Since the Madoff story broke, his wife Ruth presumably hasn’t been able to go anywhere without groups of her friends quickly winding up hushed conversations and greeting her with big, fake smiles. Her florist and hair colourist wouldn’t take her business. She’s been harassed by paps when trying to buy some Jarslberg. Worst of all, everyone’s been casually linking her to the crimes, as it seems inconceivable that she couldn’t have known about them. Well, she’s now innocent in the eyes of the law, if not the eyes of angry Palm Beachers - the feds have decided there’s no evidence…MORE »

Copyright aggravators and internet underdogs The Pirate Bay announced yesterday that they’ll be selling the site to games and internet café owners Global Gaming Network for about £4.7million - given that it’s in the top 100 most visited sites on the web, this isn’t really very much. The money is just a token though, say the Swedes, who, characteristically, won’t be lavishing it on themselves, but jizzing it all on a foundation dealing with free speech, freedom of information, and “openness of the nets”, as they charmingly put it.

At least one of them must be getting tired of the cash-sapping “cause” by now - the goodwill needed…MORE »

Lloyds are lining up Win Bischoff, still pretty fresh from being dropped by Citigroup, to be the new Lloyds chairman. As we saw recently, previous chair Victor Blank had to go lest the Lloyds shareholders release the hounds; his cocktail chat with Gordon Brown, persuading him to drop competition law and let Lloyds take over HBOS, has become one of the most infamous moments of the financial crisis (even though it might turn out rather well for Lloyds in the end). Now Bischoff has the task of placating investors and corralling Lloyds’ vast new asset pool.

Bischoff was chairman of Citigroup…MORE »

Yesterday, Bernard Madoff - Diet Coke drinker, Neil Diamond fan and $65bn fraudster - was given a life sentence for orchestrating the giant Ponzi scheme that left Kevin Bacon without any life savings. The farcical nature of American sentencing means that actually he got nearly two life sentences, 150 years, presumably insuring against spectacular advances in science over the next few years that would allow Madoff to live to 221 years old. One wonders why the judge didn’t go the whole hog and sentence him to “like, a squillion years”.

Still, it sends the message that this was a Very Bad Thing…MORE »

Screen Digest, one of those media analyst companies that exist solely to make ad salesmen cry, is all set to publish its latest report, and it’s predicting a $2bn fall in US TV advertising. And what with online services like Hulu carrying around a quarter of the ads that the same programming on TV has, internet advertising isn’t going to being making an extra $2bn any time soon.

Spake author Arash Amel to the Financial Times: “Online video is not mature enough and won’t mature quickly enough to fill the gap left by the decline of traditional TV advertising”. But he…MORE »

A new travel website, Simonseeks.com, launched last week – offering its writers a share in advertising revenue. Created by Simon Nixon, the guy behind price comparison sites moneysupermarket.com, it aims to make “high quality, independent mini travel guides freely available to everyone”.

Calling itself the “YouTube of Travel”, Simonseeks is a community where “travellers, journalists and celebrities” can write guides and get paid half the revenue created by a user clicking through from your guide to make a holiday booking, or clicking on an advert. Like YouTube, content is reviewed by other users, meaning that popular guides get bumped up the…MORE »

Steve Brill has been determined for years to get people to stop getting their news for free, starting up and then shutting down a variety of ventures along the way. Yesterday he outlined more details of his latest wheeze, Journalism Online. The only way they could have named it more blandly would be to go with “Words On A Screen”, but let’s not dwell on that.

It’s a payment platform that Brill’s been working on for a while - Christie Hefner expressed Playboy’s support for it when we spoke to her a couple of months back. It’s a customisable bundle of different pricing…MORE »

Perez Hilton vs will.i.am getting too latently homophobic? Jordan’s Twitter beefs wholly unconvincing? Then step up to the bitchfight of the year, with Mervyn King taking on Lord Turner in the battle to see who gets to regulate the UK’s financial industry!

Ok, so it’s not that exciting. But it is pretty important. As we know, the creeping deregulation in the City as the UK tried to woo the world’s financial business has partly contributed to the current stickiness - there’s a determined effort to make sure we don’t allow bonkers derivatives and over-leveraged buyouts, glued together with boozy lunches, to…MORE »

In a heartening bit of stimulus, the US has given Ford, Nissan and Tesla billions in cheap loans to fund the development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles. The companies are receiving $5.9bn, $1.6bn and $465m respectively.

Ford is spending its on making 13 big names like the Focus and Mustang more fuel efficient, while Nissan is spending it on making one of its plants ready to manufacture its upcoming electric family car. Tesla are less well known on these shores - they make a “roadster” that was apparently designed by Barbie and Ken to ferry them to a volleyball party, but…MORE »

“Green shoots” is an irritating phrase, giving rise as it does to endless crappily stretched metaphors. “Some see green shoots in hedges”, “Are the green shoots of growth about to be nipped in the bud, or will they be smothered by fast growing Chinese bamboo shoots?”, or this piece of cod Zen wisdom from RBS’s Stephen Hester this week: “Sometimes the first green shoots suffer from frost and are the first to die.” He so wise!

To use one of our own though, the green shoots have been today sprayed with the Agent Orange of investor pessimism, and rather than sprouting blooms of…MORE »

Madoff’s victims have a morsel of retribution to tie them over to the big day next week when the fraudster gets sent down - the litigious net has widened to swallow up alleged co-conspirators at Cohmad, the broker that channelled billions of dollars to Madoff.

It’s surprising that it’s taken this long, considering lawsuits have been brought against other people close to Madoff, like Ezra Merkin, as well as other channellers of people’s money, like Fairfield Greenwich. But none get as close as Cohmad, who operated in the next office to Madoff and was partly owned by him. Maurice and Marcia…MORE »

Royal Bank of Scotland, part-owned by the government and wholly-loathed by the British public after former chief exec Fred Goodwin became Mr Recession, are embroiled in two new bits of money-based controversy. First of all the new pay package for tabard-loving tree enthusiast Stephen Hester, and also the news that they’re splashing out on lots of corporate strawberries at Wimbledon this year.

Stephen Hester’s new compensation package totals nearly £10m, with salary coming to £1.2m, £2m annual non-cash bonus, and then £6.4m in long-term share options. No wonder he’s seeing green shoots! To the thousands of sacked RBS employees, it’s going to be…MORE »