DRUMM WORRIED ABOUT HIS SAFETY IN JAIL - Lawyers for David Drumm say the incarcerated former Anglo Irish Bank chief executive faces “ongoing threats to his safety” in the maximum-security Massachusetts prison in which he is being held.
Mr Drumm has been “forced to endure” what they describe as a “hostile and retaliatory environment” that is “not simply a matter of the discomfitures of prison”, they state. The claim appears in his 31-page petition against his detention, filed on Christmas Eve, although the details of the threats to his safety are confined to sealed documents, says the Irish Times. The petition states that Mr Drumm’s 80-year-old mother attempted to visit her son on Christmas Eve but that prison officials denied her “humanitarian request” to see him. “The facility’s conduct and denial of Mr Drumm’s Christmas Eve request is at best harsh and indifferent,” his lawyers say. The 49-year-old last week petitioned the Massachusetts District Court for a writ of habeas corpus, a move that means he is effectively appealing an earlier decision by US Magistrate Judge Donald Cabell to deny him bail. A hearing on this application has been set for January 8th. Mr Drumm spent Christmas in Plymouth County Correctional Facility. The Dubliner has been in custody since his arrest by US Marshals on October 10th at his home outside Boston on an extradition request from the State.
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MUSGRAVE'S WANTS GOVERNMENT TO PUSH PUBLIC TO CARDS OVER CASH - Musgrave's has called on the Government to push card payments in shops instead of cash in a bid to reduce costs for retailers.
The SuperValu owner, which is one of the largest companies in the country and employs around 30,000 people, urged the coalition to conduct a national campaign "promoting the use of cards and outlining the benefits to both SMEs and consumers". The call was made in a recently published submission to a Department of Finance consultation on interchange fees, says the Irish Independent. In March the European Parliament announced that it had adopted proposed regulations on interchange fees. Interchange fees are charged by a card holder's bank to a retailer for accepting debit and credit cards. The new rules capped the fees at 0.2% of the value of the transaction for debit cards and 0.3% for credit cards. This limit was also introduced in Ireland by the Department of Finance in December, which halved the rate of the fees here. Before it introduced the new lower cap, the department launched a consultation asking on how best to implement the new European regulations. In a recently published submission to the consultation, Musgrave's said that the cost of cash handling "has increased in recent months for retailers". The company said reducing fees on debit card payment "will increase retailers' willingness to encourage card transactions".
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WARREN BUFFET FACES WORST YEAR ON STOCK MARKET SINCE 2009 - Investment guru Warren Buffett is headed for his worst year relative to the rest of the US stock market since 2009.
Shares in his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway are down 11% with two more trading days to go, writes the Financial Times. The underperformance comes in Mr Buffett’s Golden Anniversary year at the helm, when he told investors for the first time that they should judge his record based on Berkshire’s share price, rather than just the book value of the company, which had been his preferred yardstick for decades. Mr Buffett urged them to make that judgment based on the long term, rather than on a single year, reflecting investing mentor Benjamin Graham’s view that the stock market may be a “weighing machine” in the long run, but in the short term it is a “voting machine”. But in 2015, the market has been voting negatively on Berkshire’s prospects for weathering the decline in commodity prices, according to Jim Shanahan, analyst at Edward Jones. Although Berkshire has no oil and gas subsidiaries, its railroad business transports oil, coal and agricultural products, and its manufacturing arm sells products to the shrinking oil industry. Weak results from Berkshire’s insurance divisions in the middle of the year may also be due to lower oil prices, Mr Shanahan said, since lower petrol prices mean drivers and truckers are on the road for longer and having more accidents. “They are impacted by the weak resources sector and commodity prices in general,” he said.
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WORLD'S RICHEST LOSE $20 BILLION IN 2015 - Some of the world’s richest have ended the year just a little bit poorer according to the London Independent, which said 2015 was the first year the Bloomberg wealth index had declined since 2012.
The 400 richest men in the world lost $19 billion in 2015 because of the falling oil price and the slowing Chinese economy, which hit stocks, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The biggest loser was Carlos Slim, whose Mexican telecommunications company American Movil declined 25% in 2015. Slim fell to fifth place after regulatory efforts to break apart his business cost him $20 billion. Warren Buffett, the world’s third richest person, lost $11.3 billion as his company Berkshire Hathaway made a loss for the first time since 2011. Shares in Berkshire Hathaway were down 11% two days before the end of the trading year. Buffett too has been hit by oil. Although it doesn’t deal directly in the black stuff, it is heavily invested in transport and manufacturing. Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, lost $3 billion during the year. Another tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, was the biggest gainer of the year. He nearly doubled his fortune to $59 billion, pushing him to fourth place on the index.
