While our pay cheques shrink, corporate giants are hightailing it to tax havens. Nick Curtis travels to the Swiss lakeside town where Boots, Glencore and nearly 30,000 other businesses are now based, to ask why they won't pay tax in Britain ... more
Alliance Boots shrugs off a sluggish European economy and irritation from tax campaigners about the move of its headquarters from Nottingham to Zug in Switzerland by recording soaring sales... more
The chief executives and chairmen were certain. There was not a ha'penny's worth of doubt in their minds. The 35 bosses, something close to a who's who of Britain's boardrooms, were so adamant that George Osborne's spending cuts were vital and wise that they wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying so... more
Boots might have moved its headquarters from here to Switzerland, but even customers who are irritated by this move still keep shopping at the stores... more
Alliance Boots bosses insist the group is paying a fair amount of tax, shrugging off inquiries into why its official headquarters are in Switzerland... more
Alliance Boots smashes through the £1 billion profit barrier for the first time as its lipsticks, medicines and face cream prove near recession proof... more
Fed up at criticism of the pay package of Marc Bolland, his successor at Marks & Spencer, Sir Stuart Rose said: “If you pay peanuts, you get
a monkey”
... more
There was a buzz in the City this morning, the like of which we’ve not experienced for the best part of two years. That was when Alliance UniChem, led by Stefano Pessina, paid £12 billion for Boots ... more
Andy Hornby is sitting in a Starbucks. At 42, he's just been made chief executive of one of our biggest, best-known businesses, Alliance Boots. But he's not wreathed in smiles and high-fiving it over the lattes ... more
When Boots was taken over by Stefano Pessina’s Alliance group, I irritated Richard Baker, the then Boots chief executive, when I said I did not expect him to last six months under the new regime. He disagreed and he was right; he lasted about a year. In the end though, he decided the company was not big enough to have a hands-on executive chairman in Pessina, and still leave a proper job for the chief executive ... more
Sound check: German industrial metal band Rammstein literally play with fire in their live performances - and now they are about to unleash their singeing spectacle on London. Watch out for your eyebrows
Afternoon:
2°c
