Week in review, April 27 Chairman and founder Peter Munk makes clear that Barrick Gold remains his creature Corporate person in the news: Peter Munk The "perfect storm" facing Peter Munk's Barrick Gold worsened on Wednesday. Shareholders voted overwhelmingly to rebuke the octonegarian businessman for paying a $11.9m signing-on fee to recruit former Goldman Sachs president John Thornton as his likely heir apparent. But Mr Munk made clear that Barrick remained his creature and he intended to continue running it his way, at least for the time being. "Don't blame my board," he said. "Sometimes you have to do things which may not be popular," Mr Munk added, as shares in the world's leading quoted gold producer by volume sank to 20-year lows. Mr Munk is used to dealing with hostile environments. As a teenager in 1944 he escaped the threat of Nazi extermination in Hungary on the Kastner train that carried Jewish refugees from Budapest to Switzerland. After emigrating to Canada and securing a degree in electronic engineering from the University of Toronto in the early 1950s, Mr Munk embarked on a series of business adventures. First was Clairtone, an electrical goods manufacture lauded for its high-end stereos, used by Frank Sinatra, that thrived, then crashed, in the 1960s. Next came Southern Pacific Hotel Corporation, which he built into Australasia's largest hotel and resort chain in the 70s. Mr Munk came to gold late, in his mid-50s, when he founded Barrick in 1983. Over the following decade he transformed the oil and gas vehicle into one of the world's leading gold producers through acquisitions. Already used to dealing with presidents and leading business people, the fall of the Soviet Union saw him rub shoulders with a wave of emerging mining entrepreneurs such as Oleg Deripaska, billionaire founder of Russian aluminium producer Rusal, and Nat Rothschild, scion of the Rothschild financier dynasty and founder of the now-troubled Indonesian coal miner Bumi plc. Mr Munk's expansive dealmaking has been in part responsible for Barrick's troubles, particularly the decision to outbid China's Minmetals Resources and pay $7.3bn for Tanzanian copper producer Equinox Minerals in 2011. "It's been a disaster," says Patrick Chidley, gold mining analyst at HSBC in New York. It was the wrong metal in the wrong continent. But he has also sometimes displayed a cautious side, hedging the price of Barrick's gold output until recent years, a policy that prevented Barrick from fully benefiting from the rising gold price through the last decade. Mr Munk's love of making fortunes is matched by a fearlessness towards losing them. In 2008 he told Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper: "I've seen how wealth can be eliminated overnight. If you have your self-confidence you can do it over again. Though not formally confirmed, Mr Chidley's assumption is that Mr Thornton, though chastised by this week's vote, will soon be elevated from co-chairman to sole chairman of Barrick, though Mr Munk will remain a presence. "He built Barrick from scratch," Mr Chidley says. It's his baby. If he steps down I don't expect him to leave the building. He doesn't want to leave on a down note. Bogus terror tweet spurs Twitter to reassess security Twitter is preparing to introduce new security measures after hackers this week gained access to the Associated Press account, sparking fears of a terrorist attack that caused a brief stock market sell-off, writes Tim Bradshaw in San Francisco. Traders halted buying orders on Tuesday morning after @AP tweeted that US President Barack Obama had been injured in a terrorist attack on the White House. The bogus tweet triggered a 0.9 per cent decline in the S&P 500, wiping more than $130bn off the value of stocks. The losses were recovered minutes later, when the hoax was exposed. The incident comes weeks after the Securities and Exchange Commission granted permission for US companies to use social media for shareholder communications and Bloomberg began incorporating selected Twitter feeds - including those of AP - into its trading terminals. AP said that the likely cause of the breach was a "phishing" email that tricked an employee into disclosing the account's password. A group of sympathisers to Syria's president Bashar al-Assad, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, claimed responsibility for the attack. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was looking into the source of the hacking, while two financial regulators, the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, have also launched investigations into the incident. Daimler and VW drive into European downturn This was the week that the highflying German cars sector came down to earth with a bump, writes Chris Bryant in Frankfurt. Daimler, which owns Mercedes-Benz, was forced to scrap a 2013 earnings target issued less than three months ago after European car demand, particularly in Germany, proved desperately weak in the first quarter. Meanwhile, Volkswagen, whose brands range from Skoda to Bentley, and which until now had defied a downturn in Europe's mass market car sector, recorded a 26 per cent decline in first quarter operating profit. Mercedes-Benz's problems are partly of its own making - unlike rivals Audi and BMW it has not benefited much from voracious Chinese demand for premium vehicles because of a faulty sales model that it is now trying to fix. Still, its comments about "intense competition" in Europe were echoed by VW and reflect the need for carmakers to offer financial incentives to attract European consumers. Coupled with the tendency of such consumers to favour entry-level models over high-margin saloons and SUVs, German carmaker profit margins are being eroded. VW and Daimler said the second half of the year should be better, thanks in part to the launch of new models. Investors were particularly cheered that VW retained its full-year earnings guidance. Moreover, German carmakers remain profitable and, have very big non-European sales footprints. PotashCorp drops bid for Israel's ICL after protests Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan, one of the world's leading fertiliser producers, this week abandoned its $16bn takeover bid for Israel Chemicals amid mounting opposition within Israel, writes Emiko Terazono. PotashCorp had been in discussions with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over a potential combination with ICL, in which the Canadian group has a 14 per cent stake. "Now is not the time to pursue this opportunity," said PotashCorp, although Bill Doyle, chief executive, said the company would be taking a long-term view. "We're patient in the execution of our strategy, and we think our near-14 per cent shareholding in ICL is tremendous investment for our company," he said. The merger talks between Potash and ICL followed a spurt of M&A activity in the industry, following the almost-$24bn merger of Uralkali of Russia and domestic rival Silvinit in late 2010. PotashCorp itself rebuffed a hostile takeover by BHP Billiton in 2010. The Canadian group has been trying to acquire ICL for more than a decade - it first bought a stake in 1998. Israel sees ICL as a national asset and holds a "strategic" share that entitles it to veto rights. PotashCorp's decision followed a pledge this month by Yair Lapid, Israel's finance minister, that he would "vigorously oppose" any takeover of ICL by PotashCorp. ICL's Dead Sea potash plant is a big employer in the Negev, with 5,000 workers, who staged protests because of worries about their jobs. US security issue has proved an impassable barrier Huawei made a big splash this week by abandoning attempts to clear the political hurdles blocking it out of the US market, writes Kathrin Hille in Beijing. "We are not interested in the US market any more," said Eric Xu, executive vice-president and one of three rotating chief executives at China's largest network equipment vendor by sales. While the remark was unexpected for many in China, the strategy behind it is not a surprise. Despite generating more than $35bn in revenue last year and counting 45 of the world's leading telecom operators among its customers, security concerns have kept Huawei from gaining business from any top US carrier. US politicians and security experts have long argued that Huawei equipment could pose risks to national security. They allege that the military ties of Huawei's founder Ren Zhengfei, a former People's Liberation Army officer, could make the company an agent of the Chinese government or armed forces. Those concerns have not only derailed several attempted deals by Huawei to acquire companies or assets in the US, but more recently resulted in a de facto ban against the company selling network infrastructure gear in the country. Administration officials repeatedly leaned on American operators not to buy from Huawei and last October a Congressional probe resulted in a report recommending the company be restricted from selling in the country. Osborne dealt a double blow by banking industry It was not a great week for the Treasury's banking agenda. First, on Wednesday, the Co-operative Group announced that it was pulling out of a proposed deal worth up to £750m to buy 630 branches from Lloyds Banking Group, the part-nationalised lender, writes Patrick Jenkins. The sale was to have created a sixth major force in high street banking, boosting competition. George Osborne, chancellor, had professed himself "very keen" to see the Co-op secure the branches. Analysts believe the bank's "plan B" to float the portfolio under the TSB brand could generate up to £1bn for Lloyds. But a relatively small TSB would be a weaker competitor - and so makes for a less impressive political coup. The second piece of bad news came with the resignation of Jim O'Neil, chief executive of UK Financial Investments, the Treasury unit that manages the government's stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds. Mr O'Neil, an equities banker who is to join Bank of America Merrill Lynch in the autumn, will have been three years in the job. He apparently wrestled for some time over whether to go , having relished the role of liaising between the banks and government. His decision to leave shows the banks" underwater valuations make swift reprivatisation unlikely. For Mr Osborne, it has shone an unwelcome spotlight on the government's £24bn paper losses and on the lengthening timetable for the sale of the stakes. ● At last, a tax avoider we can be proud of! In a week when Barclays and Amazon were again accused of not paying their fair share, investors in Arm Holdings cheered news that it paid an effective tax rate of only 16 per cent. It was genuine innovation, though, not the financial kind: R&D tax credits and patent tax breaks. ● Pack of four meat pies, £1.65. A 2kg bag of oven chips, £3.30. 12 cans of lager, £9.00. An "impaired life" annuity, £100,000. Actuaries became as excited as actuaries can be when Tesco announced it was to offer pension quotes. But contrary to initial rumours, it won't be using Clubcard data to estimate life expectancy.