Business Roundup For Spain And The UK

Down the drain OVER-PRODUCTION means that 40 million litres of Spanish wine must be prevented from flooding the market and driving down prices.

Producers can choose between cutting down and eliminating grapes before they ripen, or “crisis distilling” to produce industrial alcohol.

Cataluña and Extremadura growers applied in June to the Ministry of Agriculture and the European Union for permits to distil 9.17 million litres of red and rosé wine before October 15.

“This is an exceptional measure that will attempt to alleviate this year’s situation,” a Ministry official said. “It was last done in 2020 owing to reduced consumption during the pandemic.”

Wilko on the brink PLANS for Wilko store closures and staff redundancies were temporarily paused as administrators analysed rescue offers.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, called in as the chain – which lost £38.7 million (€45.06 million) last year – ran out of cash, initially announced that redundancies amongst the group’s 12,500 employees would start within weeks.

No workable offers were received until Doug Putman, who owns HMV in the UK and Toys R Us in Canada, upped his bid from 200 to 350 of Wilko’s 400 stores when the August 25 deadline arrived.  He would also employ 10,000 of the existing staff and ensure that main creditors were paid, Putman said.

Another offer from Anglo-Canadian M2 Capital to save all the stores was rejected after failing to pass all necessary checks, sources close to the process said.

Spend now, pay later LATEST Bank of Spain figures show that between December 2022 and July this year,  bank deposits by Spanish families dropped by €19.548 billion.

This was the sharpest fall since late 2011 when the financial crisis was at its height, although the present context is different, with an increased demand for consumer credit as families spend on their cards and dip into their savings to cover day-to-day spending and inflation.

“Inflation means that families have lost purchasing power and they are compensating for this with savings accumulated during the pandemic which they are using now,” Alicia Coronil, who is chief analyst at Singular Bank, told ABC newspaper.

What’s in a name MADRID’S Upper Court of Justice (TSJM) ruled that Rothschild and Vega Sicilia had the right to the Macan label.

The jointly-owned group, in which Rothschild has a 50 per cent stake, has sold Macan wine since 2013 and the TSJM rejected a complaint from the Vega Clara bodega which markets Dacan.

Possible confusion between the labels could be based on “various factors”, including the public’s “degree of knowledge” of both bodegas, the TSJM said.

The “phonetic similarity” was also conclusive, as Macan and Dacan “created a highly similar auditory impression.”

Expensive plans THE UK government’s plans to hire approximately one million more NHS staff over the next 13 years could cost £50 billion (€58.2 billion), a thinktank warned.

The huge increase was essential for the country to provide adequate healthcare for an ageing population, the NHS’s chief executive Amanda Pritchard argued recently.

Max Warner, a health executive from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has predicted that this will inevitably involve higher taxes, spending cuts or more borrowing.

Costs would increase by an annual 3.6 per cent, eventually expanding the NHS budget by 70 per cent compared to today’s levels, Warner said.