Covering the CBI Annual Conference

The CBI, the UK’s largest employers organisation in the UK, held its 2014 annual conference on 10 November in the Grosvenor House Hotel in London. Around 1,000 leading business figures and representatives from all major media organisations heard speeches by the three main party political leaders and debates over key issues facing business.

We helped provide the live coverage of the main events as they happened alongside other reporters. The pieces we produced included:

• the keynote address and Q&A session with prime Minister David Cameron
• the speech and Q&A with Deputy Prime Minister and Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg
• the keynote speech and Q&A with Labour leader Ed Miliband; and
• a presentation by Steve Varley, Managing Partner for EY UK & Ireland, a sponsor of the conference.

Reporting live from the IMF/World Bank

We were in Washington DC for the week of 6 October to cover the annual 2014 meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for Emerging Markets newspaper at a time of mounting concern over the state of the economy and the impact of the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine and the terrible Ebola outbreak.

We were involved in planning the newspaper’s coverage, putting together the daily news list, working with reporters as well as carrying out live reporting.

We looked in detail at the role of relevance of the IMF 10 years after it was written off as irrelevant and asked what’s its role should be in what MD Christine Lagarde has called a “new mediocre” era of growth. The feature is here.

We also looked at the World Bank on its 70th birthday and asked what President Jim Kim should do to ensure that the bank remained relevant in an increasingly crowded development arena. The feature is here.

We spoke with World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu about the economic impact of the outbreak of Ebola as the death toll broke the 4,000 barrier during the week. The story is here. We also spoke with World Bank climate envoy Rachel Kyte and discussed her strategy of working with businesses in countries where there ‘constraints’ on political leadership. The story is here.

 

We hope to be covering the 2015 meetings that will be held in Lima, Peru