Articles by ‘John North’

From 6 April 2013 Security and quasi security: new security registration regime expected to be in force.

On 20 March 2013, George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, delivered the 2013 Budget. The below sets out some of the key measures and policy of particular interest to financial service providers. HMRC has…

The Eurozone While the Cyprus meltdown has been dominating eurozone news lately, the overall crisis continues to dominate the global economic landscape.

The US Patent and Trade Mark Office (“USPTO”) has in a letter to Apple indicated that it would be unlikely to grant a trade mark for “iPad Mini” based on its initial description.

Around 130 turned up to an event hosted by the Scandinavian Chambers of Commerce on 11 March at Google UK Ltd in London. The event had been fully booked weeks before.

Sir Henry Newbolt’s Victorian poem applied the spirit of a seemingly-lost school cricket match – “An hour to play and the last man in” – to a desperate colonial battle – “The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead”. . . .  Pensions, one hopes, are not quite like that.  But there is still room for fair play in pensions, all the same.

I am a great supporter of auto-enrolment, and I think it was a very retrograde step that Mrs. Thatcher’s Government banned it in 1987. 

This is not a case of confusing cause and effect . . . . It is a very salutary lesson on the true cost of pensions linked to inflation.

In the 2012 Budget the Government announced that the Patent Box will come into force in April 2013. The Patent Box is a scheme whereby companies can apply a lower rate of Corporation Tax to profits earned from its patents after this date.The relief is being phased in from 2013 to 2017.

For many years everyone has complained about the country’s over-complicated State pension system.  Now the Government has published its White Paper on State pension reform, and people are still complaining!

You may remember our blog back in October reporting on the issue of the rise in mobile spamming. Yesterday the The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued the first monetary penalties under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). Fines totalling £440,000 were issued to the two owners of Tetrus Telecoms, a marketing company who were found to have sent millions of unlawful spam texts over the past three years.

The Committees of Advertising Practice (CAP) has announced that new rules providing transparency and choice for consumers around Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) will be included in the UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising from 4 February 2013.