Risk Channel delivers the latest, most relevant and useful business intelligence to key decision makers and influencers, each weekday morning.

Employers are beginning to unveil their post-pandemic visions for work, but pushback movements from employees who are keen to retain their work-from-home privileges are bubbling up. Localised protests may be indicative of more widespread resistance among workers to revert to pre-pandemic patterns, reports Brian O’Connor for BBC Worklife.  Employees may well feel they've proved they can be productive at home – and that the reasons companies say they want them back in the office don't stack up. For example, Apple’s pre-pandemic policies discouraged remote work, and early in June, CEO Tim Cook sent out a company-wide memo telling staff they would be required back in the office by early September. But post-Covid-19, the tech company’s employees are challenging what they call “a disconnect between how the executive team thinks about remote/location-flexible work and the lived experiences of many of Apple’s employees.” Kimberly Merriman, professor of management at the Manning School of Business at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, observes:  “A few numbers really reach far. Companies should be concerned when any number of employees complain like that [the Apple case]. It can escalate and give an impression, even if it’s a small number of employees, that this is the tone of the organisation.”

 

BBC News

68% of FTSE finance professionals call for UK’s proposed audit reforms to be delayed

Audit reform, long in the works by The UK Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), is fast becoming a tangible reality, with the Department’s March announcement of a consultation into reforms to modernise the country’s audit and corporate governance regime. In this research document commissioned by Galvanize, Censuswide surveyed 250 CFOs, finance directors, heads of risk, and audit managers, within UK-listed companies. Download the report and infographic to see what they had to say about audit reform in the UK.
Read the report now >>

 

The UK’s Financial Reporting Council is calling for KPMG to be fined a minimum of £15m over the firm's advice on the sale of bed maker Silentnight to private equity company HIG Capital in 2011. The regulator added that a "substantial uplift” to the fine should be made “to reflect aggravating features." An independent tribunal was held on Monday to determine sanctions on KPMG and former restructuring partner David Costley-Wood following the tribunal's "adverse findings" of loss of objectivity. The tribunal heard how KPMG and Costley-Wood favoured HIG as a buyer for the struggling mattress firm and helped it shed its pension liabilities as cheaply as possible. They were motivated by the “self-motivating factor of trying to keep HIG onside as a client,” Richard Coleman, a barrister for the FRC said. KPMG said the tribunal's findings related to restructuring work performed over a decade ago and the fine being sought was "overly punitive" and "disproportionate."

 

Financial Times

The Times

City A.M.

The Daily Telegraph

Amazon is dumping millions of unsold items every year because it's cheaper for third-party sellers to have them destroyed than paying the online retailer to store them. An Amazon worker secretly filmed evidence of the waste over several months at the warehouse where he worked and passed the video to ITV News. The worker said: "From a Friday to a Friday, our target was to generally destroy 130,000 items a week. I used to gasp. There's no rhyme or reason to what gets destroyed. Dyson fans or Hoovers, the occasional MacBook and iPad." Sam Chetan-Welsh, political adviser to Greenpeace UK, said: "Expensive products that took energy and resources to manufacture come straight off the production line and into our overstretched waste system, and the high taxes needed to dispose of it all aren't being paid by Amazon." Commenting on the scandal, Philip Dunne, Conservative chairman of the Commons environmental audit committee, said: "How can Amazon protest its sustainability credentials with a straight face?"

 

The Times

The Times

Remote working should not become something forced into UK law, senior financial services industry officials have warned. The UK might soon see legislation to allow employees to work flexibly by dividing their time between the office and home, despite the government previously pushing back against suggestions that it could become law. New legislation would build on the experience of millions who have worked from home since the pandemic started in March last year. Many companies have already said they plan a mix of remote and office working once Covid restrictions are lifted. “Legislation would be inappropriate,” Bruce Carnegie-Brown, chairman of the Lloyd's of London insurance market, told City & Financial's City Week event. “We have to allow different sectors of the economy to adapt in different ways to address this opportunity, frankly, for a more mixed economy of remote and physical work.”

 

City A.M.

London and New York are falling behind Hong Kong in the race to get bankers back in the office, with Morgan Stanley already having 70% of its Hong Kong workers back at their desks and Credit Suisse around 70%. JP Morgan plans to reach that same office occupancy in the coming weeks, while Bank of America aims to reach full office capacity in Hong Kong by the end of this month. An HSBC spokeswoman said the bank's Hong Kong headquarters was now open for all staff to return but that people could choose between working from office and home. “I hated working from home,” said a sales banker at HSBC. “I missed being able to chat with my colleagues all the time for leads and gossips. It was not fun at all at home.”

 

Reuters

City A.M.

Bumble, the dating app where women are in charge of making the first move, has temporarily closed all of its offices this week to combat workplace stress. Its 700 staff worldwide have been told to switch off and focus on themselves. Bumble has had a busier year than most firms, with a stock market debut, and rapid growth in user numbers. Senior executive Clare O'Connor revealed on Twitter that founder Whitney Wolfe Herd had made the move "having correctly intuited our collective burnout." Ms Wolfe Herd became the youngest woman, at 31, to take a company public in the US when she oversaw Bumble's stock market debut in February.

 

BBC News

Mint

Economic secretary to the Treasury and City minister John Glen says the UK is seeking deeper financial services ties with trading partners beyond the European Union to help the Square Mile thrive post-Brexit. “When it comes to developing a more open industry, we've been working hard seeking new international financial services agreements,” said Mr Glen. “We've already signed a number and we're continuing the financial services dialogues with other countries, including the US, New Zealand, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, China, India and Brazil.” Mr Glen told the City Week conference: “While openness means deepening international relations, we think it also means improving our own domestic competitiveness too so that we can take full advantage of our new position on the world stage. And that means creating the right conditions for industry to thrive outside the EU.”

 

The Daily Telegraph

Baillie Gifford fund manager James Anderson has accused UK asset managers of being obsessed with short-term performance, leading to the FTSE 100 being deprived of innovative and fast-growing companies.

 

Financial Times

Ocado has lost its latest court battle with rival AutoStore Technology after a judge sitting in London refused to grant an injunction that would stop the use of certain information in a separate US patent infringement case. Ocado had sought to restrain its Norwegian rival from referring to discussions they held regarding their patent disputes in 2018 at a key hearing at the US International Trade Commission in August. Judge Richard Hacon denied the interim injunction in the ruling. The judge in Washington’s ITC “is better placed to decide what evidence should be admitted in his own court than is an English judge in an interim hearing,” he said. AutoStore and Ocado have been at loggerheads since October last year with a series of disputes over patent infringement in multiple jurisdictions. The heart of the matter is that AutoStore argues its warehouse system is the foundation of the technology used by Ocado and is attempting to block the British company’s expansion in the US and UK.

 

Bloomberg

The Supreme Court has sided with Nestlé and Cargill in a lawsuit that claimed the companies knowingly bought cocoa beans from farms in Africa that used child slave labour. The justices ruled 8-1 in favour of the food companies and against a group of six adult citizens of Mali who claimed they were taken from their country as children and forced to work on cocoa farms in neighbouring Ivory Coast. Justice Clarence Thomas said: "Although respondents' injuries occurred entirely overseas, the Ninth Circuit held that respondents could sue in federal court because the defendant corporations allegedly made ‘major operational decisions' in the United States. The Ninth Circuit erred by allowing this suit to proceed."

 

US News and World Report

Wine experts say that warmer temperatures in recent years have created better conditions for growing grapes in England and Wales. Consultancy Vinescapes identified the South Downs National Park in particular as being ripe for investment. The area, which stretches 87 miles area from Hampshire to East Sussex, only uses 0.4% of its agricultural land for viticulture, but the analysis said that up to 34% could be suitable for wine-making and further investment could tap into hundreds of jobs and millions of pounds of investment. The park's wine industry contributes £24.5m to the local economy and £54m to the wider economy, but Vinescapes says 800 full-time jobs could be created with a £127m contribution to the UK economy, along with up to 75,000 visitors.

 

Sky News