2 |

February 23 - March 1 2011

News

The Telegraph

μNews

PAGES 2-14

μWorld News PAGES 15-17

μComment PAGES 18-21

μ Letters

PAGE 20

μObituaries PAGES 22-23

μ Features

PAGES 24-26

μCulture

PAGES 27-29

μExpat Life PAGES 30-32

μBusiness

μClassified

μPuzzles

μSport

PAGES 33-37

PAGE 38

PAGE 39

PAGES 40-48

NEWS P10

Third time lucky Diana’s brother Earl Spencer is to wed Canadian divorcee

COMMENT P18

London calling Will Mubarak join list of exiles who have sought a haven in city?

FEATURES P24

Open book Men don’t mess with me, says the new literary face of BBC

BUSINESS P33

Brace yourself Families should start preparing for interest rate rises, says Bank

LOTTO 16/02

LOTTO 19/02

11 5 15 26 29 32 6 16 26 32 34 46

Bonus Ball 49

Bonus Ball 33

There were no winners of Saturday’s £4.8m jackpot and one winner of Wednesday’s £2.1m prize

μEDITORIAL OFFICE: 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT. Tel (Int 44) 207 931 2000. Email weeklyt@telegraph.co.uk μADVERTISING: For details of local offices, contact Julie Bridge, Tel (44) 207 931 3290. Email julie.bridge@telegraph.co.uk. For further information from any advertiser in this issue, please email your contact details, the advertiser(s) and issue date to weeklytelegraphsubs@telegraph.co.uk μSUBSCRIPTIONS: Weekly Telegraph Subscriptions, 3rd-4th Floor, Victory House, Meeting House Lane, Chatham, Kent ME4 4TT. Tel (44) 1622 335080. Fax (44) 1634 815163. (Office hours: 09.00-17.00 GMT.) Email weeklytelegraphsubs@telegraph.co.uk μDELIVERY INQUIRIES: Australia: Network Services. Contact MAGSHOP. Tel: 136 116. Email magshop@magshop.com.au Canada: Vito Petrucci. Tel 001 416 585 3131. Fax 001 416 5855 476. Email vpetrucci@globeandmail.com Denmark: Bjarne Balle-Christiansen. Tel 0045 3327 7724. Fax: 0045 3296 8682. Email abo@interpress.dk Germany: Frank Blumhofer. Tel 0049 6105 925 573. Fax 0049 6157 804 599. Email fblumhofer@imd-delnet.de Hong Kong: Jeff Law. Tel 00 852 2756 8193. Fax 00 852 2799 8840. Email Jefflaw@foreignpress.com.hk Kenya: Shadrack Ochanda. Tel 0025 425 40280. Fax 0025 425 40295. Malaysia: Peter Lee. Tel (03) 7981 8563. Fax (03) 7981 9613. New Zealand: Netlink Subscriptions. Tel 0064 9 308 2871. Philippines: Denis Catangay. Tel 832 5383. Fax 831 3256. Email apcei@mnl.sequel.net Singapore: Doreen Tan. Tel 6282 1960. Fax 6382 3021.Email Doreen@carkitfe.com South Africa: Global News, 74 First Road, Kew 2090, South Africa. Tel: (011) 8872670/1. Fax 0865117067. Email: andy@globalnews.co.za Thailand: Khun Tai. Tel (02) 887 3331. Fax (02) 887 2259. United States: Marlon Johnson. Tel 1800 933 2147. μNEWSSTAND INQUIRIES: The Publisher, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT. Tel (44) (0) 20 7931 3447 Š The Weekly Telegraph (USPS#006819) is published weekly for US$218 a year by Telegraph Media Group Ltd, 111 Buckingham Palace Road, London SW1W 0DT, England. Periodicals postage paid at Newark, NJ. POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to The Weekly Telegraph, c/o SDS Global Logistics, 263 Frelinghuysen Ave, Newark, NJ 07114-1539.

μDATA PRIVACY: When you respond to Telegraph Media Group Limited’s competitions, offers or promotions, we may use your information for marketing purposes. We will contact you by mail or telephone to let you know about any of our special offers, products and services which may be of interest to you unless you have asked us not to. We will only contact you by email, text message, or similar electronic means with your permission. We will only pass your name on to third parties if you have consented for us to do so. In some cases our special offers, products and services may be provided, on our behalf, by our partners. If you have agreed to be contacted by us, your personal information may be passed to our partners; however, in all such cases we remain a data controller of your personal information. When responding to competitions, offers or promotions by postcard, if you do not wish for your details to be used by us to send you special offers, please make this clear by stating “No Offers”. We respect your data privacy. You may modify your preferences or get further information by writing to us at Data Privacy, Telegraph Customer Service, Victory House, Meeting House Lane, Chatham, Kent ME4 4TT or by email to data. protection@telegraph.co.uk.

1022

The Telegraph

By Harry Wilson and Alistair Osborne BARCLAYS paid out just £113million in corporation tax in 2009, despite making a pre-tax profit of £11.6 billion, according to Bob Diamond, the chief executive.

The disclosure came in a letter to Chuka Umunna MP, a member of the Treasury Select Committee (TSC), who put Mr Diamond under pressure to declare how much of the £2 billion in tax paid by Barclays to HMRC was corporation tax.

The vast majority of the tax paid by Barclays was pay-asyou-earn and National Insurance contributions, while corporation tax accounted for 5.7 per cent of the total bill. Mr Umunna said it was “shocking” that Barclays paid so little in corporation tax in 2009.

“This revelation underlines the Government’s failure to take the robust action needed to make sure the banks that caused the crash pay their fair share, and will stick in the stomachs of small businesses struggling to borrow and ordinary people feeling the pinch of the Government’s austerity measures,” said Mr Umunna.

Mr Diamond’s letter explained the amount of corporation tax Barclays paid was a result of it being able to reduce its bill due to “UK

Tax declaration: Bob Diamond losses brought forward principally arising from credit write-downs”. Most of these write-downs are understood to be related to losses Barclays made on holdings of US sub-prime debt securities that crashed in value.

Under UK tax law, companies incorporated in Britain are legitimately allowed to write off losses against their tax bill. About £7 billion of the profit the bank made in 2009 related to a one-off gain on its sale of the fund management business BGI.

According to an answer given to the House of Lords by the Treasury minister Lord Sassoon, HMRC expects Britain’s large banks to pay £20 billion in tax for the year 2010-11, 80 per cent of it in the form of employee contributions and 20 per cent in corporation tax.

Continued from page 1 Mr Cameron said standards in public services – on cancer survival rates, school results and crime – have been slipping against comparable countries for too long and that “complete change” was needed.

“We will create a new presumption – backed up by new rights for public service users and a new system of independent adjudication – that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service,” he said.

“Of course, there are some areas – like national security services or the judiciary – where this wouldn’t make sense. But everywhere else should be open to real diversity, open to everyone who gets and values the importance of our public service ethos. This is a transformation: it ends the state’s monopoly over public services.”

Some of the changes to encourage competition are already being introduced through education and health legislation. However, when taken with the new Open Public Services White Paper,

Downing Street believes the plans are a “battering ram to break open monopolies”.

Sources said Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, was fully “on side”, and the plans have been developed with Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury.

Last Friday, the Coalition claimed that almost three million people were employed by councils after an “explosion” in “crazy non-jobs”.

Local authorities have taken on an extra 180,000 workers since 1997, with the total number not employed in traditional front-line roles now standing at almost 750,000, according to ministers.

The Coalition is highlighting the figures at a time when councils are threatening to cut basic services and increase charges because of cuts in central government funding.

Bob Neill, the local government minister, said: “These figures reveal the explosion in town hall jobs and bureaucracy under Labour and reinforce the need for some councils to

Giving evidence to the TSC last month, Mr Diamond said Barclays had paid out £12.5billion in UK tax in the past six years. In a statement, Barclays said it complied with “taxation laws in the UK and in all the countries where we do business”.

“This is proof banks live in a parallel universe to the rest of us – paying billions of pounds in bonuses and unhampered by the inconvenience of paying tax,” said Max Lawson, spokesman for the Robin Hood Tax Campaign, which is calling for an increase in the amount of tax banks must pay.

In 2009, Barclays paid £3.7 billion in upfront and deferred bonuses to staff. Last week, the bank reported its results for 2010, showing £6.1billion pre-tax profits, with a bonus pool of £3.4 billion across the whole bank.

Barclays said: “The corporate tax affairs of an organisation with the global footprint of Barclays are complex and not reducible to simplistic comparisons; any link between Barclays Group profits and the amount of tax paid to the UK Government is inappropriate – there is no direct correlation between the two.”

Barclays declined last week to say how much UK corporation tax it paid in 2010.

Business, page 33

start cutting out middle management.

“Crazy non-jobs like cheerleading development officers and press officers tasked with spinning propaganda on bin collections provide no value to the public.”

According to the data, the number of people employed by local authorities in Britain stood at 2,728,000 in 1997 when Labour came to power. Last year the figure was 2,907,000.

There were 741,702 people on council payrolls who were not in traditional “front-line” jobs, such as those in education or health. Ministers said that, even if trade union predictions that Coalition cuts would lead to 162,000 job losses in local government were correct, it still meant that the number of town hall workers would be higher than when Labour came to office.

Among the jobs that have been spawned by the boom in “non-jobs” were a “bouncy castle attendant” on a salary of £13,000 at Angus council in Scotland and a “cheerleading development officer” in Falkirk.

VICTORIA BECKHAM, the former Spice Girl and her husband, David, are among the celebrities invited to the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William in April. They were two of the 1,900 guests who found a goldembossed invitation on their doormat at the weekend.

The Beckhams are invited because of David’s work with the Prince on England’s 2018 World Cup bid.

There was no word on whether Barack and Michelle Obama have been invited, but it is thought unlikely. As the prince is not yet heir to the throne, the wedding is not classed as a state occasion, so elected foreign leaders should not expect an invitation.

The Duchess of York is definitely not on the list. Reports, pages 11 and 15

BRITONS will be warned that they must cut their consumption of red meat to reduce the risk of cancer, following advice from the Government’s scientists.

Consumers will be told to eat no more than 500g (1.1lb) of red or processed meat each week under recommendations to be issued by the Coalition this week.

A Government source said: “It is important that people are not put off eating red meat entirely – but it would be irresponsible to ignore the potential health risks.”

The recommendations will follow the publication of a full report by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition. The findings are expected to state that lower consumption of red and processed meat would probably reduce the risk of bowel cancer.

SUMMER evenings are poised to become longer and lighter under a historic move to shift the nation’s clocks forward by an extra hour.

A new “tourism strategy”, to be published by the Coalition within days, is expected to contain plans to move the country to “double summertime”.

Putting the clocks forward by an hour to British Summer Time +1 (equivalent to Greenwich Mean Time +2) would provide lighter evenings in the summer months, but darker mornings.

Other proposals in the tourism strategy are expected to include scrapping the May Day bank holiday for another date.

Tourism chiefs back a bank holiday in October that could be called “UK Day” — or “Trafalgar Day” in recognition of the 1805 battle.