Nine West-country women aged 34-69 who ran an illegal pyramid scheme scooping more than £20 million from 10,000 duped “investors” have pleaded guilty to fraud, with most receiving prison sentences, some suspended.

The victims mostly targeted were other women, who were enticed to attend champagne parties held at the 22-room Battleborough Grange Country House Hotel, Brent Knoll, Somerset, a hotel run by 69 year-old fraudster and charity fundraiser Carol Chalmers. At the parties women were persuaded to start a 15 person pyramid by investing £3,000 and persuading two others to do the same, and then recruiting two others each and so on. Continue reading →

Energy drink company Red Bull GmbH has settled two class action lawsuits in the USA with an agreement to pay consumers $13 million for misleadingly claiming that their product gave drinkers increased mental and physical performance – “Red Bull gives you wings”.

The agreement only applies in the USA where it is thought that many more vulnerable consumers would have believed that the advertising really was a statement of fact.

Pay-outs per person cruelly misled are likely to be less than $10 (£6.30), or $15 worth (£9.45) of Red Bull, that doesn’t give you wings.

Another example of careless shopping costing consumers their cash was recently given by Asda on its sale of Cathedral City cheddar cheese and reported on the Watchdog TV programme.

A 350 gm piece was offered at a promotional price of £2, whereas an “economy” multipack of two 350 gm pieces was priced at £7.29, or £3.29 more than buying two single packs. So the unwary, those who trustingly believe bigger packs always offer better value, those bad or slow at maths or those in a hurry to do the shopping and get home were giving Asda more than 80% more than they needed to.

Poor Tesco seem to be missing their former chief executive Sir Terry Leahy rather badly since he left in 2011, judging by current woes that include departures of very senior directors, a twelve month, 60% plummet in share prices from £3.70 to £1.70 and a gaping £250 million black hole in the accounts, due, some say to an aggressive stance by Tesco that goes back to at least 2004.

Sir Terry, by contrast is doing rather well and is sharing his management expertise with others at some evening business seminars run by the London Evening Standard.

The November offering is entitled “How to innovate and take your business to the next level” and will doubtless have Tesco executives, those still there, queueing for tickets. Rumours, however that Sir Terry’s future subjects will be “How to retain top staff”, “Keeping your share price climbing” and “Getting out of a black hole” should be treated as mischievous.

A system of electromagnets that can make an object float in clear air could be the next attention-grabber for shop windows, showrooms and exhibition stands.

Objects weighing up to 560gm can hover and move around an area 27.3cm x 24.2cm and above a Z-shaped column 155cm tall.

The Gravity Lifter Movez has been developed by Dusseldorf company Usables GmbH and will be available from the end of this month.

usables.de/eng/fly

An Ipsos MORI poll has found that only 49% of politicians trust that their fellow politicians tell the truth.

This figure is optimistically high however, compared to the percentage of the general public who believe politicians – just 18% on last years MORI figures.

Apparently a staggeringly high number of politicians,18% of them, still trust bankers, and this obviously includes the dopey ones who gave the totally untrustworthy Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) £45 billion of taxpayers money six years ago, to see it all lost in excessive salaries, bonuses and fines for dishonest dealings with its customers.

Whoever said that politicians and nappies should, for the same reason, be changed often had it about right.

Food fraud is now more attractive to organised crime than trafficking drugs – with the potential profits the same, the likelihood of being caught much less and lighter penalties for the few who do.

This is the conclusion, featured in the Daily Telegraph, of a new 18-month investigation and recent report on the findings from Prof Chris Elliott of Belfast Queens University, who points to the driving down of prices by supermarkets as incentivising processors to cut corners, and the cutting of local authority enforcement services to dangerously ineffective levels as being other contributing factors.

The worryingly poor performance of the UK’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) is also cited. In the ten years before last years horse-meat scandal broke the FSA had not tested any product for adulteration with horse, and missed the inclusion of an illegal cancer-causing dye in hundreds of food items in 2003, something that French and Italian laboratories picked up.

Good to see that the nice people at TV Licensing, collecting the increasingly invidious and questionable license fee for the BBC, continue to get a well-deserved kicking from MPs and campaigners for the heavy-handed way they try to bully money out of people who don’t need a licence, the better to bolster the £3.7 billion they get in annual funding, and to make excessive pay-offs to former BBC executives.

The author’s own experience, following a few months when a TV was installed at his office for an editing job and the licence fee was paid for that year, is no doubt typical – 35 wasteful letters from various (fictional?) nonentities at TV Licensing in the 12 years since, threatening visits and detector vans. When they have been advised, in 2001 and 2004, that no TV equals no licence requirement they have written back to advise that a percentage of the criminals they deal with lie about this and that they will therefore be investigating anyway.

Time was, prior to commercial TV, Freeview and the internet the BBC might have deserved their easy money in compulsory and legally-backed licence fees but the model now needs an overhaul.

From the fashion experts who launched, and withdrew, handbags adorned with swastikas in 2007 comes another gem.

This time it’s a baby top looking like the uniform worn by Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Nazi concentration camps – a black and white horizontally striped T-shirt with a yellow six-pointed star on the left breast, evoking the star of David that Jewish prisoners were forced to wear.

Following criticisms of insensitivity, thoughtlessness and a lack of education and awareness from Jewish organisations the Spanish chain quickly withdrew the product and pledged to destroy all the stock, apologising for offence caused but claiming that the design was inspired by Westerns and part of its Cowboy Collection for kids.