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Is Jewellery Business is a Dangerous Affair?

Jewellery business suffers not only from high gold prices and recession, but from a real physical danger. The story we are going to tell may be an extreme but many of the UK wholesales have been a subject to violent attacks and robberies.
Last week UK travelling diamond jeweller who is a regular visitor to EIRE and travels around the country for business deals with local jewellers has been brutally attacked in Dublin and robbed of €1m of precious stones and diamond jewellery

The jeweller was staying in his Travelodge Hotel room, Ballymun at around 12.15am on 30.01.10 when the three masked raiders, armed with a gun and a hammer forced their way in, battering him on the head with a hammer as he tackled one of them, and chased them into the street before they turned into Coultry Road.

Despite the effort, diamond jeweller failed to prevent the men from escaping and taking his suitcase containing diamonds and rubies and lost his life savings because the jewels were not insured.

Gardai believes he was the victim of opportunistic local criminals who became aware that he was carrying a valuable haul in his suitcase and kept watch on his movements until they established where he was staying. It is assumed that the raiders had no idea of the value of their haul and could now become the focus of more serious players in the crime world who are looking for a slice of the fortune, especially since the jewels are unmarked in any way, and therefore easier to “fence”, because they are not traceable.

Investigators are also tracing all known contacts of the jeweller since he arrived in Dublin to try and establish how the gang knew that the contents of the case were so valuable.

After Gardai arrived at the scene he was taken to the Mater Hospital for treatment for lacerations, receiving around 50 stitches on his head. The doctor stated that if the injuries were a quarter of an inch left or right, the result would be an immediate death.

Last year a very similar story has happened in Manchester where opportunistic criminals attacked the jeweller in his car, breaking his door window, slicing his hand with a machete and disappearing with his stock.

When we are talking about ethical jewellery it is important to remember that bloody gold and diamonds are not only coming from conflict zones- they are also coming from UK and Ireland.

Not only the second hand but also the new jewellery as well can be of concern, as the stolen stock is flogged back into the UK wholesale market ending up in the UK and Ireland jewellery shops with or without conscious knowledge of the retailers. The situation is even more appalling during this recession when an exceptionally high gold price and the greed drive some people to commit the crime.

If we are to tackle the issue of bloody diamonds and gold we should start at home.

Visit www.GoldandSilverJewelleryShop.com for ethically sourced jewellery.

Tags: affair, Business, Dangerous, Jewellery

Is Jewellery Business is a Dangerous Affair?

Jewellery business suffers not only from high gold prices and recession, but from a real physical danger. The story we are going to tell may be an extreme but many of the UK wholesales have been a subject to violent attacks and robberies.
Last week UK travelling diamond jeweller who is a regular visitor to EIRE and travels around the country for business deals with local jewellers has been brutally attacked in Dublin and robbed of €1m of precious stones and diamond jewellery

The jeweller was staying in his Travelodge Hotel room, Ballymun at around 12.15am on 30.01.10 when the three masked raiders, armed with a gun and a hammer forced their way in, battering him on the head with a hammer as he tackled one of them, and chased them into the street before they turned into Coultry Road.

Despite the effort, diamond jeweller failed to prevent the men from escaping and taking his suitcase containing diamonds and rubies and lost his life savings because the jewels were not insured.

Gardai believes he was the victim of opportunistic local criminals who became aware that he was carrying a valuable haul in his suitcase and kept watch on his movements until they established where he was staying. It is assumed that the raiders had no idea of the value of their haul and could now become the focus of more serious players in the crime world who are looking for a slice of the fortune, especially since the jewels are unmarked in any way, and therefore easier to “fence”, because they are not traceable.

Investigators are also tracing all known contacts of the jeweller since he arrived in Dublin to try and establish how the gang knew that the contents of the case were so valuable.

After Gardai arrived at the scene he was taken to the Mater Hospital for treatment for lacerations, receiving around 50 stitches on his head. The doctor stated that if the injuries were a quarter of an inch left or right, the result would be an immediate death.

Last year a very similar story has happened in Manchester where opportunistic criminals attacked the jeweller in his car, breaking his door window, slicing his hand with a machete and disappearing with his stock.

When we are talking about ethical jewellery it is important to remember that bloody gold and diamonds are not only coming from conflict zones- they are also coming from UK and Ireland.

Not only the second hand but also the new jewellery as well can be of concern, as the stolen stock is flogged back into the UK wholesale market ending up in the UK and Ireland jewellery shops with or without conscious knowledge of the retailers. The situation is even more appalling during this recession when an exceptionally high gold price and the greed drive some people to commit the crime.

If we are to tackle the issue of bloody diamonds and gold we should start at home.

Visit www.GoldandSilverJewelleryShop.com for ethically sourced jewellery.

Tags: affair, Business, Dangerous, Jewellery

Is Jewellery Business is a Dangerous Affair?

Jewellery business suffers not only from high gold prices and recession, but from a real physical danger. The story we are going to tell may be an extreme but many of the UK wholesales have been a subject to violent attacks and robberies.
Last week UK travelling diamond jeweller who is a regular visitor to EIRE and travels around the country for business deals with local jewellers has been brutally attacked in Dublin and robbed of €1m of precious stones and diamond jewellery

The jeweller was staying in his Travelodge Hotel room, Ballymun at around 12.15am on 30.01.10 when the three masked raiders, armed with a gun and a hammer forced their way in, battering him on the head with a hammer as he tackled one of them, and chased them into the street before they turned into Coultry Road.

Despite the effort, diamond jeweller failed to prevent the men from escaping and taking his suitcase containing diamonds and rubies and lost his life savings because the jewels were not insured.

Gardai believes he was the victim of opportunistic local criminals who became aware that he was carrying a valuable haul in his suitcase and kept watch on his movements until they established where he was staying. It is assumed that the raiders had no idea of the value of their haul and could now become the focus of more serious players in the crime world who are looking for a slice of the fortune, especially since the jewels are unmarked in any way, and therefore easier to “fence”, because they are not traceable.

Investigators are also tracing all known contacts of the jeweller since he arrived in Dublin to try and establish how the gang knew that the contents of the case were so valuable.

After Gardai arrived at the scene he was taken to the Mater Hospital for treatment for lacerations, receiving around 50 stitches on his head. The doctor stated that if the injuries were a quarter of an inch left or right, the result would be an immediate death.

Last year a very similar story has happened in Manchester where opportunistic criminals attacked the jeweller in his car, breaking his door window, slicing his hand with a machete and disappearing with his stock.

When we are talking about ethical jewellery it is important to remember that bloody gold and diamonds are not only coming from conflict zones- they are also coming from UK and Ireland.

Not only the second hand but also the new jewellery as well can be of concern, as the stolen stock is flogged back into the UK wholesale market ending up in the UK and Ireland jewellery shops with or without conscious knowledge of the retailers. The situation is even more appalling during this recession when an exceptionally high gold price and the greed drive some people to commit the crime.

If we are to tackle the issue of bloody diamonds and gold we should start at home.

Visit www.GoldandSilverJewelleryShop.com for ethically sourced jewellery.

Tags: affair, Business, Dangerous, Jewellery

Is Jewellery Business is a Dangerous Affair?

Jewellery business suffers not only from high gold prices and recession, but from a real physical danger. The story we are going to tell may be an extreme but many of the UK wholesales have been a subject to violent attacks and robberies.
Last week UK travelling diamond jeweller who is a regular visitor to EIRE and travels around the country for business deals with local jewellers has been brutally attacked in Dublin and robbed of €1m of precious stones and diamond jewellery

The jeweller was staying in his Travelodge Hotel room, Ballymun at around 12.15am on 30.01.10 when the three masked raiders, armed with a gun and a hammer forced their way in, battering him on the head with a hammer as he tackled one of them, and chased them into the street before they turned into Coultry Road.

Despite the effort, diamond jeweller failed to prevent the men from escaping and taking his suitcase containing diamonds and rubies and lost his life savings because the jewels were not insured.

Gardai believes he was the victim of opportunistic local criminals who became aware that he was carrying a valuable haul in his suitcase and kept watch on his movements until they established where he was staying. It is assumed that the raiders had no idea of the value of their haul and could now become the focus of more serious players in the crime world who are looking for a slice of the fortune, especially since the jewels are unmarked in any way, and therefore easier to “fence”, because they are not traceable.

Investigators are also tracing all known contacts of the jeweller since he arrived in Dublin to try and establish how the gang knew that the contents of the case were so valuable.

After Gardai arrived at the scene he was taken to the Mater Hospital for treatment for lacerations, receiving around 50 stitches on his head. The doctor stated that if the injuries were a quarter of an inch left or right, the result would be an immediate death.

Last year a very similar story has happened in Manchester where opportunistic criminals attacked the jeweller in his car, breaking his door window, slicing his hand with a machete and disappearing with his stock.

When we are talking about ethical jewellery it is important to remember that bloody gold and diamonds are not only coming from conflict zones- they are also coming from UK and Ireland.

Not only the second hand but also the new jewellery as well can be of concern, as the stolen stock is flogged back into the UK wholesale market ending up in the UK and Ireland jewellery shops with or without conscious knowledge of the retailers. The situation is even more appalling during this recession when an exceptionally high gold price and the greed drive some people to commit the crime.

If we are to tackle the issue of bloody diamonds and gold we should start at home.

Visit www.GoldandSilverJewelleryShop.com for ethically sourced jewellery.

Tags: affair, Business, Dangerous, Jewellery

Grand theft in the wild west: the end of the affair

America Online executives regularly flouted conventional accounting practices, according to an explosive book that lifts the lid on the “wild west” atmosphere that surrounded the company’s record-breaking merger with Time Warner in January 2000.

Alec Klein, the Washington Post reporter who broke the stories that led to a US government investigation into accounting practices at AOL, claims in his book, Stealing Time, that employees routinely bent the rules during the internet company’s salad days of the late 90s.

“By late 1999, many companies seeking to do business with AOL were no longer viewed as potential partners. They were a target, to be used,” writes Klein. In the book, published in the US this week, he details how AOL deal-makers would find out how much a “target” dotcom had raised in funding and then aggressively go after half its money.

Klein conducted interviews with hundreds of employees at AOL and Time Warner, including the ousted AOL Time Warner chief executive, Gerald Levin. “Fuck ‘em, that was our mantra,” one AOL executive told Klein. “We’d say that all the time, we took it to heart. Destroy ‘em. Fuck ‘em. We lived by that.”

According to the book, the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into AOL in the form of advertising revenue generated an “anything goes” culture.

The high-rolling dotcom era also contributed to excesses that made the yuppies of the 80s seem tame, according to Klein. “The dotcom feeding frenzy was creating obscene riches at virtually every level of the company,” he writes, describing how one top AOL marketing official had her personal stair climber machine shipped to every hotel in which she stayed. When, on one occasion, it failed to turn up, she simply bought a new one and left it in the hotel.

Klein described how, as the merger between the two parties grew closer, AOL executives were anxious to keep advertising revenues rolling in to avoid a slump in the share price that could put the deal at risk.

“We had to maintain this facade, to show [Wall] Street that AOL was not backing away from its numbers,” an AOL insider told Klein. “At this point, we understood we couldn’t tell the Time Warner side how much trouble we were in.”

Many of the allegations centre on AOL’s business affairs unit, headed by David Colburn, who earned the sobriquet “god” within the firm. Last year Colburn was ousted from AOL and has refused to comment on allegations of improper accounting. In one bizarre episode, Klein describes how Colburn invited three rabbis to a company party to pray for AOL’s share price to rise.

“The rabbis weren’t just there to pray for AOL stock. He offered a deal: if each rabbi agreed to pray for AOL’s shares to rise to a certain level and they hit that level, Colburn promised to donate $1m to a Jewish cause,” claims Klein.

“Colburn’s unit could have been called the wild west. When AOL was negotiating with another company, deal-makers said some of their colleagues who knew of the transactions but were not directly involved would use that information to buy stock in the other company before its deal with AOL was announced publicly,” he adds. There is no suggestion Colburn was aware of this activity. He also goes into further detail about the inflated deals that led to AOL admitting last year it had overstated its accounts by $168m (£100m), prompting a government investigation.

One unconventional deal uncovered by Klein involved the British racecourse owner, Wembley, which owed AOL £13.7m from a legal dispute.

According to Klein, AOL offered to settle the debt by selling Wembley £13.7m in online ads and, with the quarter due to close, went ahead and booked them without telling the client. Klein also claims that business affairs officials ordered AOL employees to take artwork from the company’s 24dogs.com site and create their own banners and buttons, which were soon spread throughout AOL’s websites.

Since the $159bn (£94bn) merger in January 2000, then hailed as a revolutionary deal that would transform the media world, AOL Time Warner’s stock price has collapsed. Revenues and subscriber numbers at the internet division slumped, and the anticipated overlaps between AOL and Time Warner’s film, music and magazine publishing divisions failed to materialise.

According to Klein’s book, there was a culture clash from the beginning, as seasoned Time Warner executives reacted with horror to the dotcom upstarts moving into their building.

“Colburn, AOL’s notorious deal maker, was hunched over a conference table in the boardroom, reviewing the deal terms, when he turned to a Time Warner executive and curtly ordered him to fetch some more documents,” Klein writes.

“The Time Warner official, unused to doing the bidding of another, took umbrage. ‘You act like you’re taking us over,’ he intoned. ‘We are,’ Colburn snapped.”

This mismatch would eventually lead to the departure of virtually all the top AOL Time Warner executives involved in the original deal – including Steve Case, who stepped down as chairman last year, chief operating officer Bob Pittman and former chief executive Levin.

AOL Time Warner declined to comment on the book’s disclosures.

Tags: affair, Grand, theft, West, Wild