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British Report Says Police Failed to Pursue Savile Sex Charges

March 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The report detailed poor police procedures, missed opportunities and an unwillingness to pursue accusations against one of the country’s biggest celebrities, whose renown also inhibited victims from coming forward.

“One of the reasons why allegations were not made at the time, or investigations were not conducted as they might have been, centers on Savile’s status,” the report said. “He was a well-known national celebrity, praised for his substantial fund-raising efforts, and a household name to many.”

The home secretary, Theresa May, who is responsible for law enforcement in Britain, said: “This report brings into sharp focus police failings that allowed Savile to act with impunity over five decades. While we can never right this wrong, we must learn the lessons to prevent the same from ever happening again.”

Mr. Savile died in 2011 at the age of 84. The revelations since then about his predatory sexual behavior have shocked Britons, who watched his popular BBC programs for decades, including “Top of the Pops,” a weekly music countdown, and “Jim’ll Fix It,” in which Mr. Savile promised to grant young viewers’ wishes. Claims that he abused some victims on BBC premises, and missteps by the BBC in coverage of the accusations, plunged the broadcaster into crisis.

According to Tuesday’s report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, which reviews police forces and policing in England and Wales and answers to Parliament, the police were first alerted to accusations of sex crimes by Mr. Savile in Cheshire in 1963. On that occasion, a male reported to a local police officer that Mr. Savile had raped him the day before, but was told to “forget about it” and “move on,” and no official crime report was made or investigation undertaken, the inspectorate’s report said.

Later, when another man reported to the police that his girlfriend had been assaulted at a recording of “Top of the Pops,” which featured a studio audience, the man was told that he “could be arrested for making such allegations,” the document said.

During Mr. Savile’s lifetime, the inspectorate found, the police recorded five accusations of criminal conduct and two further pieces of intelligence about his behavior; the earliest of these formal entries in the records dated from 1964. “We have not found evidence to suggest that any investigation was carried out as a result of that intelligence,” the document said.

Since Mr. Savile’s death in 2011, more than 600 people have come forward with information about him, including 450 who have made specific accusations.

The report said that over nearly four decades, police systems meant to spot connections and patterns among accusations made in different parts of the country were used incorrectly or not at all. For example, an anonymous letter to the police in 1998 was classified as “sensitive” intelligence because of Mr. Savile’s celebrity status and because there were accusations of blackmail and pedophilia; that classification meant that it was not readily available to other police officers, the report said.

“There was intelligence available of four separate investigations, which was never linked together, and because of that failure to ‘join the dots,’ there was a failure to understand the potential depth of Savile’s criminality,” the report said. “As a result, it is clear from our analysis that the potential for further investigation and a prosecution of Savile was missed.”

It added: “Because of the way in which both victims were dealt with, there are no records available in the police forces concerned. It leads us to the conclusion, however, that we will never be certain of the number of victims who tried to report Savile to the police.”

The report said that though such systems had since been improved, they could still fail.

The head of the inspectorate, Drusilla Sharpling, said in a statement: “The findings in this report are of deep concern, and clearly there were mistakes in how the police handled the allegations made against Savile during his lifetime. However, an equally profound problem is that victims felt unable to come forward and report crimes of sexual abuse. More needs to be done, and it is neither enough nor correct to say ‘This couldn’t happen now.’ ”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/world/europe/british-report-says-police-failed-to-pursue-savile-sex-charges.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Valentino’s Name, Their Vision

March 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Standing in front of this table on Tuesday night were the designers who took over the Valentino label in late 2008: Maria Grazia Chiuri, kohl-eyed and almost nunlike in a black dress with a white collar, and Pierpaolo Piccioli, skinny in a Sinatra suit, with a boyish face. It was their party, to mark the reopening this week of the Valentino store on Avenue Montaigne, which had been overhauled by the architect David Chipperfield to reflect their vision of the label.

And to one side, though no less visible, was Valentino Garavani himself, with his business partner, Giancarlo Giammetti, the men who made Valentino a household name, and a legendary one at that.

As they arrived, the guests, including the retail chiefs of Saks Fifth Avenue and Bergdorf Goodman, the editors of international magazines, movie stars, socialites and the designer Alber Elbaz, first paid tribute to Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. They complimented the designers on their fall collection of austere lace dresses and furs inspired by the paintings of Flemish masters, shown that afternoon in the Tuileries Garden.

And then, those guests stepped over to Valentino to kiss the ring. Mr. Elbaz even bowed to him.

“They get better every season,” Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis, Vogue’s style editor at large, said of Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. Ms. von Thurn und Taxis is a princess who is descended from a long line of Valentino customers. “But it must be hard to work with a living legend,” she said.

More than any other designer who has walked away from a fashion empire — Hubert de Givenchy or Emanuel Ungaro or, to a lesser degree, Calvin Klein — Mr. Garavani, at 80, has remained in the spotlight since his ostensible retirement in 2008.

That year, the documentary “Valentino: The Last Emperor” made him a celebrity for a new generation of customers, and he and Mr. Giammetti have since created an online museum, in 2011, and also participated in a major couture exhibition that closed last week in London. Two weeks ago, they attended every major party in Los Angeles on the Oscars circuit, at the same time that the Valentino company was trying to lure celebrities with red-carpet dresses from the most recent couture collections designed by Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli. (There were two successes, with Sally Field and Jennifer Aniston, and one major embarrassment, with Anne Hathaway.)

When they first took over the collection, Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli were described as “very Valentino,” which was meant as a compliment, at least in the eyes of Mr. Garavani’s loyalists, if not critics who wanted to see something new. There was red, there was lace, there were cocktail dresses. Having designed accessories for Valentino for a decade, they understood, perhaps better than anyone, the codes of his house. Alessandra Facchinetti, a former Gucci designer, had immediately succeeded Mr. Garavani, but she was fired after two seasons of going too far in her own direction. (Ms. Facchinetti has recently joined Tod’s as creative director.)

Replacing any designer is like walking a tightrope; replacing Mr. Garavani is like walking on a thread. Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli have managed to do that better than anyone might have imagined, and they are now coming into their own.

Their most recent collections have included designs that are often regal and conservative in appearance, like church dresses, with high collars, but with lively filigree or floral lace patterns. It looks nothing like the Valentino of old, and no one has complained. Tuesday’s show included a Delftware-inspired dress made of five meters of fabric, each meter requiring 28 hours of handwork as the designers attempt to bring a couture sensibility to their ready-to-wear.

“It is wonderful what they are doing,” Mr. Garavani said. “This is how the future of Valentino can be modern.”

Ms. Chiuri and Mr. Piccioli are, as Cathy Horyn, the fashion critic of The New York Times, wrote of their spring couture show, “more self-critical and demanding.” It is probably not a coincidence that this change coincides with a restructuring of the Valentino business and a new investor that has put it on more solid financial footing. Valentino was acquired last July by Mayhoola, an investor group from Qatar.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/fashion/valentinos-name-their-vision.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Global Business Tagged With: , ,

Google’s Ad Campaign Uses Emotions, Not Search Terms

January 2, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The search giant made its first push into advertising with a Super Bowl ad in 2010 about a young couple falling in love. But through last year it began a more focused national television campaign, as well as taking on other efforts, like hosting Google-themed conferences in an effort to represent its online brand in the offline world.

“This past year has really been a remarkable transformation for Google,” said Peter Daboll, chief executive of Ace Metrix, a firm that evaluates TV and video ads.

Though Google is a household name, it needs to tell its story now for a few reasons. It needs new businesses like the Chrome browser and the Google Plus social network to succeed if it is going to find sources of revenue beyond search ads.

The ads are also part of Google’s mission, led by Larry Page, its co-founder and chief executive, to pare down its product offering and make Google products more attractive, intuitive and integrated with one another.

Lorraine Twohill, Google’s vice president for global marketing, would not disclose how much the company had increased its advertising spending, but said there had been a shift in strategy.

“As we got bigger, we had more competition, more products, more messages to consumers, so we needed to do a bit more to communicate what these products are and how you can use them,” she said.

Also as Google comes under attack from antitrust regulators, it can’t hurt to tell heartwarming stories about Google to wide audiences.

“If we don’t make you cry, we fail,” Ms. Twohill said. “It’s about emotion, which is bizarre for a tech company.”

Some viewers may be hard-pressed to keep their eyes dry after watching “Dear Sophie,” Google’s ad for Chrome in which a father sends multimedia messages to his baby daughter, or to hold back a smile watching grandmothers and children dancing to Lady Gaga.

But that is not to say that Google, where data is religion, does not back up sentimental branding efforts with cold, hard data.

Before showing the Super Bowl ad, Google tested a dozen versions on YouTube and chose to broadcast the one that received the most views.

And Google events, which also fall under the marketing division, require immense spreadsheets, like one to choose a location for Google Zeitgeist, its annual conference for wooing its biggest advertisers. The spreadsheet charted 140 hotels from Manhattan to Phoenix, with color-coded tabs and columns for ballroom size, room rates and the number of layovers to fly there.

The winner was Paradise Valley, Ariz., where Google’s event planner, Lorin Pollack, brought the company headquarters’ preschool motif to the desert.

“Google’s an online brand,” Ms. Pollack said. “You can’t experience the brand except for typing keys. It’s a huge responsibility to actually bring that brand to life outside of the computer.”

The lanterns lining the steps at the nighttime parties were Google colors — red, yellow, blue and green — and oversized stuffed ottomans mimicked the office’s beanbags, where engineers sit with laptops perched on their knees. Attendees could climb on the giant tricycle that Google Street View engineers ride to take photos or design their own Android robot T-shirts. A vending machine dispensed primary-colored juggling balls, bought by swiping Android cellphones.

Even the tablecloths had to evoke Google, which meant no billowy linen, Ms. Pollack said.

“Google is a very clean, simple brand,” she said. “Linen gets sloppy. It gets dirty; it’s hard to sit under. I take a lot of inspiration from our home page. It’s just simple.”

Like Google’s events, its TV ads are light on details about products’ features. Instead, they are meant to evoke curiosity and emotion, Ms. Twohill said.

The first ads for Chrome, aimed at frequent Web users, were online and discussed the browser’s speed and security. But when it came time to take Chrome mainstream, she said, Google turned to television to reach those “who don’t get out of bed in the morning and think, ‘I’ll get a new browser today.’ ”

Google broke the recent trend of 15-second television ads to tell stories in a minute or two.

An ad for Google Plus shows the arc of a couple’s courtship without spoken words. The man places the woman in a social circle titled “love of my life,” but he starts out in her circle called “creepers.” Over time, though, he graduates to “book club,” “ski house” and eventually “keepers.”

Another, which was broadcast just before Christmas, shows the Muppets in a Google Plus Hangout video chat singing along to Queen and David Bowie. A newspaper ad for Google Plus featured the Dalai Lama joining Desmond Tutu by Hangout after he was denied a visa to visit South Africa.

Google is also advertising its search engine, even though, with two-thirds market share in the United States, it is hardly an unknown brand to anyone.

“I still think it’s important to remind people why Google matters, how it’s had an impact on people’s lives, what life was like before this,” Ms. Twohill said. An added incentive is that Google’s main rival, Microsoft’s Bing, also has a new ad campaign.

One search ad shows a surfer finding the perfect wave, a teenager becoming the youngest person to discover a supernova and a man installing solar panels.

“We’re all searching for a different thing, even if we’re all trying to get to the same endpoint,” a voice says.

Google’s strategy has connected with viewers, Mr. Daboll said, because they would rather view a story than have products pushed at them. Google ads took five of the top 10 spots on Ace Metrix’s list of the most effective TV ads for Web sites last year.

“Google has been so dominant in its usefulness,” he said. “Now they want to make you feel something about search, as opposed to just relying on it as a useful tool.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=51979e02909d34c6439a6b1450f834fe

Filed Under: Business News Tagged With: , ,

Wealth Matters: MF Global Customers Seeking Access to Accounts

November 5, 2011 by Leave a Comment

James Koutoulas, chief executive of Typhon Capital Management in Chicago, said 85 percent of his clients’ money was tied up in MF Global, about $55 million.

About 150,000 accounts — from investors big and small — were left in limbo in the firm’s rapid demise. Regulators are in the midst of trying to transfer about a third of the accounts to other commodities brokers and securities firms. That usually takes place in a matter of days or weeks.

But, as in any bankruptcy filing, there are complications. Regulators say they are looking for roughly $600 million in client funds that they believe are missing. Before clients can get full access to their funds, the regulators are first going to have to determine where that money is and, then, seek to recover it.

Also unresolved is whether the money in some clients’ accounts was mixed in with the firm’s money, as regulators have contended. That could lead to further litigation over the ownership of money in the accounts.

And then there is the fact that most of the firm’s investments were not in securities, where the dollar value of an investment is clear, but in commodities, where investors put up what is essentially a down payment on what a commodity will be worth on a future date. Sorting out who is owed what will also take time.

While MF Global may not have been a household name, it was respected in the commodities and futures markets. It provided the essential service of holding money and clearing trades.

The firm’s brand name was why smaller clients said they did not worry whether their money would be safe. Mark Tucker, who lives in the English seaside village of West Runton, population 1,633, manages rental properties by day. But he said he had been trading options for the last 18 years and had $50,000 with MF Global (and another $50,000 with another clearinghouse).

He has not had access to his account since Monday and was worried about some of the options he bought before the firm’s bankruptcy filing. They are bets that the prices of crude oil, coffee and sugar will fall. “It’s not a comfortable position,” he said. “By definition, the potential for losses on short options is limitless.”

Like many clients, he is trying to separate rumor from reality. He had heard that his account would be moved to another broker. He said his broker had been “trying to reassure me the only reason it hasn’t happened is they have 50,000 of these accounts and it should move over in the next 24 to 48 hours, but that’s what they told me 24 to 48 hours ago.”

So do clients of other commodities clearinghouses need to worry about the safety of their money?

SITUATION James W. Giddens, a partner at Hughes Hubbard Reed and the court-appointed trustee in the case, said his group was working closely with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities Investor Protection Corporation to transfer accounts to other commodity brokers. He said clients would be notified “if and when their accounts have been transferred.”

The court has approved the transfer of 50,000 commodities accounts to other brokers because those are the easiest to move and the most likely to be picked up. A spokesman for the trustee said that the selection of which accounts would be moved was led by the CME Group, the giant exchange where MF Global did business. On Friday, the CME Group announced that 15,000 accounts had been moved.

But even the clients whose accounts are transferred will not get all their money back immediately. Given that some of the funds involved are contested, clients will have access to only about two-thirds of their accounts’ value. This is a common practice to ensure that there is some money left to pay claims against MF Global.

MF Global was also a registered broker-dealer, like Fidelity and Schwab. The future of the securities accounts it held is less clear. Stephen Harbeck, chief executive of SIPC, said he believed there were only 6,000 securities accounts. So far, he said, the trustee had not found another home for them because they did not have a large amount of assets and a trading history. In other words, these accounts may not pay large fees and could be more of a hassle than they are worth to another firm.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=ea56119aaa286e6576230341b5dbe052

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