Every sensible business owner is aware that today’s trusted employee may become tomorrow’s competitor. However, as a High Court ruling showed, with the right legal advice and professionally drafted employment contracts, powerful steps can be taken to discourage disloyalty. The…
Registering your original business logos and artwork as trade marks really is the only effective means of protecting them and reliably maintaining your brand. The point was clearly made by a High Court case in which a small sportswear company…
Many entrepreneurs treat their companies as their babies, lending them their private money and, if necessary, writing off such debts when times are hard. In a case of interest to the business community, a tribunal has analysed the effect of…
The squeeze on incomes which has been facing households for a number of years has led to severe problems in industries that depend on 'discretionary spending', such as the restaurant trade. A recent report by a large firm of chartered…
Customer databases are the lifeblood of many businesses, taking a great deal of time and money to compile. They can, however, be pirated in a matter of seconds and, as one High Court case showed, that can give rise to…
Copyright violation is rife on the Internet, with 'knock-off' copies of branded goods being regularly offered on trading sites and whole websites set up to offer imitations of name brands. The response of several luxury brands that are particularly affected…
The consequences of public authorities failing to observe fairness and transparency rules when conducting contract tendering exercises can be severe indeed. In one High Court case, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) suffered acute embarrassment after applying arbitrary criteria in awarding…
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have a variety of methods, both sophisticated and less so, for uncovering tax evasion and find sectors with substantial cash income, such as takeaway restaurants, a source of easy pickings. As well as having industry…
There are all sorts of things one can do with trading losses under Corporation Tax (CT), but the fall-back position is that losses can be carried forward and set against the next available profits 'of the same trade'. That sounds…
When HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) suspect serious tax evasion, they will normally launch a full-scale tax investigation into the person they suspect. They use many tools in such investigations and one of the more common ones is to compare…