Posts Tagged ‘Barclays Bank’
Barclays bank corporate tax paid for 2009 = 1% of profits
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
Barclays Bank has been forced to admit it paid just £113m in UK corporation tax in 2009 – a year when it rang up a record £11.6bn of profits.
The admission stunned politicians and tax campaigners. It was revealed on the eve of a day of protests planned against the high street banks by activists from UK Uncut, a group set up five months ago to oppose government cuts and corporate tax avoidance.
The Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who lobbied Barclays’ chief executive, Bob Diamond, to reveal the tax paid by the bank, described the figure – just 1% of its 2009 profits – as “shocking”.
The current rate of corporation tax in the UK is 28%, although global banks such as Barclays – which has hundreds of overseas subsidiaries, including many in tax havens – do not generate all of their profits in their domestic market.
Max Lawson, of the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, said: “This is proof that banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us, paying billions in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax.
“If banks paid their fair share we could avoid the worst of the cuts and help those hit hardest by the financial crisis they did nothing to cause.”
Just to give you an idea of how “tough” the Blair Labour government was on big corporations.
Sounds like home to an American.
ATM cash machine inventor dies at 84
Undated file photo
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
The man credited with inventing the world’s first automatic cash machine has died.
John Shepherd-Barron passed away at the age of 84 on Saturday after being treated for a brief illness at a hospital in northern Scotland.
Shepherd-Barron once said that he came up with the idea after being locked out of a bank, and that his invention was inspired by a machine that dispensed chocolate candy bars.
“It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world,” he said in a BBC interview in 2007 to mark the ATM’s 40th anniversary.
“I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash.”
He later sold his concept for an automatic teller machine, now known as an ATM, to Barclay’s Bank more than 40 years ago…
Today, there are at least 1.7 million ATM machines around the world.
Enough for every novice hacker – or mugger – to practice on.
RTFA. Enjoyable. Bright dude.
Brooklyn subway stop named for British bank
Turnabout is Fair Play, eh?
The British are coming, the British are coming — to Brooklyn? By subway? Barclays has paid $300 million for the naming rights to the New Jersey Nets arena.
New York’s struggling Metropolitan Transportation Authority has sold the naming rights to the second-busiest subway stop in Brooklyn. The Atlantic Avenue-Pacific Street Station will now have the name of a British bank, Barclays, added to it…
One straphanger said, “A London Bank shouldn’t be the name of this train station; it’s something that belongs to the public domain…”
Though the Atlantic-Pacific subway station is the first in New York for which naming rights have been sold, across the country, there have been several cases of public transportation systems using naming rights to increase revenue.
In 2003, the Las Vegas monorail system signed a 12-year, $50 million deal with Nextel to put its name on the station in the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Cleveland Bus System sold station names to two hospitals for $1.1 million a year.
Selling everything that ain’t nailed down is the American Way. Selling the name of what is nailed down is just another part of the same lack of standards.
I can’t afford a railroad stop on the new RailRunner Express. Though I kind of like the sound of the warning horn on the diesel locomotive that makes it to Lot 4 on an easterly wind some mornings.
Wonder if the county will let me name the perpetual pothole that tops the first rise up our road from the county road? We could name it Eideard Canyon or some such. $20?
