Today’s post covers a topic that will be of interest to a lot of people all across the world. According to figures from the last couple of years, the Premier League – the highest football league in the U.K. – is massively popular, and its rates of growth in terms of expansion, income, and transmission across the globe grows year on year. The Premier League, which sells the ability to televise its games to multimedia companies like Sky or BT, is preparing to auction off the rights to televise its product at the end of the year, with the expectation that this round of auction will produce new record amounts of revenue. Whilst that is likely, there are external factors that may affect this incessant growth, and those factors are the focus of today’s post. Simply put, the ‘Premier League’ has been an incredible success since its inception in 1992 . Figures taken from the last few years confirm this, with the Premier League being broadcasted to 156 countries with 4.2 billion fans wa...

Today’s post looks at the news that BT, the giant telecommunications company, has switched its auditor for the first time in 33 years due to the failings of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) regarding the recent Italian accounting scandal that cost BT £530 million. Although we spoke about the scandal very briefly here in Financial Regulation Matters before, it will be worth going over the scandal again to examine what the actual failings of the auditing firm were. Upon doing this, it will be good to examine the recent trends affecting the accountancy industry in terms of regulations because, in a move that is echoed in a forthcoming book by this author regarding credit rating agencies, a powerful position does not have to mean one is immune to regulation – in fact, it should be the opposite. The accounting scandal at the Italian division of BT started in October of last year, when the company reported that it had taken a £145 million hit after uncovering ‘ inappropriate management ...

Today’s post looks at a subject that has been the focus for many of the posts in Financial Regulation Matters and that is Executive Pay. In recognition of the ever-increasing issue of executive pay despite poor performance, the blog has analysed a number of issues in this field, ranging from BP recently cutting the pay packet of its CEO to Credit Suisse vowing to increase the bonuses it pays to its leading managers . However, as discussed in a post dating back to the 9 th of February, there is an undercurrent of unrest amongst shareholders that is slowly but surely beginning to shape the atmosphere amongst big business. In this post, the focus will be on reviewing the latest tranche of stories coming from the world of big business in relation to executive pay and, ultimately, the post will discuss how the trajectory of this movement to affect the pay packages of some of the leading business figures may continue. The first firm that will be worth discussing is Bunzl , the mul...