A High Court has ordered the forfeiture of Diezani’s jewellery, gold iPhone worth $40m

Diezani at the world economic forum

Report suggests that Justice Nicholas Oweibo of the Federal High Court in Lagos has ordered the forfeiture of 2,149 pieces of jewellery and a customised gold iPhone, valued at $40m, belonging to Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, the former Minister of Petroleum Resources.

Apple CEO, Tim Cook takes 15% pay cut for missing sales target

iPhone maker, Apple is cutting CEO, Tim Cook's pay by 15% citing the company's failure to meet its performance goals for both sales and profits. This is because iPhone sales last year caused Apple to suffer its first annual revenue decline in 15 years.
Apple's board is now holding its CEO and other leaders accountable for the stumbles.
While Cook's salary rose to $3 million from $2 million last year, his cash bonus took a hit. Apple awarded Cook and other executives 89.5% of their target, instead of the maximum amount like in recent years.
That meant Cook's cash bonus fell to $5.4 million in 2016, down from $8 million the year before.
Cook's total compensation was $8.7 million last year, compared with $10.3 million in 2015.
Sales of iPhones have declined in each of the past three quarters, slipping to 45.5 million in the September quarter. The problem is that Apple has faced competition from Samsung and other smartphone makers and the newest iPhones haven't featured enough upgrades to lure customers.

Why Ireland's Government Doesn't Want Apple's Money

Ireland’s finance minister is so angry that he’s willing to fight the European Commission all the way through the courts for the right not to collect the taxes that Apple supposedly avoided over the last 12 years. Darn it, he’s already spent over 670,000 euros ($750,000) of taxpayers’ money in fighting the Commission. Why the ingratitude?

It’s not like his voters or his cabinet colleagues don’t want the money. After six years of austerity imposed as part of Ireland’s 2010 bailout, Ireland’s public sector in particular is gasping for it.

Moreover, Noonan is going to get it in the neck from his rivals if he doesn’t take the money. Pearse Doherty, the finance spokesman for Sinn Fein, which preaches an idiosyncratic cocktail of nationalism and left-wing populism, called on the government not to appeal the ruling, telling the newspaper Anphoblacht: “There’s an irony here when we see an Irish Government challenging the European Commission when they actually bowed down to the same Commission during the period of austerity and bank bailouts.”

“Many people will be mindful that they themselves will be taken before an Irish Court because of their failure to pay water charges, yet this same Government are willing to go to court to defend Apple,” Doherty said.

Sinn Fein would love it to be that simple. However, even its Marxist old guard would probably have to accept that the ruling is a devastating blow to a country that has thrived for decades on attracting foreign investment through its favorable tax regime: the stock of foreign direct investment in Ireland at the end of 2014 was 311 billion euros ($350 billion), or 165% of GDP. Facebook and Google and many others have their European headquarters in Ireland, due mainly to its 12.5% headline rate of corporate income tax—the lowest in the EU.

If Noonan now enforces the Commission’s ruling, it will send a chilling message to other companies that have either invested in Ireland in the past, or were thinking of doing so in the future.

Small wonder that Noonan told state broadcaster RTE that: “It is important that we send a strong message that Ireland remains an attractive and stable location of choice for long-term substantive investment.” He said a challenge was needed “to defend the integrity of our tax system, to provide tax certainty to business, and to challenge the encroachment of the EU state aid rules.”

That second half of Noonan’s statement is important. For although the Commission zeroed in on what it thought it to be a very specific abuse of Ireland’s tax code, the Irish government is clearly afraid that this ruling will be the thin end of a wedge that ends in its complete loss of sovereignty over setting its own tax rates.

Until this year, such sovereignty hadn’t seemed in danger: after all, the government had successfully resisted the attacks on its tax code during the 2010 bailout negotiations, when it was at the mercy of France and Germany. The two countries had the best opportunity in years to stop Ireland luring away investment—and budget revenues—by “racing others to the bottom.” At that time, the government of Taoiseach Enda Kenny had successfully argued that its tax code was the only thing keeping the Irish economy alive—and thus the only way the creditors would ever see their 78 billion euros in bailout loans again (to say nothing of another 130 billion euros and more lent to Irish banks by the ECB at the height of the crisis).

But times change. And even though it happened years after the alleged offense, the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU puts today’s ruling in an entirely different light. As long as the U.K. was part of the EU, it was a waste of everyone’s time and energy to even propose the greater centralization of powers over tax in Brussels. With the Brits gone, the Irish have lost their biggest protector. What was impossible becomes possible (at least if France and Germany agree on an approach that somehow suits them both, which admittedly remains a tall order).

The Commission’s press release itself contains a hint of where the first attack on Ireland’s tax sovereignty could come from.

“In fact, the tax treatment in Ireland enabled Apple to avoid taxation on almost all profits generated by sales of Apple products in the entire EU Single Market. This is due to Apple’s decision to record all sales in Ireland rather than in the countries where the products were sold. This structure is however outside the remit of EU state aid control. If other countries were to require Apple to pay more tax on profits of the two companies over the same period under their national taxation rules, this would reduce the amount to be recovered by Ireland.”

In other words, the Commission is inviting other member states to calculate how much they may have lost in tax revenue as a result of the alleged violations, and to claw it back from Ireland. That alone is good reason for Noonan to challenge the ruling. The last thing he or any Irish government wants is to establish that kind of precedent.

At least Noonan’s Fine Gael party has some support from Fianna Fail, the party that has ruled Ireland for most of the last century (perhaps unsurprisingly, given that a string of Fianna Fail governments devised and presided over the said scheme for years).

“The Commission has opened the door to other countries including the U.S. to seek a slice of the 13 billion euros,” finance spokesman Michael McGrath said in a press statement. “It would be deeply unwise of Ireland to make any plans for funds that may not even materialize in reality.”

In Brazil, iPhone costs $931

There is a considerable variation in iPhone prices around the world with handsets in Indonesia and Sweden also coming with hefty price tags, especially when compared with the United States. In 2016, an iPhone 6 costs around $598 in the U.S. while in Brazil, it will set you back $931.

Even though the iPhone costs a small fortune in Brazil, the price has dropped substantially in recent years, according to World Bank data reported by the World Economic Forum. In 2015, an iPhone 6 cost $1,254 and this fell to $931 this year, primarily due to the real gaining 10 percent against the dollar. Still, when an American purchases an iPhone in Brazil, he or she will have to pay 56 percent more for the device there than at home.

Apple takes incremental steps For Long-Term Success

As the reveal of the iPhone 7 family of smartphones approaches, Apple’s 2016′s iteration of the smartphone is looking more and more like a stop-gap than a true leap forward. Apple may have the ability to create the strongest human connection possible to a slice of silicon, but it cannot alter the insatiable demand for a new phone every 12 months. At best it can bluff and prevaricate while it works on the real game-changers that can take up to three years to arrive.

But these features are targeted not at 2016′s iPhone 7 but the tenth-anniversary iPhone that will arrive in September 2017.

In September, Apple will take to the stage and Tim Cook will anoint the iPhone 7 as ‘the best iPhone we have ever made’, and he would be right. The cheat is that Apple has the technology to make a better smartphone than the one it is making (and similar technology is available on competing handsets). No matter the platitudes and digital inches highlighting the new features, there is something better in the offing.

The technology is only iteratively better than that available on the iPhone 6S, and it’s clear that Tim Cook’s team believes that the big changes are not ready to be offered to the customer base.

It’s not that kind of world. It’s a world where the average mobile contract lasts two years so a new handset needs to be available as the contract ends to satisfy the network demands to retain customers and the manufacturers’ need to keep customers from switching ecosystems. It’s a world where two quarters of falling sales signals the death knell of the company, irrespective of the obvious long-term plans.  And it’s a world where the iPhone ‘S’ models are a barely concealed fudge to satisfy the short-term hunger of sales and Wall Street with the need to extend the development time of ‘the next changes’ out to two years.

Now it looks like the technology required to advance the iPhone 6 to the iPhone ‘next generation’ needs another twelve months, forcing the turnaround time out to three years between notable models. That timescale does not meet the expectations of today’s cut-throat mobile industry.

This, however leaves us with the iPhone 7 – a handset that has a few token updates in the hardware and the usual increase thanks to Moore’s Law in the chipset specifications. The demands to ‘do something’ every year, to satisfy sales projections and quarterly demands, to be seen to be ‘thinking different’ and rejuvenating the industry every year is a herculean task. It’s one that Apple struggles with just as much as the next manufacturer (which is likely Samsung).

Apple cannot pull the focus of the market away from the 12-month cycle, and the iPhone 7 is a symptom of a market that simply does not fit Apple’s way of working. I’m happy with the idea that Apple needs three years to develop its next iPhone. So, apparently, is Apple. Unfortunately everyone else demands a new handset every year.

So let’s get ready for the iPhone 7, Apple’s obligation to the marketplace.