Planet Business

A sideways view at business this week

THE NUMBERS

85,000

Number of "cowboy directors" running Irish companies, according to company law expert Brian Walker - that's enough rogue directors to fill Croke Park.

€2.8 billion

Size of the tax shortfall in State coffers at the end of August, after a summer of economic contraction almost as severe as the rain.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"People are going to have to knuckle down into it."

- Bertie Ahern sits back and tells the Newstalk Breakfast Show how it's going to be from now on.

GOOD WEEK

MANCHESTER CITY FC

Just what every struggling, credit-burdened business needs: intervention from oil-rich trillionaires who promise to "clear any pending payments" and "buy whatever is needed".

Dr Sulaiman al-Fahim (pictured), the property developer managing the takeover of the club for Abu Dhabi's ruling family, is currently declaring his transfer targets for a "dream team" that will become "the biggest club in the world".

COIN COLLECTORS

The Central Bank has issued a €5 silver proof coin and a €100 gold proof coin featuring Antarctic explorers Ernest Shackleton and Tom Crean. The limited issue coins have been designed by Thomas Ryan, who you may know from such previous coin classics as the Irish £1 red deer coin and the 1988 Dublin Millennium 50p coin.

CHROME

Google's new open source internet browser has the potential to become a "Windows killer", according to TechCrunch.com. Web traffic analysis firm StatCounter reckoned that Chrome grabbed 1 per cent of the global browser market on its launch day, hitting not just Microsoft's Internet Explorer but the open source browser Firefox.

BAD WEEK

OIL SPECULATORS

It will have seemed like such an easy bet. With hurricane Gustav predicted to intensify to a Category 5 hurricane as it crossed the Gulf of Mexico, oil production was shut off last weekend with workers removed from the rigs for safety. But investors who speculated on a fresh spike in the price of crude oil will have been almost as disappointed as the anorak-sporting television crews assembled in New Orleans when Gustav was rapidly downgraded to a tropical storm. With no damage to the refineries, oil prices promptly dropped to their lowest level in five months.

"It is now time that the Government put away their golf clubs, suntan lotion and Dan Brown paperbacks and got a grip on the deteriorating Irish economy."

- Fine Gael finance spokesman Richard Bruton responds to the poor public finances, which, to be fair, probably don't make the ideal beach read.