Catch up with all the top stories from business this week with our newsround digest.
The Financial Times
Small businesses could receive a government subsidy to ease the pain of having to pay a 3% contribution to employees’ pensions under the Pension Commission’s proposals, Adair Turner, the commission’s chairman said. Lord Turner has signalled his readiness to seek a compromise with Gordon Brown that will make the commission’s proposals less expensive between 2010 and 2020.
The government is seeking to make a radical change to the value added tax system (VAT) in an effort to eradicate one of the most serious types of tax fraud that costs more than £1bn a year. It has asked the European Commission for permission to remove VAT charges from the supply chain of certain goods such as mobile phones and computer chips. Ministers believe that this will deprive criminals engaging in missing trader intra-community fraud of the opportunity to steal VAT.
The Guardian
The government should scrap council tax and replace it with a 1% tax on the value of property, a leading think tank proposes. Releasing its latest quarterly economic forecasts, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, admitted that its idea would hit owners of expensive properties harder than a council tax would, but said this would be fairer.
Google, the world's biggest search engine, will team up with the world's biggest censor, China, with a service that it hopes will make it more attractive to the country's 110 million online users. After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.
Daily TelegraphU2’s Bono has teamed up with American Express, Converse Gap and Giorgio Armani to launch a series of products under the brand name of ‘Red’, which will donate a chunk of its revenues to fight AIDS in Africa. They will include an AmexCo Red credit card, Converse sports shoes made with African mud-cloth, Gap T-shirts and Emporio Armani sunglasses embossed with a Red logo.
The controversial £1.3bn flotation of Qinetiq has run into further trouble as an independent watchdog announced that it is to launch a formal investigation into how the privatisation process has been conducted. The National Audit Office, whose job is to ensure tax-payers get the best possible deal from state-run services and businesses, said it would study the ‘choice of strategy’ chosen by City advisers to the stock market float of the defence research company and ‘the price achieved’.
The Times
Banks are to come under more scrutiny over services to small and medium enterprises amid fears that institutions are failing to meet undertakings given to a regulator. The Office of Fair Trading has said that it will review the promises made by the banks in response to a 2002 Competition Commission. The OFT also said that banks had made excessive profits of more than £700m from customers between 1998 to 2002.
The credibility of the euro suffered a serious setback after a former European commissioner publicly called into question its long-term survival. The attack by Frits Bolkestein, the former EU Internal Market Commissioner, is a serious embarrassment to the Commission, which has fought hard to kill off speculation about the single currency’s future.
