A passion for throwing elaborate dinner parties may have sparked Clare Harris’s decision to start the decorations business Talking Tables 25 years ago but it was her decision to supply retailers rather than directly to consumers that has led to its longevity. Harris leaned on sales training from a previous job at IBM, the American…
When the time came to shut down his lab-grown meat start-up for good, British entrepreneur Joshua March took his team out for a farewell lunch. Pointedly, they did not opt for the company’s burgers, which are brewed in a steel vat. “You know, I think we’d had enough of our own burgers,” March said. After…
Carpetright has put itself up for sale in a move which could lead to hundreds of store closures and job losses. The floorings retailer, which trades from about 300 stores and has more than 3,000 employees, has appointed PwC to launch a formal sale process as it struggles amid a slowdown in demand and increased…
Early last year I booked two holidays: one to Athens in September and a trip to Florence in October. They cost £3,565 in total and I took out travel insurance with Good to Go after seeing an advert on TV. In July I started to feel exhausted and had a severe flare-up of eczema. Extensive…
In May 2022 Boris Johnson was still prime minister and Liverpool won the FA Cup on penalties. It was also the month we bought the shared freehold of our home in London. We had lived in one of three flats in a converted terraced house for six years and with the other leaseholders bought the…
The former finance chief of Autonomy has been banned from the chartered accountancy profession in England and Wales for another 14 years and ordered to pay £450,000 in costs, six years after being convicted of fraud and jailed. Sushovan Hussain would not be able to rejoin the profession until November 2038, according to a ruling…
The Universities Superannuation Scheme sold its entire £80 million holding of Israeli bonds between February and July this year. Britain’s biggest private sector pension scheme said the decision to sell all its Israeli government bonds had been taken on financial grounds alone and was not the result of a move to completely divest from the…
Profits for Saudi Aramco have dipped after it sold less crude and its refining margins weakened. The world’s largest oil producer reported a net profit of $29.1 billion for the second quarter, down from $30.1 billion a year earlier, although the decline was less severe than analysts had forecast. The company said that it produced…
The number of parents claiming shared parental leave pay hit 24,700 last year — the first time take-up has exceeded Whitehall expectations of its popularity since the right was introduced in 2015. Officials believed between 2 per cent and 8 per cent of the estimated 285,000 new fathers in work each year would agree with…