Business & FinanceEconomy

Market Impact

With half the company to be sold, the initial public offering could raise 350 billion yen at that valuation, which would exceed the size of Kokusai Electric’s IPO last year and become the largest since SoftBank Group listed its wireless unit in 2018. 

Income Protection Awareness Week (IPAW 2024) kicked off today (23 September) with a seminar for advisers exploring the current income protection (IP) market.

The awareness week is being organised by the Income Protection Task Force (IPTF) to raise the profile and grow sales of IP products.

The week will comprise a series of online keynotes, panel debates, case studies and presentations and will tackle various themes across income protection.

Today’s session looked at the case for income protection and what advisers are seeing in the market and in client conversations.

It also looked at how advisers include IP in their advice process and the impact that consumer duty has had on adviser behaviour.

Jo Miller, co-chair, IPTF, said the IP market has seen a rise in sales, with a record number of sales on advice.

However, she urged the sector to keep up the momentum as more work needed to be done.

The adviser panel – consisiting of Mike Douglas, protection specialist, Woodside Financial Services, Nina Brown, protection specialist at Pam Brown Mortgages, and Hannah Murray, financial adviser, St. James’s Place Protection Planning – expressed similar sentiments.

For his part, Douglas urged advisers to make the IP advice process simple by explaining the benefits and pitfalls of not having IP cover.

Meanwhile, research from protection and employee benefits provider MetLife UK has found that while one in five (20%) consumers see the benefit of financial protection, 12% don’t understand the difference between the various offerings.

The study, published today, found one in ten (9%) customers admitted they only thought about financial protection once it was too late and they needed to claim.

MetLife said IPAW provides the chance for advisers to talk to clients and review what protection they do and don’t have in place.

THE youngest man accused of raping “Beast of Avignon’s” wife carried out the horror ordeal on the day his first daughter was born, a court heard.

Joan Kwai was just 23 when he assaulted Gisele Pélicot after her sick husband drugged her and called 72 male strangers to rape her over a decade.

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He was among the six other men accused of the mass rape to have taken the stands today in the trial that has rocked France.

The court heard that Kwai, a former French conscript, first went to Mr Pélicot’s house in November 2019, the day his daughter was born. 

He went back again for a second time and admitted to having planned a third visit which Mr Pelicot cancelled at the last minute.

He also said he never asked if Ms Pélicot had consented to the sexual activity, before admitting it was a rape and that the victim was unconscious.

He said he “recognised the facts, but not the intention”.

Kwai was arrested at the army barracks while he was serving, DailyMail reports.

Prosecutors have described him as a man with “depressive tendencies”.

Dubbed “Beast of Avignon”, Dominique Pélicot has been accused of “aggravated rape” of ex-wife Ms Pélicot – and faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted at the Vaucluse Criminal Court, in Avignon.

He allegedly invited the men he met online to assault his wife after spiking her food to knock her out.

Taking the stands for the first time last week, the sick grandfather admitted to the heinous mass rape of Ms Pélicot that stretched for almost a decade.

Wearing a grey shirt, the French pensioner shuffled into court using a cane to support himself and owned up to his crimes.

He said: “Today, I maintain that, with the obligations we all have, I am a rapist, like everyone in this room. They cannot say otherwise.”

However, as the cross-examination continued, a tearful Mr Pélicot shockingly insisted he “still loves” his ex-wife.

He said: “I loved her well for 40 years and loved her badly for 10 years … I ruined everything, I lost everything. I should never have done that.”

During the trial, psychologists described Mr Pélicot as a “Jekyll and Hyde” character who appeared like a normal husband during the day and then drugged his wife so strangers could rape her at night.

Mr Pélicot said of the comments: “I am accused of many things. We are not born perverts, we become them.

“Even if it is paradoxical, I have never considered my wife as an object.”

A report submitted to the court suggested Mr Pélicot displayed a tendency towards “paraphilia” –  sexual arousal in atypical situations – and also “somnophilia”– an attraction to unconscious partners.

This made him a “very caring and much-loved husband by day” but “a rapist at night”, psychologist Bruno Daunizeau explained in the report.

The court heard how Mr Pélicot considered himself a “good husband” to the woman he married in 1971 and had three children with.

He said he was “respectful of his wife’s desires and refusals to sex”, but “also had fantasies about swinging” and “got pleasure” in seeing his wife “undergo sexual acts that she normally refused”.

His daughter Caroline Darian, 46, branded him as the “worst sexual predator” as she took the stand on the fifth day of the rape trial.

She told the court: “How do you rebuild yourself from the ashes when your father is undoubtedly one of the greatest sexual predators of recent years?”

Ms Darian was herself secretly photographed in the nude by her father, as were her two sisters-in-law while taking a bath, the court heard.

She is convinced that – like her mother – she was routinely drugged so that her father could sexually assault her.

The photos taken of her were in a file entitled “around my daughter, naked”.

HORROR DETAILS

Mr Pélicot was first caught in September 2020, when he was arrested for secretly filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket in Carpentras.

His devices were searched, and there were hundreds of photos and pornographic videos of women, including family members.

It was while in custody that Mr Pélicot reported a hard drive, hidden under a printer, which contained a file called “Abuses”.

It classified the nickname and telephone numbers of attackers, together with some 3,800 photos and videos of Gisèle Pélicot being raped, between 2011 and 2020.

The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by Ms Pélicot ‘s husband and more than 90 by strangers.

Investigators drew up a list of 72 suspects besides the husband, and have so far managed to identify 50 of them, aged between 26 and 74.

The French court heard that in some of the heinous footage, Pélicot allegedly takes turns with three other men to rape his wife in one single incident.

In a separate case, Mr Pélicot has been charged with raping and murdering a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991.

He has admitted one attempted rape in 1999 after DNA testing proved a case against him.

The Avignon aggravated rape case continues, and is due to last until December 21.

Fourteen of the other defendants have admitted rape, while the rest deny any wrongdoing.

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Business & Finance

Market Impact

The investigation into suppliers for LVMH’s second-largest fashion label, which Reuters revealed on June 11, has shone a spotlight on potential worker exploitation in the $1.6 trillion global luxury goods industry.

It isn’t the solution to overconsumption, it’s a symptom of it

September 23, 2024 4:36 pm(Updated 4:38 pm)

I am famous among my family and friends for scavenging. Basically all the furniture in the billions of flats I lived in during my twenties was hoiked off the street. In my (admittedly middle-class) neighbourhood, I am constantly walking past cardboard boxes full of dusty nicknacks and battered flatpack bookcases, offered for free; days later, often drenched by rain and having been damaged or dirtied, they are still there.

This is what’s become known as “middle-class fly-tipping” – that is, leaving things on the street with a little “PLEASE TAKE ME” note, as opposed to the sort of fly-tipping which ditches a washing machine on waste ground by a railway line. On the whole, it feels like a neighbourly, communal spring-cleaning ritual, a way to keep useful objects from the landfill. But some people who’ve done it have found themselves slapped with £500 fixed-penalty notices.

Now the local government and social care ombudsman has announced there will be new guidance about this sort of thing, intended to stop local authorities from dealing too harshly with people who leave unwanted items outside their homes.

It seems like a step in the right direction. Yet, while putting out useful objects and furniture for passersby to pick up might seem helpful, what’s “useful” is ultimately in the eye of the beholder. And as the queen of middle-class fly-tipping I should know. I am part of the problem. I must do better.

It’s just so very hard to stop. While I have become a little more discerning with age, I still cheerfully adopt shoes, clothes and books, not just from beneath “PLEASE TAKE ME” signs but also the, er, ground.

My best finds include several silver rings, a rabbit fur muff someone had left on snowy Primrose Hill, and an Anglepoise lamp still in its box.

Luckily, considering how small my current flat is, I’m just as fond of getting rid of stuff as I am of obtaining it – but assuming that my trash will be another person’s treasure, let alone to the extent that it excuses blocking paths and littering garden walls, is ultimately as arrogant as it is entitled.

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I am entirely invested (nay, embedded) in the ecosystem of strangers passing junk between each other. But we’ve got to stop doing it via the pavement.

While it’s a bore to dispose of things properly – who wants to drive to the tip or organise a waste collection? – that doesn’t mean that your neighbours should have to clamber over your ratty old sofa for weeks just because it’s got a “FREE TO A GOOD HOME” Post-It on it.

There are lots of ways of getting your old stuff to people who actually want it. Sell things on Vinted or Ebay or Depop, put them on Facebook Marketplace or Freecycle! Give them to charities, or easier still, organise a collection by one! Ring your friends who are moving home and see if they need your bed frame, or fancy any of your old books! Just please don’t put them on the road, to get rained on and manky.

No question, we are too quick to trash things that still work, to the extent that the planet is on fire/underwater thanks to the effects of our thoughtless overconsumption. But giving things away like this doesn’t divorce you from that cycle.

I am the biggest fan of buying second-hand, but leaving things on the street is littering, no matter how hard we try to flatter ourselves with lofty notions of a circular economy. We’re so accustomed to getting new stuff that we’ve stopped thinking about how to dispose of the old. “Middle-class fly-tipping” isn’t the solution to our problem; it’s a symptom of it.

It’s time to admit that my personal convenience (or self-indulgent fantasy of providing someone with something they need, just by chance) doesn’t outweigh the fact that most stuff I don’t want won’t be of interest to anyone else either.

I promise I’ll get my act together. Meanwhile, if anyone wants a box of lightly dog-eared books, I’m your woman.