The Financial Times recently ran a very interesting article (‘The great pensions tax squeeze’, September 2) on the impact of changes to pensions and Venture Capital Trust (VCT) and Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) regulations. Definitely worth a read but, if you are not a subscriber, the salient points were as follows: – The tax-free amount…
I work for Turquoise investing in and raising funds for Energy, Environment and Efficiency companies that in the main are in competition with Nuclear Power. In my previous career, I have never worked on nuclear projects. So why am I making a case for Hinkley? Let’s start at the beginning. The UK has now adopted…
The simple act of compelling larger retailers to charge 5p on plastic bags in England at the end of 2015 has had a dramatic effect on people’s behaviour – you now see shoppers emerging from supermarkets with trolleys filled with an assortment of reusable household bags rather than the one-off sort. The insistence of the…
The simple act of compelling larger retailers to charge 5p on plastic bags in England at the end of 2015 has had a dramatic effect on people’s behaviour – you now see shoppers emerging from supermarkets with trolleys filled with an assortment of reusable household bags rather than the one-off sort. The insistence of the…
Churchill is quoted as once saying: “I am preparing my impromptu remarks”. It seems that decisions about long-term green investments are sometimes made without such forethought, delivering some unintended results. For example, when the US decided to support mass production of bioethanol it was not long before scientists started raising the alarm. Apparently, unlike tropical…
Having dispatched Trilemma1 to Room 101 let me now try and place a finger in the dyke of Trilemma2 recently proposed by Mr Marchant before it is taken seriously by anyone and a dam wall breaks flooding regulators with confusion and obfuscation that is not required. Trilemma2 has raised three related but simple issues; Flexibility…
Thanks to the good work of my colleague, David Wright, Mandarin-speaker and China expert, Turquoise recently played host to a large delegation of business and government people from Zhejiang Province. Located to the south of Shanghai, Zhejiang has China’s highest per capita GDP and is home to many of the country’s largest, privately-owned companies. Turquoise’s…
It’s very easy to get caught up in hyperbole in the period immediately following a subsidy cut announcement, as all the stakeholders desperately clamour to make their voice heard the loudest. Given the recent cuts to solar subsidies, depending on who you listen to, you could very easily believe that the industry has either been…
Ian Marchant, ex CEO of SSE and ex IE President, has suggested we need a second Trilemma (see below). However, as the first Trilemma achieved nothing, the second is surely a step in the wrong direction. The first trilemma was a brain teaser that the power industry created where it was befuddled into doing very…
It must have been incredibly dispiriting, and at times scary, to have spent the holidays in the north of the British Isles being inundated with torrential rain day after day as Desmond (not me!), Eva and Frank swept in from the west. Two years ago, it was the south & west that bore the brunt…