No sooner had families and friends around the world exchanged best wishes for a healthy, happy and prosperous 2015 than the news broke about Her Majesty’s second son.
A woman alleged that a billionaire American investment banker used her as an under-age ‘sex slave’ and forced her to have repeated sexual relations in London, New York and on a private Caribbean island with rich and famous friends, including Prince Andrew.
The Portuguese and the Brits were responsible for some good figures last December in a last month boost to the region’s economy.
Revenues from hotels and tourist developments in the Algarve increased 6.6% in December, the month in which the overall average occupancy rate was 29.0%, some 6.6% more than in 2013.
The eurozone has dropped into deflation, according to Eurostat which estimates that prices in December were -0.2% lower than a year earlier.
This is against the European Central Bank’s target of just under 2%.
The unemployment rate in the eurozone in November stood at 11.5%, stable compared with October but down from 11.9% in November 2013.
For Portugal, November’s rate of 13.9% was a shade higher than the 13.6% in October but a healthy drop from 15.4% in November 2013.
Last year appears to have been the year of the British entrepreneur as the UK saw a record number of new businesses start up.
Research has shown that 581,173 businesses were registered with Companies House last year.
This afternoon the police had gathered enough evidence for a charge of homicide to be levelled by the prosecutor at an expat Briton over the 'body in the garden.'
The corpse of a British woman who had been missing since last November was found by police last night, buried in the garden of the isolated house where she had lived for around ten years near Alcalar, Portimão, according to a police source this morning.
The market is spooked by the pending report into Portugal Telecom loans to Grupo Espírito Santo subsidiary Rioforte.
PT shares slid closer to the cliff edge today with a 20% drop to their lowest value ever and are trading at around 5% of their value just a year ago.
Following the article reproduced below published last December the Editor received the following commentary from Ulrich Bieger at Ferrostaal which we are delighted to print including his comments about 'ethical conduct.'
The offending text has been removed, but you will get the drift:
