Apple’s Tim Cook delivers blistering speech on encryption and privacy
Receiving an honour for “corporate leadership” on Monday evening at EPIC’s Champions of Freedom event in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple rejects “the idea that our customers should have to make trade-offs between privacy and security”. “We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy.” This marks the first time that EPIC, a non-profit privacy and civil rights research centre, has given the honour to a person from the business world. Cook did not hesitate to implicitly refer to companies like Facebook and Google, which rely on advertising based on the data they collect for large portions of their income. He noted that “You should never have to trade [privacy] for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we are storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices”. (TechCrunch)
Corporate Reputation
Sepp Blatter to resign as Fifa president amid corruption scandal
Sepp Blatter has resigned as the president of FIFA, just four days after he won re-election for a fifth four-year term against the backdrop of a massive corruption scandal. Mr Blatter, who presided over world football’s governing body for 17 years, said it would hold an extraordinary congress to elect his successor. He plans to carry on his duties until a replacement can be elected. Blatter’s resignation as the most powerful figure in football comes less than a week after US investigators alleged “rampant” corruption at the highest level of FIFA and indicted nine of the organisation’s officials, while Swiss prosecutors announced a criminal probe into the awarding of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. Among FIFA’s important sponsors, Coca Cola, which had last week urged the organisation to “take concrete actions” urgently, said that Mr Blatter’s decision was “a positive step for the good of sport, football and its fans”. (BBC; FT.com)
Strategy
Three quarters of business leaders reckon climate impacts threaten bottom line
Board-level executives are broadly aware of the significant risks and opportunities climate change presents for their businesses, but are still struggling to translate this awareness into a coherent programme to manage the risks and seize the opportunities. That is the conclusion of a major new report from the Carbon Trust, which explores why businesses’ action is still “nowhere near sufficient to address the major environmental challenges faced by society”. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of experts from business, finance, government, academia and civil society, as well as independent market research interviews with 229 board-level executives from around the world, the survey revealed high levels of awareness of climate change and other environmental issues. However, the awareness is not matched by decarbonising strategies. Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust, said the onus was on board members to go beyond identifying climate change risks and opportunities and start enacting strategies in response. (Business Green)
Tax
Tax dodging by big firms ‘robs poor countries of billions of dollars a year’
The international corporate tax system is outdated, unfair and will continue to cost developing countries tens of billions of dollars in lost revenues each year unless it is completely overhauled Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) has warned. In a report published on Tuesday, ICRICT argues that globalisation has rendered the century-old global tax system obsolete. It calls for the abolition of the separate entity principle, arguing that it allows huge multinational companies to dodge their tax obligations by presenting their operations in different countries as completely independent of one another, permitting them to shift their profits to countries with low or zero tax rates – and to move their losses into countries where taxes are higher. The report, which was released as G7 leaders prepare to meet in Germany for their annual summit, also calls for rich countries to agree a minimum corporate tax rate to stop “the global race to the bottom”. (Guardian)
Waste
Construction completed for UK’s first food waste AD plant
ReFood, the UK’s leading food waste recycler, has completed a multi-million pound development project to expand its anaerobic digestion (AD) facility in Doncaster. The state-of-the-art site, which has been undergoing an extensive development programme since April 2014, is now the largest plant of its kind in the UK. Almost doubling capacity, the facility is now capable of processing 160,000 tonnes of food waste from across Yorkshire and Humberside each year. Generating just under 5MWh of electricity via combined heat and power (CHP) in result, ReFood Doncaster will help to power more than 12,000 homes across the region with completely sustainable renewable energy. The ReFood Doncaster expansion forms part of the company’s wider investment plans. Alongside opening the UK’s largest gas-to-grid plant of its kind in Widnes last year, ReFood plans to invest in an additional site in Dagenham later this year. (Click Green)
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