LONDON: Cosmetics firm Rimmel will review its contract with super model Kate Moss, who is named in instances of drug abuse. The company said it is shocked and dismayed by the allegations surrounding the model’s behaviour and that it is reviewing the contract. Rimmel, the top-selling U.K. cosmetics brand, had signed Moss in September 2001 and renewed her contract last year. She models for mascara, nail polish, lipstick and other cosmetics for Rimmel.

British newspapers had published pictures of the 31-year-old model consuming cocaine. She is yet to react to the allegation publicly.

She has already been dropped from modelling assignments by firms such as U.K. fashion store Burberry and Swedish clothing company Hennes & Mauritz. Even French fashion house Channel said it will not renew an existing contract when it expires in October. According to estimates, Moss earns as much as 4 million pounds from her modelling contracts.

Hennes & Mauritz, by far the largest fashion store in Europe, said it is invoking a provision in the contract that stipulates that its models should be “healthy, wholesome and sound”. It said it has decided that a campaign with Moss is not consistent with H&M;’s clear disassociation from drugs. Moss was to model a one-time collection from designer Stella McCartney for the fall 2005.

Burberry is cancelling an autumn campaign with Moss following a mutual consent.

The model is now facing a police inquiry into the alleged involvement with cocaine. If she is found to have used the drug, she can be charged with possession of the drug, which is a serious offence. The police generally probes drug dealers rather than users, but London’s police commissioner Ian Blair said the policy is adaptable to the impact of events.

Moss had won a libel case recently against Daily Mirror over allegations that she had collapsed after ingestion of the drug in Barcelona in 2001.

The model, with a two-year daughter, has been in media glare following revelation of her relationship with pop star Pete Doherty, who has admitted to having used cocaine and heroin. With an estimated fortune of 30 million pounds, she is best known for her work for Calvin Klein.

LONDON – Virgin Atlantic boss Sir Richard Branson has called on governments across the world to break the monopoly of the Opec and try and build at least 10 refineries to meet the growing demand for petrol and oil.

Sir Branson said that the fuel costs were hitting his airline hard and consequently he was exploring possibilities to build a refinery and towards this end was planning to sound out the government, “At the moment there’s an enormous shortage of refineries in the world. Every one of the refineries is at capacity, the oil companies are not building new refineries, and we have put a team on trying to raise money to build at least one,” he said.

Fuel bills for Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Express had hit £750 million a year, an increase of over £300 million a year over the last couple of years. And in the aftermath of the tragic Hurricane Katrina, fuel prices tore through the roofs hitting consumers and businesses hard. Oil companies were accused of gouging prices, but in the end people had to pay up. “If we can encourage governments to confront this issue, if we can get western governments together to work out how to deal with the issue, we think we can make a real difference,” Branson said adding that even a tiny reduction in the airline’s fuel costs could make a significant difference to consumers.

As fuel prices have begun returning to pre-Katrina rates, a price war has broken among suppliers to attract more customers. Esso confirmed a 4 pence reduction in its UK petrol and diesel prices effective from Friday, while supermarkets Asda and Tesco have already done so. Royal Dutch Shell and BP were also planning to cut prices.

Sir Branson came down heavily on the Opec countries and said that they collude to keep oil prices high, “The western world should have a counterbalance to that. If $20 billion was put aside to build 10 new refineries, oil prices would start to collapse again,” he said. He felt that the government should reward companies who practice fuel efficiency by providing tax breaks. “If they intervene in the short term and do something too radical to stop growth, we will have an incredible recession,” he concluded.

LONDON: The U.K. government has postponed the proposed revaluation of millions of homes in England, which would have led to substantial increase in council taxes. The review was expected to have brought one in every three homes in a higher tax band, mostly in south of England.

A senior government official said the revaluation exercise will be postponed — and not cancelled. The last time the valuation was conducted was in 1991.

The council tax is a local tax based on property prices with houses put into eight categories. Alongside the revaluation, there is an independent evaluation of the council tax now under way conducted by Sir Michael Lyons. The government official hinted that the government is waiting for the Lyons report. Sir Michael is intending to publish his recommendations in December, with implementation due to coincide with revaluation in April 2007.

The revaluation has been described as a time bomb for the Government because property prices — in London and the South East in particular — have risen significantly since the last valuation. There has been opposition to the exercise with many people saying they are already paying higher rates of council taxes. Under the existing eight band system, owners in the top-rate band H are paying twice as much as people on band D.

The revaluation was to cover all the 22 million English homes and possibly have them rebanded, based on their value on April 1 this year. The proposal envisages that anyone whose house has risen in value by more than the national average since the 1991 valuation is likely to move to a higher tax band in April 2007. In the 1991 valuation, the average house price was 73,000 pounds. It is now around 180,000 pounds. However, houses in London, the South East and South West could command prices in the range of 310,000 pounds to 440,000 pounds and the owners could expect a tax increase of 1,000 pounds annually. Pensioners would have been the hardest hit by the proposed increases.

Revaluation has already been done in Wales, and it has shown that 58 per cent of homes remained in the same tax band, while about a third had moved to a higher band. However, in some areas where house prices have gone very high, the tax increase has been really high — 64 per cent in Cardiff and 52 per cent in Wrexham.

While the households paid 8.8 billion pounds in council taxes in 1996-97, it was 16.4 billion pounds in 2003-04, an increase of 86 per cent.

LONDON – BT has announced that it will be conducting pilot trials that would enable it to provide broadband services to the remaining 0.2 percent of areas where the service is currently unavailable.

This is because these pockets are out of range of the nearest telephone exchange. BT will install broadband switches (DSLAMS) near street cabinets and connect them via a fiber optic cable to the exchange. Nine locations in Yorkshire and Northern Ireland have been identified for the trials that will run into the summer of the next year.

Commenting on this project, Cameron Rejali, BT Wholesale managing director for products and strategy said, “While the vast majority of people can now get access to broadband we haven’t lost sight of the small pockets where access to this vital technology remains an issue. We’re investigating a range of possible solutions which might help us get broadband to small pockets of customers in certain areas.”

BT had extended the availability of broadband services to local exchanges that had been upgraded so that many users would be able to get 512kbit/s ADSL service. This move had ensured that there was 99.8 percent broadband connectivity. Now, BT is focusing on integrating the remaining 0.2 percent as well.

“We believe the approaches set to be trialled can get ADSL service to such areas but BT Wholesale has to investigate the technical, commercial and operational factors which will influence any future deployment of such solutions,” pointed out Rejali. About 200 trialists have been invited to take part in these pilot trials.

BT is also conducting similar trials in December to provide broadband services to Charlton Down area of Dorchester, Dorset, and the Kingswells area of Aberdeen. In these areas, the cable technology is not broadband-enabled and hence they have been excluded till now. Both these trials aim to test the technical, logistical and commercial aspects of providing broadband services to remote areas.

LONDON – The UK’s Competition Commission has said it has found evidence that retail store cards were being overcharged and consequently consumers were ending up paying an extra £100 million a year. The Commission further said that store cards are uncompetitive.

These store cards charged higher interest rates and were thus drilling a hole into the holders’ pockets. Around 14 million store card accounts exist in the UK. The competition watchdog added that it wanted warnings on the cards to inform consumers of these liabilities.

In a report that was released this morning, the commission said that since there was no pressure on the stores to ensure that they charge competitive Annual Percentage Rate (APR) interest on credit, they were virtually charging at their will.

“Store card APRs (interest rates) are on average some 10 to 20 percent higher across the store card market as a whole than they would have been had they reflected providers’ costs, including the cost of capital,” said commission deputy chairman Christopher Clarke. “The detriment to cardholders in terms of the excess prices paid for credit and insurance is in the region of 80 million to 100 million pounds a year,” he added. The Commission’s investigation has tuned up some problems in this regard for which it is consulting to find possible solutions. Following a parliamentary Treasury Select Committee enquiry into UK debt, the credit card industry had agreed to put out similar warnings as demanded by the commission on the general use credit cards.

“People, it seems, are genuinely ignorant about the rates they are signing up to when they take out a store card…if we raise the level of consumer knowledge then competition will improve and APRs, which are too high, should fall,” said a Competition Commission spokesman.

HSBC Holdings PLC and GE Consumer Finance are two of the leading companies that provide store cards in Britain.

LONDON: Readers of the Guardian were surprised this morning to find their paper had sort of shrunk from a broadsheet to a size that is known among the media as the ‘Berliner’.

It isn’t exactly a tabloid but readers are expected to find the new size “small enough to handle” as their ad says. The newspaper hopes the relaunch and the new look – all pages in colour, will win back readers that had moved to The Times and the Independent in 2003 when these newspapers changed to tabloid format.

In the July 2005 readership review by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), Guardian’s circulation had dropped by 358,000.

Guardian said the downsizing was in response to research which revealed that readers were uncomfortable with the broadsheet format and would rather read a newspaper that was easier to handle in many everyday situations such as commuting to work. The ‘Berliner’ size is midway between a broadsheet and a tabloid.

There was also the other challenge from free newspapers such as the Metro which was forcing other newspapers to reconsider their marketing strategy. Mainline newspapers were losing readers also to news sources like television and the Internet.

For Guardian, the redesign has meant a new masthead and a new typeface – the Guardian Egyptian and new state-of-the-art printing equipment – three MAN Roland ColourMan presses from Germany. Every page is now in colour and easier on the eye compared to Guardian’s earlier B/W look. There will also be a couple of new sections and 12 pages will feature the sports section exclusively.

The “radical change” as Guardian editor Alan Rusbridge calls it, involved a cost of £80 million and 1 1/2 year’s preparation.

Currently, the once the broadsheet newspapers are the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times.

ROME – Fiat Auto SPA and Ford Motors have reached an agreement to work together to develop new models in the small cars segment. The move comes seven months after Fiat broke off from an alliance with General Motors Corp.

Both Fiat and Ford confirmed that a memorandum of understanding had been signed between the two companies to develop Fiat’s “Cinquecento”, which would be revived and a new model of Ford’s “Ka.”

Both these cars would be developed as two-door hatchbacks and would be sold at “entry-level” prices. Both the companies have been hit hard in recent times with falling sales and revenues and analysts say that these agreement would give both the companies some breathing space as far as competing on a global scale is concerned. Patrick Juchemich, auto analyst for the Sal. Oppenheim bank was of the opinion that this partnership made a lot of sense, “The volumes of the respective cars are too low to justify that they go their own way,” he said. Both the above-mentioned cars would be designed differently, though they would have the same engines, chassis, and bodywork, he added.

Ford’s European division appeared to agree with him for it released a statement saying, “By working together on this project, both companies would envisage reduced development and material costs, while providing highly competitive products to the marketplace.” Lapo Elkann, in charge of brand promotion at Fiat said that the two cars would basically be made on the platform of the Fiat Panda, but that the agreement could be broadened in future. “The industrial agreement will be on one line of product. I can’t tell if they will do more as they are still in talks,” said Elkann.

Fiat’s chief executive Sergio Marchionne had hinted on Tuesday that the Turin-based company was on the verge of signing another deal with a reputed manufacturer, but had not given any details. Fiat had emerged better off after the deal with General Motors collapsed, since GM had to pay $2 billion to cancel out a clause in the agreement.

LONDON: A former pensions minister has warned that the Child Support Agency, which collects maintenance from absent parents, is in a state of “meltdown”, is refusing to publish data and has written off more than 1 billion pound in maintenance that is due from absent parents.

Frank Field, Labour M.P. representing Birkenhead, and former pensions minister, said he had conducted his own investigation into the agency’s performance and found that it is refusing to publish data which would reveal the extent of its shortcomings.

Field has written a letter to prime minister Tony Blair saying organisations in meltdown “typically bolt down the hatches to the outside world”. He said he has official statistics, correspondence and previous annual reports of the organisation for basing his interpretation that there is chaos inside the agency.

He told Blair that the uncollected maintenance amount that had been written off had crossed the 1 billion-pound mark, the total sum of maintenance still to be collected had gone up by a third to 1.26 billion pounds and the backlog of parents waiting for a maintenance assessment is soaring.

Field said the CSA was refusing to publish data to show how many cases were cleared through its work or how many were cleared because the cases were closed before it had got round to calculating the maintenance figure. He wants the agency’s collection functions to be transferred to the Inland Revenue and divert its staff to the task of chasing the non-payers.

Field’s findings also indicate that the proportion of lone parents receiving a first payment where the maintenance assessment had been made, dropped by a third — from 72 per cent to 52 per cent, while the total backlog of parents waiting for a maintenance assessment continued to rise — by 20 per cent in the past six months. As much as 40 per cent of all applications for child support on the new scheme are waiting for an assessment.

He said it now costs the tax payers 54 pence for every pound the agency collects.

Field’s letter to Blair says: “The 2003 reforms, while costing the taxpayer 456 million pounds for the new IT alone, have added to the agency’s general chaos and declining performance, and made an intolerably poor service even worse.”

Lord Hunt, minister responsible for the agency, said the agency is now dealing with one million extra child support cases, a workload which would test any organisation. He said the government is determined to ensure that the maintenance flows for those children whose parents live apart. For advise further afield it could be worth contacting an orange county ca child support lawyer.

LONDON: Dublin-headquartered budget airline Ryanair has overtaken British Airways in the total number of passengers carried in August. The airline reported a passenger growth of 27 per cent for the month to 3.26 million passengers from 2.57 million a year earlier. It claimed it now carries more passengers in Europe than British Airways does across its entire worldwide network.

Ryanair operates 250 routes across 21 countries.

British Airways had said earlier that it had a passenger load of 3.1 million in August, a fall of 3.9 per cent compared with figures for August last year. The airline’s performance has been hampered by a strike by 1,000 employees at London’s Heathrow Airport in support of fellow workers at the Gate Gourmet catering contractor. It had to cancel some 700 flights and the business class travel was the most affected segment.

British Airways is ranked third in Europe after Air France-KLM Group and Deutsche Lufthansa AG in terms of passenger traffic.

Said Ryanair’s chief executive Michael OLeary, “It’s official — Ryanair has today become the world’s favourite airline!” He said the airline’s passenger numbers is expected to grow 27 per cent in the year through March to 35 million travellers. It is launching its 14th European base at Pisa, Italy and may announce a new base each in September and October.

O’Leary said Ryanair’s decision not to impose a fuel surcharge had helped it to have more passengers.

A spokesperson for British Airways, however, disputed Ryanair’s claims saying the no-frills airline includes so called “no shows” in its figures (accounting for nearly 8 per cent of passengers).

“We carry our passengers much further than Ryanair does and, if you measure it in revenue passenger kilometers, we are a considerably larger airline,” he said.

LONDON: Lloyd’s of London insurance market has calculated that a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico like the Katrina could cause losses of the order of $60 billion — $10 billion in offshore energy losses and $50 billion in property losses. The insurer has done a study and the details are available on its website.

Meanwhile, quoting leaked documents from the insurer, newspapers said U.K. and U.S. insurers will face more than $40 billion in claims for damage from Katrina, the hurricane that made a landfall on the Gulf of Mexico coast on 29 August, when the levees that protect New Orleans city were damaged and the whole city was flooded, causing death and destruction on a vast scale.

Lloyd’s had done similar Realistic Disaster Scenario studies to assess the industry’s possible liability from natural disasters like a California earthquake and a typhoon in Japan.

Lloyd’s Chairman Peter Levene had said on record that Hurricane Katrina would cost a lot of money but was within normal business planning. The insurance market had its second-most-profitable year in
2004 even though there were four major hurricanes.

A Lloyd’s spokesperson said it is not for the company to give industry-wide loss estimates, but from what is assessed, there is not yet any consensus on how much Katrina will cost. However, its
syndicates are well equipped to deal with the catastrophe.

German reinsurance company Hannover Re says Katrina could be the costliest natural disaster in history.

Lloyd’s is expecting to receive “significant insurance claims,” largely from offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, property damage and claims from businesses forced to close. It has
sought supply claims estimates from all insurers by 12 September.

The insurance industry in Britain feels home insurance costs will go up. The Association of British Insurers says its members now feel hurricane has become part of a pattern of global climate change and it is going to have a serious impact on insurers. The association, however, said it is not expecting an immediate increase in premia.

Insurance companies with the highest exposure are believed to be Munich Re, Swiss Re and AIG. A spokesperson for Britain’s Prudential said it would be hard to say there would be nothing at all, but it would be minimal.