In the 1992 courtroom drama A Few Good Men, the military lawyer played by Tom Cruise interrogates Jack Nicholson’s colonel Nathan Jessup about a death at a US naval base.
Even watching it for the first time, it doesn’t take the skills of Perry Mason to work out what’s going to happen next, and sure enough Jessup is irritated enough by the cocky lawyer to be provoked into saying something unwise. “I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom,” the delightfully self-regarding Jessup brags just before spilling the beans. “I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
Which brings us to how long it will take Sports Direct boss Mike Ashley to crack at the retailer’s interim results this week, when inevitably he’ll be asked about working conditions at his embattled firm. Unusually, the billionaire may have to front the whole show, after a dreadful year in which he has carelessly lost both his chief exec and acting finance boss.
Ashley, of course, has cracked under the gentlest of questioning before. At the group’s annual meeting in September, he completely lost his temper with Unite’s Steve Turner who, like Cruise’s character, had the temerity to ask a cheeky question.
European meltdown continues
It has been easy to forget, what with the Brexit result and the US election, but there’s still something going on called the eurozone crisis.
We will be reminded of this lower-profile threat to our children’s financial futures on Thursday, when the European Central Bank returns to centre stage with a policy meeting.
The outcome looks pretty hard to call at the moment, with all sorts of things that could potentially blow up in the interim. Not least among them is today’s Italian referendum, after which we may all have to learn to contemplate either the collapse of the eurozone or the equally scary mastering of the refrain: “Constitutional reform means constitutional reform.”
However, there are still those brave enough to make forecasts. Last Friday, Reuters was boldly reporting that the European Central Bank would extend its bond purchases beyond March and consider sending a formal signal that the programme would eventually end, citing senior sources with direct knowledge of discussions.
Weak underlying inflation and heightened political risk made an extension inevitable, it said. Brave.
Don’t panic: rich can still avoid tax
In his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, Douglas Adams once wrote about a character spending a year dead for tax reasons.
He was very good at surreal jokes like that, but one wonders if the gag was actually so far-fetched? The more one studies the subject, the more one becomes convinced that there are few things rich folk eschew if they sniff the chance of a tax saving.
This recurring theme gets an airing this week, when the public accounts committee hears from Jon Thompson, chief executive of HM Revenue and Customs, and his director general of enforcement and compliance, Jennie Granger, as part of the committee’s inquiry into taxing the rich.
HMRC estimates that its specialist unit dedicated to collecting tax from high-net-worth individuals clawed back £416m last year – money that millionaires had tried all sorts of creative ruses to avoid paying. Still, the National Audit Office reckons that tax inspectors have identified potential evasion and avoidance worth nearly £2bn by Britain’s richest. But, you’ll be amazed to hear, convictions are rare. As Meg Hillier, committee chair, said, this “underlines concerns that high-net-worth individuals and their advisers are able to keep one step ahead of HMRC”. Quite.
