Big Brother... more
I can't quite remember what the president of the Confederation of British Industry said the first time I attended an annual dinner 40 years ago, but last night's effort from current president Helen Alexander had a weary familiarity... more
Advertising and marketing: Companies are suddenly finding that taxation has become a major issue affecting their corporate reputation - think of the allegations thrown at Vodafone... more
What is one of the fastest-growing areas of the insurance market? Brands taking out “disgrace insurance” to protect themselves against their celebrity endorser doing a Wayne Rooney... more
Channel 4 admits its flagship channel crashed to a £61.6 million loss last year but still makes a pre-tax profit of £2.2 million thanks to digital channels E4, Film4 and More4... more
City Comment: Entrepreneur Luke Johnson concludes that the private equity business model investors seek to preserve has been largely discredited... more
An interesting and enjoyable lunchtime seminar session on “long finance” at risk manager and insurance broker Willis was marred by a couple of bizarre musical interventions... more
SO farewell to Andy Duncan, who has bowed to the inevitable and stepped down as chief executive of Channel 4 before having to face the elite of the British TV industry at the Cambridge Media Convention... more
Last week a report claimed that nearly 1 million under-25s were on the dole. But in the capital, bright young businesses are springing up like green shoots. Andy Barker meets the Dragons of the future...... more
The one thing this bankrupt Government desperately needs is money - in other words, the inflow of our taxes. However the chances of even that drying up are increasing...... more
Bookseller Borders UK could be put up for sale. The retailer, owned by Channel 4 chairman Luke Johnson's Risk Capital Partners, has hired Clearwater Corporate Finance to "seek out funding opportunities", indicating Johnson may be looking to sell.
Borders has already appointed restructuring specialists RSM Bentley Jennison to ditch its worst-performing stores.... more
Come on, I say, to Luke Johnson, it must have hurt? The chairman of Channel 4 and serial entrepreneur shrugs. "Not really," he says. "I am able to laugh about it."... more
As leading business figures puncture the BA/BAA claim that a Third Runway is vital for the British economy by saying that, er, it isn’t, how does the airport operate.. ... more
Consumer: FishWorks, the troubled restaurant chain, has collapsed into administration but an immediate bidding battle for some sites looked likely... more
Leisure: The dire state of London’s restaurant trade has been laid bare as upmarket chain FishWorks called for trading in its shares to be suspended as it looked for new cash or a takeover... more
Celebrity sells at an astonishing rate, yet at its heart the UK still loves a book for itself and London is a great champion of literature. These are the people who keep us reading.
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Tonight:
3°c
