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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – Europeans banks are bracing for a mass exodus of their staff to the U.S. over pay rules. Employees of some of Europe’s largest banks have hinted that they would soon file applications with U.S. financial institutions after receiving their 2010 bonuses, headhunters said Sunday.

The majority of European bank staff got smaller bonuses paid mostly in deferred shares because of stringent European Union rules on bank bonuses, while employees of leading U.S. banks got their bonuses last week, with a large part in cash.

To worsen the situation, European regulators are considering stricter rules on bonuses because of public uproar over insensitivity of banks in granting millions of bonuses to staff, while the rest of the world from whom banks earn their income tighten their belts due to austerity measures put in place by national governments.

However, there are reports that the talks between the British government and the banks over fat bonuses and executive pay, and increasing lending to small companies have run into problems and would likely be postponed.

Last week Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and JPMorgan paid bonuses to their staff. In some cases, bonuses below $500,000 were paid in cash, while larger bonuses had only 20 percent in deferred shares.

Despite the threat of exodus, British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg pushed for a breakup of banks to keep them safe and protect the government from having to bail out very large banks. Clegg said high-risk “casino” banking must be separated from low-risk high street banking.

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Westpac Banking Corp., Australia’s top bond underwriter last year, hired Ignacio Cortes as a London-based director of debt capital markets.

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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – Retail industry experts warned Monday that the 2.5 percent increase in value added tax, which took effect Tuesday, will be exploited by merchants to hike the prices of their wares.

Experts estimate cost of goods and even services will go up by about 8 percent, or three times the VAT hike which increase the effective tax rate to 20 from 17.5 percent.

One expert said retailers would likely round up, rather than round down the VAT increase. He justified the move as necessary for retailers to stay profitable because of years of price deflation. Another accounting consultancy said 60 percent of retail managers plan to increase prices by at least 2.1 percent on top of the VAT hike.

Industry analysts forecast memberships in gyms, mobile phone subscription rates, food prices and product prices will go up between 5 to 8 percent, timed with the VAT hike.

As a result of the tax hikes, a British accounting firm estimates that couples with a combined income of $105,000 (GBP 70,000) would increase their yearly spending by $840 (GBP 560). For average families, their bills would rise by $600 (GBP 400) a year.

Labor Party leader Ed Miliband warned that the VAT increase, aimed to reduce the national budget deficit and raise $4.5 billion (GBP 3 billion) a year, would place 250,000 jobs at risk.

One likely casualty of the VAT and price hikes would be the pub industry which estimates 8,800 jobs would be lost as drinking establishments would close since many Britons would probably opt to buy alcoholic beverages from the supermarket and drink at home.

The Center for Retail Research projects that retail sales in Britain would dip by 3.1 percent or $3.3 billion (GBP 2.2 billion) for the first quarter of 2011 because of the VAT increase.

Chancellor George Osborne defended the VAT hike as a necessity to reduce Britain’s debt or the coalition government would be forced to increase spending cuts by $19.5 billion (GBP 13 billion).

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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – Retail industry experts warned Monday that the 2.5 percent increase in value added tax, which took effect Tuesday, will be exploited by merchants to hike the prices of their wares.

Experts estimate cost of goods and even services will go up by about 8 percent, or three times the VAT hike which increase the effective tax rate to 20 from 17.5 percent.

One expert said retailers would likely round up, rather than round down the VAT increase. He justified the move as necessary for retailers to stay profitable because of years of price deflation. Another accounting consultancy said 60 percent of retail managers plan to increase prices by at least 2.1 percent on top of the VAT hike.

Industry analysts forecast memberships in gyms, mobile phone subscription rates, food prices and product prices will go up between 5 to 8 percent, timed with the VAT hike.

As a result of the tax hikes, a British accounting firm estimates that couples with a combined income of $105,000 (GBP 70,000) would increase their yearly spending by $840 (GBP 560). For average families, their bills would rise by $600 (GBP 400) a year.

Labor Party leader Ed Miliband warned that the VAT increase, aimed to reduce the national budget deficit and raise $4.5 billion (GBP 3 billion) a year, would place 250,000 jobs at risk.

One likely casualty of the VAT and price hikes would be the pub industry which estimates 8,800 jobs would be lost as drinking establishments would close since many Britons would probably opt to buy alcoholic beverages from the supermarket and drink at home.

The Center for Retail Research projects that retail sales in Britain would dip by 3.1 percent or $3.3 billion (GBP 2.2 billion) for the first quarter of 2011 because of the VAT increase.

Chancellor George Osborne defended the VAT hike as a necessity to reduce Britain’s debt or the coalition government would be forced to increase spending cuts by $19.5 billion (GBP 13 billion).

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London, United Kingdom (AHN) – International protest is building about the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange this week. Assange is being held in a British jail awaiting extradition to Sweden on rape charges.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department is seeking to extradite him to the United States to face espionage charges after his Web site released more than 250,000 documents that exposed secret State Department communications. However, political leaders in Australia, Brazil, Russia and elsewhere say Assange is a political prisoner who is being punished for exercising rights of the free press.

Some of the harshest criticism is coming from Australia, where hundreds of people rallied Thursday in three cities to protest Assange’s arrest. Assange is an Australian citizen.

Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd said Assange was merely doing the job of any journalist by publishing the documents. “The blame for any violations of the law should fall on the persons who gave the documents to Wikileaks,” Rudd said. “The Americans are responsible for that.”

The State Department communications, called “cables,” described Rudd as a “control freak” and said that he made mistakes as Australia’s foreign minister.

Rudd said he was unconcerned about the criticisms.

He also said Australia would offer consular help to Assange.

Consular help refers to sending diplomats to meet with a citizen of their own country who is arrested abroad to determine whether legal assistance can be arranged.

In Brazil, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva described the arrest of Assange as a crime.

“I want to express my protest against this offense against free expression,” Lula said. “I will use the presidential blog to express my protest.”

He also encouraged the international news media to be more vigorous in defending Assange.

“The young man who is giving so much trouble to the diplomacy of the United States was arrested and so far I have not seen any protest defending free expression,” Lula said.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin described the U.S. government’s efforts to prosecute Assange as hypocritical.

“If it is full democracy, then why have they hidden Mr. Assange in prison,” Putin said during a press conference Thursday. “That’s what, democracy?”

Putin’s remarks appear to be a response to a February 2010 cable from Defense Secretary Robert Gates that said, “Russian democracy has disappeared and the government is an oligarchy run by the security services.”

In Mexico, the Journalists Club put up a plaque in their Mexico City headquarters honoring Assange for his “contribution to the conscience of mankind.”

The State Department documents published by Wikileaks described Mexico’s difficulties in managing its war with drug cartels. The cables described the government’s efforts as ineffective, often corrupt and divided among competing administrators.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Research Service is saying any U.S. prosecution of Assange would face unprecedented legal and diplomatic challenges.

A 24-page report from the government agency examines how the Justice Department could apply U.S. criminal laws to a foreign news operation.

“We are aware of no case in which a publisher of information obtained through unauthorized disclosure by a government employee has been prosecuted for publishing it,” the report said.

The prosecution of Assange creates First Amendment and diplomatic hurdles “based on concerns about government censorship,” the report said.

Some members of Congress, such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I.-Conn) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), say Assange should be prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917.

However, the Congressional Research Service report said no single law forbids the news media from publishing diplomatic cables only a “patchwork” of statutes that leave unclear answers.

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LONDON – U.S. President Barack Obama made a splash in India recently when he indicated that the United States would back India’s bid for a permanent seat on an expanded United Nations Security C…

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London, England, United Kingdom (AHN) – British Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone said Thursday that the United Kingdom will initiate positive action to ensure workplace equality.

Among the initiatives the coalition government would make are: to name and shame companies that do not provide equality for women workers, give preference to applicants from under-represented groups such as ethnic minorities, gays and disabled people along with placing more women in the boardroom.

The initiatives are contained in the government Equality Strategy, which the minister recently published.

While labor unions welcomed the strategy to remove workplace discrimination based on gender, business leaders were apprehensive it would lead to lawsuits from job applicants.

Featherstone said the target of the coalition government is that 50 percent of all new appointments to public boardrooms by 2015 would be females.

Even on the domestic front, Britain has a lot of catching up in terms of promoting gender equality at home.

According to the newly released international Fairness in Families Index, U.K. was 18th place among 21 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations in the area of equal parenting.

Rob Williams, chief executive of the Fatherhood Institute which released the index, said British families lag in terms of paid paternity leave, time spent caring for children, and men and women’s pay.

Among the measures of family fairness indicators used by the institute were paternity leave, ratio of men’s and women’s time spent caring for children, percent of women in management roles, percent of men in part-time workforce and time spend by men and women performing unpaid domestic work.

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London, United Kingdom (AHN) – Britain’s health secretary Andrew Lansley announced during a televised interview Sunday that the coalition government is going to ban cheap alcohol, dissuade teenagers from smoking and to encourage young mothers to breastfeed their babies.

Lansley confirmed that the coalition government was preparing a range of interventions intended to reduce certain inequalities. These necessary “state interventions” are the introduction of plain packaging for cigarettes, banning low-cost alcohol sales and of introduction of breast feeding areas in the workplace.

These government interventions were said to be necessary to preserve the public health as the “health inequalities” of the poorest sectors of society need to be addressed.

In the same program, Lansley’s attempt to “micro-manage” the lives of people through government intervention drew sharp criticism from former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe. “Now we have got the state actually saying to employers in a time of recession you must provide paid breaks, paid facilities, a special fridge for expressed milk and goodness knows what else for women returning to work who have decided, on their responsibility presumably, to have a child,” she commented.

She added, “It is not appropriate for the state to micro-manage our lives as they are doing.”

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Dubai, United Arab Emirates Michael Grubb – Dubai International Airport, the largest in the Gulf, is outpacing the world aviation industry’s recovery this year as it capitalizes on its role as a pivot for business travelers arbitraging between a struggling Europe and the burgeoning economies of Asia. But analysts warn that Dubai’s success makes it a likely magnet for new competition.

Traffic through Dubai International rose by close to 16 percent in the first nine months of the year, well ahead of the 12.9 percent average increase in the Asia-Pacific market, making it the world’s fastest growing, according to Airports Council International. The pace of growth for Dubai continued in October, when traffic exceeded 4 million people for the second time ever, Dubai Airports reported Wednesday.

Aviation is a big and thriving business for tiny Dubai, whose economy is otherwise struggling with some $100 billion of real estate debt. Dubai is home to the world’s 14th busiest airport, just behind New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport and ahead of Amsterdam’s Schiphol. The number of people passing through the airport in October alone was equal to more than twice the country’s entire population.

Dubai Airports has ambitious plans for expanding. Annual capacity at Dubai International will grow from 60 million passengers to 75 million next year when it dedicates Concourse 3, the world’s only facility dedicated to servicing the Airbus A380, the largest passenger airliner in the world.

Meanwhile, a second airport, the Al-Maktoum International, is under development next door. Al-Maktoum began cargo operations six months ago and will be opening for passenger travel in March 2011.

Dubai Airports is expecting growth to continue at a strong double-digit rate in 2011, with annual passenger traffic jumping 13.1 percent to 52.2 million from a forecast 46.1 million for all of 2010. Dubai’s flag carrier Emirates is counting on its passenger numbers growing 10 percent next year while the discount carrier Flydubai forecasts its traffic doubling.

“Before the end of the decade passenger numbers will approach 90 million making Dubai International the busiest airport in the world in terms of international passenger traffic,” Paul Griffiths, chief executive officer of Dubai Airports, said last week.

But Dubai’s airports – and its airlines — are vulnerable to emerging competition because it is entirely dependent on funneling passengers from Europe and Asia through its airports and sending them on to their final destinations, he said. The airport has no domestic market and a tiny regional one. Indeed, measured by international traffic alone, Dubai rises in the world airport rankings to No. 6.

“They will have competition, the dynamics will definitely change,” Philip Butterworth-Hayes, lead consultant of the aviation advisory firm PMi Media, told The Media Line. “I would look at Indian airlines in particular. Once you have a strong home market like India, you have the ability to capture traffic.”

Dubai has not only benefited from huge investment in its airport and carriers but also from low costs, the absence of environmental constraints to airport expansion and its strategic location. Demand for Europe-Asian travel has grown as European companies focus sales on the growing economies of China and the rest of Asia while newly wealthy Asians have the disposable income to travel to Europe for holidays. Dubai is about 5,500 kilometers (3,400 miles) from London and 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles) from Shanghai.

Adding to world-class airports, Dubai’s state-owned Emirates airlines has been an aggressive competitor, taking market share from hobbled European rivals by adding capacity – the airline has the biggest fleet of the giant A380s on order – and is keeping fares and costs low.

But India could match many of these assets. Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital is about 7,200 kilometers (4,500 miles) from London and 5,000 kilometers (3,100 miles) from Shanghai, on top of being a business and tourism destination in its own right.

As India’s economy grows, demand for domestic air travel for its 1 billion people has also increased. Domestic air traffic in India grew 15 percent in October compared with a year ago to 4.6 million passengers, the government said last week. What the country still lacks to take on Dubai is a competitive airline to service an Indian hub, Griffiths said.

“If you were to have an Emirates-like operation in India, you could make it a major hub,” he said. “But they would also benefit from the presence of a huge domestic market.”

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LONDON (MarketWatch) — European finance ministers are working on an international aid package for Ireland that could total up to 100 billion euros ($136 billion), and would include credit from the euro zone and the International Monetary Fund, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday. A package of aid for Irish banks would be worth 45 billion to 50 billion euros under the plan, while a broader package designed to shore up Ireland’s finances could range from 80 billion to 100 billion euros, the report said, citing an official familiar with the negotiations. Officials are pressing Britain to participate by offering bilateral loans to Dublin, the report said.

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