A group of intelligent, articulate and highly-talented students are just finishing their degree course in event management and are talking in the pub about jobs available to them in the events sector.

JIM “I’ve been offered a key management position at £28,000 a year plus expenses and car with AEG Europe at the O2 in London” .

LAURA “Lucky bugger. I’ve been trying to find a financial firm I can actually feel proud to work for. The collective greed and stupidity of the banks and bankers nearly collapsed the UK economy a few years back and some of the culprits had to be bailed out with billions of our money. Since then Barclays have been caught fiddling the Libor rate, whatever that is, others have been fined millions for mis-selling their customers and CEO’s at Royal Bank of Scotland and Halifax have been stripped of their honours. Seems you can’t trust any of them and I really don’t feel it would look good on the CV to be associated with companies and individuals so obviously lacking in ethics”.

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The Royal China restaurant group in London has had illegally imported shark fins confiscated by Westminster Council.

Jason Chan, marketing manager for the four-restaurant group had boasted to reporters from the i newspaper that he sold shark fin soup, not on the menu, to wealthy Chinese diners and had a team of people bringing the fins into the UK in suitcases “to stop them being confiscated”. In fact the investigation found that the fins were being posted from Hong Kong, in contravention of UK import law. Continue reading →

• A rally of Neo-Nazis, Holocaust-deniers, and members of the National Front and BNP at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria on April 11 has angered the Campaign against Anti-Semitism after claims that speakers had dressed up their race-hatred as academic work and described Jewish people as “the enemy” and the “children of darkness” The keynote speaker was Spanish self-confessed Nazi Pedro Varela who has claimed “There were never any gas chambers at Auschwitz”, although at just 57 years old he couldn’t possibly have been there at the time to know.

  The police say the rally “did not reach the threshold for a criminal investigation” However, going on previous similar situations, any Jewish staff at the Grosvenor who were exposed to the “vile rants” and offended by them may have a case against their employer under duty of care, if the management was aware of the content of the rally when the ill-considered booking was taken.

• A fire station opposite Piccadilly station in Manchester, derelict since 1986, has finally been put up for sale by its owners Britannia Hotels, after threats of a Compulsory Purchase Order from Manchester City Council (Business Desk).

  The Grade ll listed red brick and terracotta building was built in 1906 in an Edwardian Baroque style and now has listed building consent to turn it into a high-end 227-bedroom, 13,000 square metre hotel with restaurants, bars and conference spaces, thought to be a profitable possibility given the ambitious plans for regeneration of the Piccadilly area for the HS2 trains.

• The billionaire Barclay twins, Sir David and Sir Frederick have sold their 64% stake in the Coroin holding company for Claridges and the Berkeley and Connaught hotels to the Quatari Constellation Hotels Group.

  This follows four years of Fred and Dave making very rich solicitors richer still with failed legal battles to force Coirin’s other shareholder, Paddy McKillen, to give up his stake.

  The Barclays still own something valuable on London’s Piccadilly called The Ritz.

Those organising events in venues with some history will want to know about Clevedon Hall, a beautifully preserved 150 year-old Victorian mansion, located 13 miles south west of Bristol centre and by the seafront at the time-warped Victorian seaside town of Clevedon.

Opened in 2010 for weddings and corporate events after a £3 million refurbishment the Hall offers an English country house feel and, from last November, 25 individual bedrooms in the style of the era. On a recent press visit our very spacious one included a large four poster bed, period furniture, a Victorian roll-top bath. a huge walk in shower stall, large bottles of expensive toiletries and a selection of more than fifty classic books by the likes of Shaw, Dickens, Scott, Stevenson, Somerset-Maughan, Dumas, Hugo, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, enough for a year’s relaxed reading and the perfect intellectual diversion for corporate high-fliers and newly-weds. One quirky item that might also appeal is the high-tech Japanese heated toilet seat that moves to different positions and delivers a cooling and cleansing spray. Continue reading →