BARRY O'HALLORANlooks back on the week in business
Hero's welcome
Spain may be through to its first World Cup final but things are looking tough at Barcelona, the club that is home to many of the national team, including striker David Villa, for whom it paid Valencia €40 million.
Barcelona’s new president Sandro Rosell says it needs to borrow €150 million to pay player and staff wages.
He has plugged part of the gap by selling defender Dmitro Chygrynskiy to Shakhtar Donetsk for €15 million. As for the other €135 million, well , after five World Cup goals, Villa’s got to be worth more than €40 million. Maybe Rosell should give Man City a call . . .
"We'll fight to the death to bring an internationally recognised metals and mining expert to run the company"
Russian oligarch Oleg Daripaska takes the search for a chief executive for nickel producer Norilsk to a whole new level.
Alphabet soup €7m
The Mortgage Arrears and Personal Debt Expert Group report gets this week’s award for best new acronym: MARP, the Mortgage Arrears Resolution Process that the group wants every bank to put in place.
The reports says that before your bank agrees to a MARP, you must first talk to its ASU and give them an SFS. You should also check to see if you are entitled to MIS. This will become part of the CCMA, to which the CPC should apply.
You can always rely on the Writers of Official Expert Reports (Woofers) for some plain English, can’t you?
€7m
The amount that Nama lost in its first two months – it could still make a profit, or a loss, but it won’t be returning €4.8 billion to the taxpayer. There’s a surprise.
The Questions
Did Google do evil to its online search competitors?
The EU is scrutinising the touchy- feely search engine – motto: don’t do evil – after complaints from rivals such as Microsoft, which say that it unfairly demoted them in its rankings. Competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia, told a conference this week that, given Google’s importance to the online search market, he was “looking at the allegations very carefully”. For answers, try googling: “EU and online market competition investigation”.
