Some Wall Street banks are drawing up preliminary plans that include moving some of their London-based operations to Ireland to deal with the possibility of the UK leaving the EU, the Financial Times reported on Sunday last week, citing people familiar with the situation.
Citigroup Inc, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Corp are considering Ireland as an alternative location for some of their European activities if they need to move them out of the UK, according to people familiar with the banks, the Financial Times reported.
The report said that the plans were at a very early stage.
Bank of America and Morgan Stanley declined to comment on the article. Citigroup could not immediately be reached for comment outside regular working hours.
British Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to conduct a referendum on a renegotiated EU membership if the Conservative Party is re-elected next year. This possibility has raised fears that the world’s sixth-largest economy could quit the bloc it joined in 1973.
The situation worries many in the City of London, also known as the Square Mile, the financial hub that accounts for roughly 10 percent of the British economy.
Separately, the UK’s Serious Fraud Office is looking into allegations of high street banks misusing government schemes designed to boost lending to small businesses, the report said. The UK’s main anti-fraud agency is investigating banks’ use of the government’s Enterprise Finance Guarantee and its predecessor the Small Firms Loan Guarantee Scheme in relation to small business customers.
The report said it had seen correspondence that showed the fraud office was studying allegations about alleged abuse by lenders.
The report said the fraud office has yet to announce whether it is to launch a formal investigation.
“We are aware of the situation. We’re monitoring it, but we can neither confirm nor deny whether an investigation is or isn’t taking place,” a fraud office spokesman said.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
MAJOR DROP: CEO Tim Cook, who is visiting Hanoi, pledged the firm was committed to Vietnam after its smartphone shipments declined 9.6% annually in the first quarter Apple Inc yesterday said it would increase spending on suppliers in Vietnam, a key production hub, as CEO Tim Cook arrived in the country for a two-day visit. The iPhone maker announced the news in a statement on its Web site, but gave no details of how much it would spend or where the money would go. Cook is expected to meet programmers, content creators and students during his visit, online newspaper VnExpress reported. The visit comes as US President Joe Biden’s administration seeks to ramp up Vietnam’s role in the global tech supply chain to reduce the US’ dependence on China. Images on
New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last