Written by Jeremy Martin on January 20, 2012.
Figures show that investment under the Corporate Venturing Scheme surged by 65% in its final year, leading some experts to suggest that the Government were too hasty in scrapping the scheme.
According to accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young, the amount larger firms invested in smaller companies during the final year the CVS was running rose by 65% to £28m.
The CVS scheme was created by the Labour Government to encourage investment in smaller high-risk businesses by larger firms, in exchange for 20% upfront tax relief on the investment value, as well as any losses incurred.
Over the 10 year period the scheme was in operation, just over £130m was invested in around 600 small businesses.
The CVS provided tax incentives for investment in unquoted business with gross assets under £7 million and limited the investment to up to 30% of the issuing company.
The incentives were available from 1 April 2000 to 31 March 2010 and offered three types of tax relief: Investment relief against corporation tax of 20% of the amount subscribed for full-risk ordinary shares; Deferral relief from tax when the shares were sold and the funds reinvested and relief against income if shares were sold at a loss.
Ironically, given the scarcity of lending currently available to small firms, UHY Hacker Young believe that the now-closed scheme could play a useful role in bridging the massive funding gap which has resulted from the collapse in bank lending to smaller businesses.
Corporate venturing is far more widespread in the US – with an estimated $1.9bn invested in 2010 alone. In
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Written by Michael Harris on January 19, 2012.
The Dallas-based carrier, which will launch service in Atlanta next month, said among the new flights it will launch later this year are three daily nonstop flights each to Norfolk and Louisville from Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
Southwest is adding the routes even as it announces cuts of flights operated by AirTran Airways, which Southwest acquired last year. The airline last week announced AirTran will stop flying to White Plains, N.Y. and Sarasota, Fla. from Atlanta effective Aug. 12, as part of a broader pullout of several AirTran-served cities. AirTran is the second-largest carrier at Hartsfield-Jackson, behind Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines.
Written by Michael Harris on January 16, 2012.
A 35 percent collapse in the futures price over the past year has been a boon to homeowners who use natural gas for heat and appliances and to manufacturers who power their factories and make chemicals and materials with it.
The country is flush with natural gas as a result of new drilling techniques that have enabled energy companies to tap vast supplies that were out of reach not so long ago. The country’s natural gas surplus has been growing even as the country burns record amounts.
This winter’s warm weather slowed the growth in demand, however, and created a glut. In the Northeast, December was the fourth warmest in the last 117 years. Winter supplies are 17 percent above their five-year average.
The natural gas futures price fell 13 percent last week, to $2.67 per 1,000 cubic feet. That’s the lowest winter-time level in a decade.
“The market has been overwhelmed with gas,” says Anthony Yuen, a commodities analyst at Citibank.
He and other analysts expect the price to average near $3 for all of 2012.
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Written by Jeremy Martin on January 14, 2012.
Eight employees of Essex Police, including three police officers, have resigned after allegedly accessing the personal records of citizens contained in the Police National Computer.
One of the officers and a community support officer face criminal charges of gross misconduct for illegally accessing and sharing the data.
Essex Police analysed the data access histories of all 5,500 of its employees after it emerged that confidential data had been shared with the public, the East Anglian Daily Times reported yesterday.
“With [data] access comes a duty and responsibility that any information held is only viewed for policing purposes,” the head of Essex Police’s professional standards department chief superintendent Dave Folkard told the paper. “We expect and demand the highest standards of ethical behaviour from all our employees and when they fall below the standards expected, they are dealt with through either internal misconduct proceedings or, if appropriate, through the criminal justice system.”
A Freedom of Information Act request to Essex Police in May last year revealed that the force had suffered numerous data breaches over the previous three years. T
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Written by Jeremy Martin on January 9, 2012.
When you set up in business via a limited company, your annual profits will be subject to corporation tax.
Dealing with your corporation tax affairs is one of your accountant’s key tasks, however ultimately the company directors are responsible for ensuring that the corporation tax liability is accurate, and your annual tax return is filed on time.
This is an overview of how to comply with the corporation tax rules.
Registering your new business
You are legally obliged to inform HMRC that your company has been formed after you have completed the incorporation process.
Once you appoint your accountant, you will often need to fill in a form authorising your accountant to deal with your tax affairs on behalf of your new company The relevant forms are downloadable from the HMRC website.
Sole traders are not liable to pay corporation tax. The self-employed pay income tax via the self-assessment process. For more details, read out article on how to set up as a sole trader.
Corporation tax self assessment
Each year, your company is required to complete a corporation tax return (Form CT600).
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Written by Michael Harris on January 7, 2012.
You might want to start carrying some green just in case.
Consumers could see more $5 or $10 minimum charge rules — or at least polite requests — when using credit or debit cards this year, as merchants try to cope with an unintended effect of new federal limits on how much card issuers can charge them in so-called “swipe fees.”
Those regulations already sparked an uproar when some banks tried to impose monthly debit card use fees on consumers to offset the revenue hit — only to retreat in the face of a withering backlash.
But the fallout didn’t end there.
In an odd twist that stems from the way swipe fees have been assessed, the new rule could prompt card issuers to actually raise fees on smaller purchases in order to offset lost revenue from lower fees on larger ones.
And that means stores with a lot of small-ticket sales, such as coffee shops and gas stations, may force or coax consumers into paying with plain old cash for purchases under a certain amount, experts predict. Stores now
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Written by Jeremy Martin on January 3, 2012.
Business services conglomerate Serco is the only remaining supplier in the running for a contract to supply shared back-office functions to a group of NHS Trusts in the East of England.
In 2002, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust and five other NHS trusts founded the Anglia Support Partnership (ASP), which provides back-office functions, including HR, IT and procurement. ASP, which also supplies a further 50 other public and private organisations, has to date been managed by the NHS trusts themselves, with Cambridge and Peterborough as the lead trust.
In March 2011, the contract to operate ASP was offered up for tender. The contract was valued at between £75 million and £400 million. The tender document revealed that ASP turns over £34 million a year, and owns assets worth £3.8 million.
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