Microsoft says its email service Outlook.com will now support Skype, allowing users to make audio and video calls from their inbox.
Excerpt from: Skype now available for Outlook.com
Category : Business
Category : Stocks, World News
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Endexx to attend NAMA Spring Expo for Medical Marijuana Technology Solutions
Endexx moves towards Up Listing
PR Newswire
PHOENIX, April 23, 2013
PHOENIX, April 23, 2013 /PRNewswire/ — Endexx Corporation (OTC Markets: EDXC) announces it will be attending the NAMA One Show 2013 (NAMA Spring Expo) – National Automatic Merchandising Association this week,(04/24/2013 – 04/26/2013).
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills accused of retrospectively rewriting rules of loan scheme
The government is facing the threat of a judicial review into its handling of an investigation into Barclays’ involvement in a state-backed loan scheme.
An investigation into a loan made by the bank in 2006 under the small firms loan guarantee scheme was extended last month by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills after an intervention by Michael Fallon, a business minister.
However, questions have been raised about the latest examination of evidence by the auditors RSM Tenon on behalf of the department. The loan was made to a company owned by Yorkshire businessman Jeffrey Morris who has alleged Barclays did not comply with eligibility rules imposed by the loan guarantee scheme.
“The new report makes no sense to me,” Morris said. “It is selective in the information it relies upon, it is inconsistent with itself and the evidence, it rewrites the scheme rules and it is inconclusive. The only way I can get justice for myself and the taxpayer is to seek a judicial review. I have spoken to my lawyers who believe there is a case for a much wider and fully independent judicial enquiry.”
The scheme for startup businesses, which guaranteed banks a return if their investment defaulted, has cost the taxpayer at least £200m in compensating banks. The Guardian reported on the loan in September, prompting the department to commission RSM Tenon. Papers seen by the Guardian show, allegedly, that Barclays sought collateral for the deal and gave the loan to a long-established business – actions that contravened the scheme’s terms. Morris defaulted on the loan in 2006, but Barclays reclaimed most of the balance owed – £91,667 – from the taxpayer.
Morris argues that an internal email sent by Barclays in May 2006 shows the bank had arranged a loan under the guarantee scheme for his business, Diamond Shape, even though he still had available collateral. Under the terms of the scheme, a loan could be guaranteed by the government only if the borrower had exhausted all other forms of collateral.
The new investigation examined a key email from Barclays, discussing a meeting with Morris, which indicates that the bank sought collateral for the loan. Referring to the department’s former guise as the Department for Trade and Industry, it says: “Looking for NewCo SFLG of £200k asap – this has been sanctioned by DTI. We advised we would need to see at least either share charge or property charge in place prior to drawdown.”
This suggests Barclays was seeking further collateral before making the money available to Morris, in direct contravention of the scheme’s rules. However, the new RSM Tenon report makes no mention of this part of the email. Instead, it focuses on the shares and property Morris was offering to Barclays as additional collateral. The reports admits that Mr Morris had further collateral available at the time the loan was made.
The new RSM Tenon report also appears to suggest that although the bank was seeking further personal collateral from Morris, this did not breach the key rule that any such loan could be made only when all other personal collateral had been exhausted. Barclays has said that the crucial email does not relate to Diamond Shape and had no relevance to the SFLG application.
Referring to the email, the report says: “The extent to which he was being asked to support the borrowing … personally does not, in itself, invalidate the making of an SFLG loan.” The department could not explain how this apparent retrospective rewriting of the scheme’s rules was justified. A department spokesperson said: “The department is satisfied that all relevant and necessary evidence from the loan application process, from all parties, has been properly considered.”
Barclays said: “Barclays co-operated fully with the Department of Business Innovation and Skills and RSM Tenon during their thorough audit of the loan made to Diamond Shape Limited by Barclays in 2006. Weare pleased to acknowledge the findings of the final report which found that ‘the loan and business appear to meet the eligibility criteria of the scheme at the time’. Barclays remains committed to lending and will utilise government schemes, where appropriate, to help make funds available to our customers and clients.”
RSM Tenon declined to comment.
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Endexx Acquires Cann-Can LLC.
Endexx’s Medical Marijuana Movement into Dispensing and Vending Technologies
PR Newswire
PHOENIX, April 9, 2013
PHOENIX, April 9, 2013 /PRNewswire/ –
Category : World News
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Medex Inc. Warns Public of Un-Solicited Email Spam
PR Newswire
CHULA VISTA, Calif., Jan. 16, 2013
CHULA VISTA, Calif., Jan. 16, 2013 /PRNewswire/ –
I feel I’m being ripped off by a bill for nearly £30 to end service
My fiance and I moved from our rented flat in London, where we had broadband, and moved temporarily in with my parents so we wanted to terminate our account.
I was told we would have to pay a £29.60 disconnection fee to cover the sum charged by BT for terminating broadband accounts. This fee represents more than three months’ worth of service and I feel I’m being ripped off. TM-R, Cambridge
A bill to stop receiving a service certainly seems an impertinence, but most customers avoid it because they are transferring from one service provider to another using a Migration Authorisation Code (MAC), for which there is no charge. Because you were cancelling, not transferring, you didn’t qualify.
I asked BT Wholesale, from whom your provider buys its services, how it justified a fee of nearly £30 and it said it reflects the toil of staff who have to process the cancellation and update the customer’s records – ie, spend a few minutes tapping at their computer keyboard.
However, sometimes there’s more to it than a few minutes of keyboard tapping because, says a spokeswoman, technicians might have to travel to the local telephone exchange and remove the wires from the distribution frame that connect to the customer’s house.
If you need help email Anna Tims at your.problems@observer.co.uk or write to Your Problems, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include an address and phone number. Unfortunately we cannot respond to emails individually.
Category : Stocks
Vancouver, BC,
Canada, December 24, 2012 – Intelimax Media Inc. (“Intelimax“ or the
“Company”) (CNSX:IMD & OTCPink:IXMD) wishes to announce that further to its
news release of November 14, 2012, certain conditions of closing have not been
met by the December 21, 2012 deadline and therefore the Company has terminated
the securities exchange agreement previously entered into
with Ride Media Group LLC, a California limited liability company, and the
members of Ride Media.
My passport says I’m Thomas, but I booked the flight as Tom; surely the airline should not make me buy a whole new ticket
I booked flights to Chile via Brazil and used the name Tom, whereas my passport bears the name Thomas. This was not a problem on the flight out to Rio, but when I checked in for the Rio to Santiago leg I was told that since the names didn’t match I would have to buy a new ticket at an extra cost of £330. I work in fraud detection and would never make an issue over such a discrepancy. TF, London
Airlines have, for obvious reasons, become increasingly neurotic about security. They are free to set their own policy about how precisely names on tickets and passports match up, according to the International Air Travel Association, which is why one waved you through and the other didn’t.
“We therefore recommend that the name on the ticket should match the name on the passport to minimise the likelihood of being denied boarding,” says a spokesman. Under US rules, however, tickets have to bear the exact name, including any middle names, as it appears on your passport. Nicknames are all very well at home, but it’s best to leave them behind and travel formally when taking to the skies.
If you need help email Anna Tims at your.problems@observer.co.uk or write to Your Problems, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include an address and phone number. Unfortunately we cannot respond to emails individually.
Regulators publish emails showing scale of rigging of Libor rates before and during the 2008 financial crisis
The record £940m fine levied on Swiss bank UBS threatens to shift the focus of the worldwide Libor-rigging investigations to the intricate web of relationships between banks and brokers at the heart of the financial system.
More than 2,000 requests for “inappropriate submissions” to the crucial interest rates were documented by the Financial Services Authority, which found 45 UBS traders, managers and senior managers were involved in, or aware of, the practice of manipulating the benchmark rate.
Some 1,000 of these requests were made to 11 brokers at six brokerage firms, the FSA said. While the participants were not named, the UK regulator found that brokers had accepted “corrupt” payments – as much as £15,000 a quarter – for helping UBS to manipulate the rate.
American regulators also found that UBS colluded with at least four other banks on the panel that set Libor to make false submissions, and induced at least five interdealer brokers to disseminate false information or otherwise influence other panel banks’ submissions.
The regulators published a series of colourful email exchanges and telephone conversations.
One phone call on 18 September 2008 – just days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers – illustrates the type of promises made by UBS traders. “If you keep 6s [the six-month Japanese yen Libor rate] unchanged today … I will fucking do one humongous deal with you,” the trader told a broker. “Like a 50,000-buck deal, whatever. I need you to keep it as low as possible … if you do that … I’ll pay you, you know, $50,000, $100,000 … whatever you want … I’m a man of my word.”
The emails provide the most graphic illustration yet of the scale of rigging of the keyimportant Libor rates before and during the 2008 financial crisis, when UBS ensured its submissions to the Libor panel did not suggest it was in financial difficulty.
It was bailed out in October 2008 at about the time that UK banks such as Royal Bank of Scotland – also braced for a Libor-rigging fine – were rescued by taxpayers.
One trader at UBS devised strategies that were put in place to help ensure he made profits for other trading positions linked to Japanese yen. “Sometimes he looked ahead and conducted sustained manipulative operations for weeks to move yen Libor in the direction he needed, even coining names for these longer-term schemes, such as ‘the Turn Campaign’ and ‘Operation 6m’,” said the US regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The FSA is continuing investigations into six other financial companies – not all of them banks – after taking action against Barclays, which was fined a total of £290m in June, and now UBS. A dozen firms around the world are thought to be under investigation.
RBS, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan are among the many banks that have made legal disclosures about co-operating with authorities. RBS has fired traders, while interdealer broker Icap has suspended one trader and put three on administrative leave.
Lawyers are warning of further arrests after the Serious Fraud Office arrested three British men last week concerning the Libor investigation.
“Of particular interest in today’s announcement of UBS’s global settlement is the detail that has emerged of the heavy involvement of interdealer brokers in fixing the Libor rate and the alleged corrupt payments to these brokers,” said David O’Mahony, complex fraud barrister at 7 Bedford Row chambers. “It is highly likely that other banks may now be implicated in similar dealings with these brokers and further arrests may well occur.”
There are also concerns about potential litigation. “The big unknown factor is the civil litigation that could follow on as a result of this,” Paras Anand, European equities head at Fidelity Worldwide Investment, one of UBS’s biggest investors, told Reuters. “The issue for shareholders is the challenge of pricing that risk in.”
The bank’s shares slipped only slightly on the scale of the fine, which follows a wave of embarrassments for UBS, including the jailing last month of former trader Kweku Adoboli.
Ratings agency Fitch said: “The Libor fine is larger than we anticipated but can be absorbed by 2012 earnings so that UBS will maintain a solid capitalisation.” But it also warned about the “potential for material litigation expenses and civil settlement costs”.
We arrived at the airport to find there was no one at the BA desk and the flight had been brought forward by two and a half hours
My sons and I recently flew to Rome with British Airways. When we arrived at the airport for the return flight there was no one at the BA desk, and no sign of any departure. We then discovered the flight had been brought forward by two and a half hours. We had to spend the night at the airport and were returned the next day via Milan. BA never informed us of this change and when I complained I was told I should have checked the website for updates, which we couldn’t do as we were travelling without access to the internet. MD, London
Only when I called the press office did BA realise that, due to a “technical error” it failed to text or email you to tell you your flight had been cancelled and an earlier one booked due to the transition from its summer to winter schedules – a change you would have thought it would have known about long before you left for Rome. BA is granting you £300-worth of vouchers, thereby trying to ensure you spend more money with it on another trip. In