Barclays on back foot over £500 million tax loophole
A leading UK bank, thought to be Barclays, has been accused of using “highly abusive” arrangements to avoid paying hundreds of millions of pounds in tax as the Government acts to close loopholes. The Treasury moved after the lender used legal loopholes to reduce its tax bill. One of the tax schemes involved the bank buying back its own debt and making a profit on the transaction while not paying corporation tax. A spokesperson for Barclays stated that the bank had an open relationship with HMRC and that there had been not been any non-compliance with UK tax law.
Farmer training launched in Ghana as part of the Cargill Sustainable Cocoa Programme
Cargill’s cocoa & chocolate business – in close cooperation with the Ghana Cocoa Board – is expanding its Cargill Sustainable Cocoa Programme with the launch of an extensive four year commitment to farmer training in Ghana. The training will be delivered in partnership with Ghanaian licensed cocoa buying company Akuafo Adamfo and the non-governmental organisation Solidaridad West Africa. This programme aims to train 15,000 farmers and support cocoa farming communities over the next four years in the Ashanti and Western regions of Ghana.
Campaigners uncover sweatshop labour at Olympic factories
Workers in China’s Guangdong Province are toiling under sweatshop conditions at factories producing merchandise for the London Olympics, according to a report, Toying with Worker’s Rights. Low wages, excessive working hours, child labour, dangerous health and safety conditions and audit fraud are among the findings in the report published by the Playfair campaign. The reports researchers found that employees were working up to 100 extra hours a month, which is in violation of national laws and children were also found to be making pin badges, which is a direct contravention of Chinese labour law and LOCOG’s code of practice.
FTSE accelerates green push with new Carbon Strategy indices
Investors and businesses in Europe, Japan and Australia will be provided with a new tool for tracking large firms’ exposure to carbon-related risks, after the FTSE Group launched four new green indices as part of its FTSE CDP Carbon Strategy Index Series. Developed in partnership with the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) and analyst firm ENDS carbon, the new indices apply a weighting to existing equity indices based on a company’s level of exposure to carbon-related risks such as new environmental policies and climate change impacts.
Eden Project installs UK’s first employee-owned solar plant
A new 50 kilowatt PV array at the Eden Project, the world’s largest indoor rainforest, has just become the UK’s first employee owned renewables installation. Ebico, the Witney-based social enterprise that is the UK’s only not-for-profit electricity supplier, lent money to a new company that put 200 panels on the roofs of some of Eden’s storage buildings. Employees are now able to buy shares in the new business and the proceeds of this unique offer will be used to pay back Ebico. The aim is to show that renewables can also be of financial benefit to people not able to afford to put PV on their own roofs.
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