Your commercial news round-up: UK economy, Motatos, Musk and Twitter, Top Gun

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Inflation rates, discount rivals, copyright allegations and more in this week’s commercial news round-up. Whether you’re a first-year university student or you’re making training contract applications as we speak, building on your commercial awareness should be a top priority and is key to your success. Use LawCareers.Net’s weekly Thursday round-ups and our commercial awareness hub to help to keep you in the loop.

• The UK’s economic growth is forecast to grind to a halt next year, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), making it the worst performing G20 country after Russia. While the OECD has predicted that the UK’s economy will grow 3.6% this year, much of this growth is due to the country’s recovery from the covid-19 pandemic. With the UK continuing to grapple with the impact of high inflation, the OECD says its economic growth will fall to zero in 2023 “due to depressed demand”. Tax cuts are on the cards, according to the Treasury, but there are several risks that could worsen the situation, including “higher than expected energy prices as the Ukraine war drags on, and a deterioration in the public health situation due to new covid strains”.

• Motatos, a Swedish online discount retailer offering 60% off branded products like Heinz, Cadbury and Walkers, is set to rival Aldi and Lidl following its launch in the UK earlier this week. The online retailer said UK shoppers will be able to buy “well-known products that would otherwise risk ending up in landfill”. Motatos, which was formerly known as Matsmart, was founded in Sweden in 2014 and has since expanded into Denmark, Finland and Germany. The products being sold are items that are no longer on sale in shops due to packaging changes or short best before dates, among other reasons.

• Earlier this week Elon Musk threatened to abandon his $44 billion purchase of Twitter if the platform failed to provide data on fake accounts. The request comes following Twitter’s claims that fake and spam accounts amount to fewer than 5% of its user base. It has since been revealed that the social media platform will comply with Musk’s demands and is set to provide him with access to the requested data, according to the Washington Post. Whether or not the data will satisfy the world’s richest man remains to be seen: watch this space.

• Paramount Pictures is facing copyright infringement allegations following the release of the latest Top Gun sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, last month. The 1986 movie Top Gun was inspired by Israeli writer Ehud Yonay’s 1983 story Top Guns. Yonay’s family claim that the film studio didn’t have the rights to his story when the latest sequel was released because the studio’s copyright for the piece was terminated in 2020 under the US Copyright Act. The lawsuit, which was filed on Monday, claims that Paramount’s Top Gun franchise wouldn’t have existed without Yonay’s “literary efforts and evocative prose and narrative”.

Despite Paramount’s response that the claims are “without merit”, the lawyer representing Yonay’s family said: “Much as Paramount wants to pretend otherwise, they made a sequel to Top Gun after they lost their copyright”. Top Gun: Maverick generated £438 million globally in the first 10 days of its release.

• Big Four accountancy firm EY hopes to capitalise on the $5 trillion private equity market with plans to strengthen its private equity offering by investing £800 million to expand its business over the next four years. EY is also reportedly considering plans to spin off its advisory business and float it on the stock market – these plans could see EY’s tax, consulting and deals advisory business float on the stock market via an initial public offering with the intention to split the firm’s audit operations away from the rest of the business.

Check the News every Thursday for this weekly commercial news round-up.

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