Thursday newspaper round-up: Border controls, McKinsey, KPMG
By Michele Maatouk
Date: Thursday 11 Apr 2024
(Sharecast News) - New post-Brexit UK border controls coming into force later this month will cost British businesses £2bn and fuel higher inflation, according to a report warning that UK-EU trade will be damaged as a result. With less than a month before the introduction of new checks on animal and plant products from 30 April, the insurer Allianz Trade said the controls agreed under Boris Johnson's Brexit deal could add 10% to import costs over the first year. - Guardian
Rishi Sunak ordered multiple taxpayer-funded focus groups and polls to craft the messaging of his planned "eat out to help out" campaign in July 2020, despite keeping the UK's top medical and scientific advisers in the dark about the scheme. The Treasury negotiated five public opinion contracts worth more than £2m from June 2020 throughout the pandemic, while Sunak was chancellor, including those to establish how best to "sell" the hospitality scheme to voters. - Guardian
Heat pump owners are to host visitor days at their homes for prospective buyers as Britain races to boost demand for the technology in an attempt to hit net zero targets. Homeowners can invite curious neighbours round so they can see the pumps in action using a website launched by the charity Nesta, in a move likely to recall 1960s Tupperware parties when the brand's supporters showed off its products to their friends. - Telegraph
McKinsey is planning to lay off hundreds of staff as the consulting giant grapples with weaker demand for its services. The management consultancy company is preparing to make 360 redundancies across its design, data engineering, cloud and software divisions. McKinsey's layoffs will affect about 3pc of 12,000 of workers across the business's global offices who are considered as specialists or as having technical expertise. The job cuts will not affect the firm's traditional consultant roles, Bloomberg first reported. - Telegraph
Hundreds of staff at the Dutch division of KPMG cheated on professional exams and misled investigators, resulting in the Big Four accountancy firm being hit with a record $25 million fine from America's audit regulator. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in the United States found that between 2017 and 2022 hundreds of KPMG workers in the Netherlands, including senior partners and managers, had shared questions and answers with one another. This included for exams that they had to sit to test their understanding of professional ethics. - The Times
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