Vladimir Putin allegedly has a secret lovechild with cleaner now worth $100M
Russian President Vladimir Putin may be the father of a secret teenage lovechild with a cleaner who is now worth more than $100 million, according to a report.
An investigation by Russian media outlet Proekt has linked the notoriously secretive 68-year-old leader to Svetlana Krivonogikh, who now lives in an elite area of St. Petersburg reserved for Putin’s pals.
Her 17-year-old daughter, Elizaveta Krivonogikh, “bears a phenomenal resemblance to the Russian president,” the investigation, which has also been shared in The Moscow Times, said.
The outlet shared photos of the teen — which it did not publish because of her age — with a face-recognition expert who said there was a 70 percent similarity between Putin and the youngster.
“From this information, we can draw the conclusion that they may be related,” Professor Hassan Ugail, Director of the Center for Visual Computing at the University of Bradford in the UK, told Proekt.
Elizaveta Krivonogikh was born in 2003 — while Putin was still married to now-ex Lyudmila Shkrebneva.
Proekt said Elizaveta Krivonogikh’s birth documents do not list a father, and only list “Vladimirovna” as the name deriving from her father.
The teen has reportedly been living under an assumed name for years — and immediately deleted photos showing her face from her social media accounts when reporters started contacting her, the outlet said.
Her mother, now 45, had been a cleaner from a modest background before becoming a beneficiary of a company that owns a small share in the Putin-linked Rossiya Bank, as well as owning properties in numerous cities, according to the investigation.
She also owns a nightspot known for “erotic shows,” the report says, estimating her total assets as being at least $102 million.
Flight logs reportedly link her to flights also taken by Putin, and her current home in “the most elite housing that a St. Petersburg resident could wish for” is somewhere reserved for the president’s closest friends, the report said.
The alleged relationship likely ended “somewhere near the end of the last decade,” Proekt reported.
Numerous Putin sources refused to discuss the allegations with Proekt, and Svetlana Krivonogikh did not return Proekt’s messages despite an initial promise to talk, the outlet said.
But Putin’s spokesperson denied ever hearing about Krivonogikh when probed by local reporters.
“This is the first time I’ve ever heard of such a woman and I can’t tell you anything about this,” Dmitry Peskov, told reporters, The Moscow Times said.
“Yes, I was asked about this name and I have never heard anything about it and I do not know anything,” he insisted.
Putin, meanwhile, has a track record of secrecy regarding his reported brood.
He has never officially confirmed his two daughters from his first marriage — Maria and Katerina who are both in their 30s — and is widely rumored to have up to four kids with former gymnast Alina Kabaeva.
Mulberry warns London’s luxury stores under threat
High rents, Brexit, and end of tourist VAT scheme compound effects of coronavirus pandemic
A combination of Brexit, high costs and the end of sales tax refunds for tourists could drive high-end retailers out of central London in the wake of the pandemic, the chief executive of luxury handbag group Mulberry has said.
Thierry Andretta said rents in the UK capital were the highest in Europe and business rates the highest in the world. “How can you ask us to do business in London with these very high costs when you are telling tourists not to come here?” he said.
Footfall in the West End shopping district has fallen by more than half this year, with overseas tourists absent and office staff working from home. Mr Andretta and others believe government plans to scrap the VAT refund scheme that allows non-EU visitors to reclaim UK sales taxes, will slow London’s post-Covid recovery.
“Chinese tourists in particular make these one-week trips that are focused on shopping. They are not here to go to museums and galleries, they are going to Harrods and Bicester Village,” he said.
The Treasury is ending the VAT refund scheme from January, and has forecast this will boost tax revenues by £1.8bn over the next six years. Opponents contend the UK economy will lose out overall with well-heeled tourists more likely to head to Paris, Milan or Barcelona instead.
Retailers such as Mulberry are not paying business rates on their stores, but this year-long holiday is due to end in March next year. The government has said it will consider further reliefs for certain sectors, possibly including retail, but will not announce them until the new year.
Mr Andretta said landlords in London had also been less flexible about rents than those in regional cities and overseas capitals. The group pays about £11,000 a day in rent and business rates on its 5,400 square foot flagship store on Bond Street.
Mulberry could also face a 5 per cent increase in costs if the UK leaves the EU without a trade deal, Mr Andretta said.
About 70 per cent of its bags are made in the UK, but many of the materials are imported and would attract tariffs if the UK adopted World Trade Organization terms. “We would try for as long as we can to absorb these duties,” he added.
His comments came as the group reported a 29 per cent fall in sales for the half-year to September, as the pandemic turned many city centres into ghost towns.
The group said it expected disruption to continue for at least the rest of its financial year and warned that tourism, which generates about a tenth of its sales, might not recover until 2022. In the eight weeks since the half ended, sales are down 19 per cent, though growth in Asia has helped offset further lockdowns in Europe.
The group’s half-year loss was lower than last year — £2.3m against £10.1m — because of cost cuts and the government’s job support scheme. There was also strong growth in Asia-Pacific sales and digital revenue rose by almost 70 per cent.
The company, which is 36 per cent owned by Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, said that its cash position was better than it had initially forecast, with its main lending facility still undrawn.
Rémy Cointreau: why brandy is dandy
Lockdowns are proving less painful for the cognac business than first feared
Anything that curbs travel, gift-giving and celebrations is bad for cognac sales. Half-year operating profits have fallen more than a fifth at Rémy Cointreau. But investors have kept up the party spirit despite the pandemic. Shares in the French drinks business are up 35 per cent this year.
The business is on course for a strong recovery in the second half. In China, where Rémy’s sales started growing again at the end of June, demand for spirits is now back to pre-pandemic levels. Elsewhere, lockdowns are proving less painful for the business than first feared.
Americans, who account for 53 per cent of sales, have been drinking more through the crisis. They have not switched to cheaper drinks in the way they did in the global financial crisis. Money saved on travel and going out is paying for treats at home. People have had time on their hands to learn about recherché brands.
Rémy may not keep all those customers when normality returns. But with cognac accounting for just 7 per cent of the US spirits market, up from 6 per cent pre-coronavirus, there is scope to occupy more space in the nation’s cocktail cabinets.
Grounds for caution remain. Even with mass vaccinations on the horizon, Rémy does not expects travel traffic to get back to 2019 levels for a year or two. It could yet get caught up in a US-France tariff war.
The shares are pricey, trading at 55 times forward earnings, or double rivals Pernod Ricard and Diageo. There is some support to the valuation from the ageing contents of its cellars — worth at least €5.4bn, about 70 per cent of its market value, says UBS.
Moreover, the company expects profitability to rise steeply over the next decade. The high barriers to entry in cognac help, since the top producers have 92 per cent of the market. Rémy can justify its pricey valuation, but only by flexing its enviable pricing power.
What China’s 14th Five‑Year Plan Means for Investors
It will continue to be important to be an active investor during this period of transition and to carefully monitor the impact of policy on credit sectors.
China recently unveiled its 14th five-year plan (FYP) to guide the country’s economic development over the coming five years, along with the blueprint for a long-term strategy that outlines its vision for 2035.
Overall, we think the new long-term plan should imply a stable outlook for China, with diverse potential opportunities for investors across different sectors. China’s GDP growth should gradually moderate: with the emphasis on quality and sustainable growth, large-scale policy stimulus is no longer an option, except in extremely adverse conditions. Structural policies may be deployed instead to support growth in targeted sectors while mitigating systemic risks.
Strategically important sectors, such as technology, infrastructure, modern manufacturing and renewable energy could benefit from China’s focus on self-reliance and its “dual-circulation” strategy, while in the housing and financials sectors, risk will be carefully monitored. Service sectors such as education, research and development (R&D), and healthcare may also benefit from government support.
Four key highlights of the FYP
Growth target will likely be lower and focus on quality: The plan aims to double China’s GDP by 2035, implying an average annual growth rate of about 4.4% from 2021 to 2035. We expect the government will gradually lower the growth target over the next 15 years, starting with around 5% growth in the first five years and falling below 4% by 2031-2035 (vs. 7% in 2011-2015 and 6.5% in 2016-2020). This is consistent with China’s long-term trend growth and could help accommodate necessary reforms while avoiding the risks of over-stimulus.
Opening up should continue: Building out a self-reliant economy does not mean China will close its doors to the world. The plan pledged to implement policies such as the further two-way opening up of financial markets, strengthening trade competition, and improving international cooperation. We believe renminbi (RMB) internationalization will regain momentum, in tandem with capital market liberalization, and the government will likely show more tolerance for a stronger yuan (CNY) as the country becomes less export-reliant.
Innovation and technology will be a national strategic pillar: The goal is to achieve self-sufficiency in key technologies, such as semi-conductors and artificial technology, by 2035. China aims to boost its technology capacity, targeting key industries such as AI, quantum information, integrated circuits, and biotech. China will likely spend more on R&D and education, and use structural policies to support targeted sectors.
The environment is a key commitment: China has announced its aim to achieve “carbon neutrality” by 2060. Echoing this, the plenum called for significant progress in controlling carbon emissions by 2035. We expect China to set a higher standard for environmental protection, which means demand for related equipment, services and investment are likely to continue growing swiftly.
Investment implications: Which sectors will benefit from the FYP?
Technology was at the centre of the FYP, as China aims to be less dependent on semiconductor imports and technology. Auto manufacturers that have strong electric vehicle (EV) exposure and EV battery makers should enjoy both regulatory and demand support. The efforts to be self-sufficient in cutting-edge semiconductor technology could still take some time, however, and the sector could face near-term headwinds with more restrictions coming from the U.S. and its allies as geopolitical risk remains.
We continue to see leading internet players as key beneficiaries under the new economic framework. Online penetration was unexpectedly accelerated due to COVID-19, especially for services such as fresh grocery delivery, online education and healthcare. Significant investments made in areas such as cloud, big data, AI, and smart manufacturing will play a greater role as China’s government looks to upgrade its industrial activities into high value-added manufacturing. Domestic and overseas merchants will allocate more budget to advertising online given the better return on investment from targeted marketing.
Leading consumer names should continue to benefit from the consumption upgrade trend. Chinese consumer companies are constantly innovating to capture growing demand and they could stand to gain more market share from global brands. Services will also play a bigger part in overall consumption as penetration of products becomes higher.
China’s goal to become carbon neutral by 2060 should further accelerate the growth of renewable power generation, transmission and distribution, to be mainly implemented by state-owned enterprises. With the fast decline of solar panel and wind turbine prices, renewable energy has become more commercially viable and is on the way to "grid parity", meaning there will be no more subsidies for new onshore wind power projects after 2021.
While the government has been trying to reduce reliance on the property sector to drive economic growth by shifting focus to domestic consumption and technology, we acknowledge that most local governments are still heavily reliant on this sector, which is likely to remain a key economic driver in the medium term. The central bank’s newly imposed tests on developers will cap total debt growth, or even put pressure on highly leveraged developers to de-leverage in coming years, which should improve the sector’s overall credit profile over time. On the demand side, stable and increasingly high-quality domestic economic growth should support housing demand in the long term.
Chinese financials will likely embrace structural changes, seeking a higher share of direct financing in both debt and equity capital markets and applying disruptive technologies to core businesses, such as payments and lending. Chinese banks may gradually shift their lending focus from more traditional industries such as infrastructure and property into consumer sectors, renewable energy and technology. We also expect them to increase exposure to privately-owned enterprises in these sectors.
On commodities, we believe mining companies that have exposure to resources linked to the EV sector, such as nickel, lithium, cobalt, copper and manganese, will likely benefit from the FYP. Despite the long-term focus on renewable energy development and carbon neutrality, we expect the traditional energy sector will continue to play a key role. Given China depends heavily on imports for oil and gas, in order to improve self-sufficiency, we expect more investment in domestic exploration and development activities and technologies. At the same time, we expect Chinese oil and gas companies to be more active in international M&As and partnerships to secure long-term reserves.
Greater potential opportunities in China’s bond markets over time
We expect the onshore bond market to continue opening up to foreign investors. We also foresee a widening of the issuer base in the U.S. dollar-denominated bond market with enhanced credit transmission to improve system transparency and encourage fairer pricing of default risk. That said, we expect this transition to be gradual and smooth in order to avoid any potential market disruption.
We expect increasing opportunities in strategically important sectors, such as technology, renewable energy and consumer-related sectors. Service sectors such as education and healthcare will also benefit from government support. However, it will continue to be important to be an active investor during this period of transition and to be selective regarding investment opportunities.
German watchdog reports EY to prosecutors over Wirecard audit
Oversight body said there was evidence of potential criminal violations
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The German audit watchdog has told prosecutors that EY may have acted criminally during its work for Wirecard, a step that significantly escalates the legal and reputational risks for the accounting firm.
People familiar with the matter said that Apas, the watchdog, had sent a report to prosecutors. It is the first time a government agency has said EY may have broken the law during its audits of the German payments group, which collapsed this year after revealing a multi-year fraud.
Munich prosecutors told the Financial Times they were evaluating the evidence that was filed by Apas and had not yet come to a conclusion. Prosecutors have not launched a criminal investigation into current or former EY staff.
For more than a decade, EY Germany had given Wirecard a clean bill of health before discovering this year that €1.9bn in corporate cash did not exist. Wirecard subsequently collapsed into insolvency in one of Europe’s biggest postwar accounting scandals.
The revelation comes ahead of a potentially fiery parliamentary hearing on Thursday afternoon, in which EY partners are set to clash with MPs over how much they are allowed to reveal about their work for Wirecard without violating strict confidentiality rules.
Apas, an independent government body overseeing Germany’s auditing industry, last year launched an investigation into EY’s work at Wirecard after the FT reported that many important clients of the firm seemed not to exist. The body can issue fines for misconduct and in extreme cases can disbar individual auditors.
Apas declined to comment, pointing to confidentiality rules.
According to people familiar with the matter, Apas filed an interim assessment of the case to criminal prosecutors in Berlin on September 29 and asked them to share the findings with criminal prosecutors in Munich. Berlin prosecutors told the FT that they have not launched an investigation against EY.
In the document, the watchdog said it found indications that the auditor potentially violated its legal due diligence and reporting obligations during the Wirecard audits. Under German law, auditors found guilty of such misconduct can be punished with up to three years in jail. German newspaper Handelsblatt first reported on the Apas document.
EY Germany told the FT that it had “no knowledge of such an Apas document”, adding that “based on our current state of knowledge, our colleagues conducted the audits professionally and in good faith” and that there were “absolutely no indications for criminally relevant misconduct by EY auditors in the Wirecard case”.
EY had earlier responded by quoting the Munich chief prosecutor Hildegard Bäumler-Hösl as saying that, “we currently do not see enough evidence for criminally relevant behaviour by EY auditors in the Wirecard case”.
However, Munich prosecutors on Thursday took issue with the statement, saying that EY had taken the quote out of context as it did not refer to the Apas letter. “We cannot confirm EY’s assessment that there are no indications for criminally relevant misconduct by EY in the Wirecard case as this is still being scrutinised,” the prosecutors added.
The FT reported in June that EY, for at least three years, failed to request account information directly from a Singapore bank where Wirecard claimed it held large sums of cash. A KPMG special audit into Wirecard concluded that EY did not properly investigate whistleblower allegations about alleged accounting manipulations in India.
Fabio De Masi, an MP for the leftwing Die Linke party, urged the German government to “act immediately” and to stop commissioning EY with taxpayer-funded mandates until potential criminal misconduct by the firm has been ruled out.
Several EY partners have been summoned as witnesses by the parliamentary inquiry committee and will be questioned on Thursday afternoon in Berlin.
EY has said that it may refuse to testify at Thursday’s parliamentary investigation into the collapse of Wirecard on the grounds that its auditors could become liable for breaches of secrecy, which carry a prison sentence or large fines — a stance that has infuriated German lawmakers.
The EU plan to live in a raw materials world
China supplies 98% of the bloc’s rare earths, and has exploited that bottleneck
Hello from Brussels, where the Brexit talks, believe it or not, haven’t yet been resolved. Whatever the real deadline is (agreement on this point is itself elusive), it’s rapidly approaching. Again. Next week is apparently a crunch point, though to be fair Brexit has had more crunch points than a barrelful of Golden Delicious apples, and with similarly little flavour.
Meanwhile, our Christmas list of trade policy buzz-phrases continues to expand. “Patriotic globalism”, which we mentioned last week after we spotted a former deputy US trade representative using it, got another shout-out over the weekend from Liz Truss, UK trade secretary, boasting about Britain’s new bilateral deal with Canada. (See also Tall Tales below.) Also, New Zealand’s formidable top trade negotiator, Vangelis Vitalis, reminded us via Twitter that the Kiwis and their Asia-Pacific pals including Chile and Singapore got in the game a while back with “strategic resilience”, and a real corker, “concerted open plurilateralism”. Lovely ring to it, though we’re not sure how you can have plurilateralism without acting in concert. Maybe it’s as opposed to disconcerted plurilateralism, of which there is lots.
Anyway, a big-up to the concerted guys from Wellington, Santiago and Singapore, and a strategically resilient festive season to you all. Keep them coming — we’re envisaging a range of Christmas cards, maybe an advent calendar. Today’s main piece is on the EU’s valiant attempts to diversify its access to the critical minerals the economy needs, while our chart of the day shows how coronavirus vaccine hopes have set off a rush for emerging markets.
Don’t forget to click here if you’d like to receive Trade Secrets every Monday to Thursday. And we want to hear from you. Send any thoughts to trade.secrets@ft.com or email me at alan.beattie@ft.com
The Aussies come to Europe’s rare-earth rescue
OK, so enough with the rarefied EU rhetoric about open strategic autonomy and resilient supply chains and what have you. Let’s get down to cases. Specifically, if Europe is to break its dependence on inputs from China, where will all the raw materials to make the magnets that run electric vehicles come from?
Tricky one. The EU this week launched one of the more substantive initiatives of its supply chain strategy, a “raw materials alliance”. The partnership of companies, business associations and governments wants to secure access to a total of 30 critical inputs by increasing domestic production and recycling and looking abroad for friendly suppliers. The list of sensitive materials has more than doubled over the past decade, familiar suspects including rare earth elements lately joined by lithium, titanium and bauxite.
Even for instinctive free-traders like us, this seems fair enough: the risk of relying on spot sourcing on world markets is obvious. China supplies 98 per cent of the EU’s rare earths, and has exploited that bottleneck in the past by putting on export controls, diverting output to its own manufacturers and driving up global prices.
A worker at the site of a rare-earth metals mine in Jiangxi province, China © Reuters
But it’s going to be a struggle. Some of the problems are obvious and longstanding, such as the EU’s environmental and social regulations deterring mining. The EU’s largest known deposit of rare earth materials, Norra Karr in Sweden, was declared off-limits to further exploration by the Swedish supreme administrative court in 2016 because of environmental risks, and reversing that decision would be difficult.
Other problems reflect the peculiarities of the materials involved. Supply chains for rare earths and the like are particularly hard to diversify. It’s not like finding a new source of crude oil. The materials have multiple stages — mining, concentrating, separating and processing — which are expensive, complex and dirty. It’s politically and economically cheaper to outsource the nastier bits to Chinese producers, but a monopoly over even one link in the chain gives China leverage over the whole thing.
So when the EU goes looking for supplier countries to produce materials to feed into its manufacturing, it wants stable, environmentally sensitive and economically advanced allies capable of replicating the whole value chain. Several sets of ears around the world prick up at this, but few as eagerly as those in Canberra. Australia has rich rare earth deposits, and while its green record is not exactly perfect — the climate change denialism of some of its politicians is unhelpful — in terms of environment and labour standards it’s certainly not China.
Spotting an opportunity, Australia’s famous high-performance export promotion engine has purred into action. The government created a “critical minerals facilitation office” in January to position Australia as a reliable supplier of said commodities, and is doing outreach. The office’s head, Jessica Robinson, told a seminar including European officials and business types last week that the processing, separation and mining of minerals all needed to be brought on stream to give advanced manufacturing economies such as the EU a full-range service. “It really takes a co-ordinated collective effort,” Robinson said. “There is a need to help the private sector appreciate the sense of urgency in needing to invest in raw materials that are going to be needed to support downstream activity.”
But a patched-together network of companies in Australia and the EU with limited public support is going to struggle to compete against Chinese producers. China already has an entire “mine-to-magnet” value chain for the components, and its own advanced manufacturing in sectors such as electric vehicles to boot. People in the materials industry say China is also capable of maintaining its dominant position by indefinitely subsidising costly parts of the process, deterring competitors. The US and others won a World Trade Organization case against China in 2014 against export controls on rare earths, but other companies in the business reckon China manages to manipulate quantities and prices along the supply chain nonetheless.
We wish the EU, and indeed Australia, luck. The bloc has identified a genuine problem and is mobilising what tools and alliances it can. But it’s up against Beijing in a game of low costs, lax standards, managed prices and state handouts in a mass-production industry with a dominant position in strategic commodity markets at stake. China tends to win those most of the time.
Charted waters
The coronavirus crisis sparked a record flight out of emerging market assets, with more than $90bn leaving bonds and stocks in March alone, according to the Institute of International Finance. But now the asset class is making a comeback. And as Wall Street sets out its big ideas for 2021, EM is top of the list.
Delta and Alitalia to launch ‘quarantine free’ flights from US to Italy
Airlines open first travel corridor between the two continents since Covid rules were introduced
Delta Air Lines and Alitalia are to launch “quarantine free” flights between the US and Italy, opening up the first travel corridor linking the US and Europe since countries introduced isolation rules during the pandemic.
The US airline said that from next month passengers travelling on select flights from Atlanta to Rome would not have to self-isolate if they test negative for Covid-19 three times on their journey.
Travellers will be asked to take a gold-standard PCR test 72 hours before departure, and then rapid tests at the airport in Atlanta before boarding and again on arrival in Italy.
The aviation industry is pushing regulators around the world to allow pre-departure testing to replace the current blanket quarantine restrictions in place across most countries that have stifled demand for travel.
Several airlines have launched flights between the US and Europe that test passengers as they travel, but Delta and Alitalia's flights to Rome are the first that will allow travellers who have been tested to skip quarantine.
Aviation executives in the UK have been pushing for an air corridor between London and New York to help restart business travel, but Delta's chief executive Ed Bastian told the Financial Times last week that it would be easier to open up a corridor with “just about any” other European capital.
Sunak refuses to rule out raising income tax, VAT and national insurance
Increases in these big money-raising taxes would breach a Tory election pledge
Rishi Sunak, chancellor, has refused to rule out raising income tax, value added tax or national insurance — breaching a Conservative manifesto pledge — as new forecasts revealed a borrowing hole of about £30bn at the next election.
The so-called “triple lock” against these taxes increasing was a central part of Boris Johnson’s pitch at the December 2019 general election, but the Covid-19 crisis has forced ministers to rip up the promise.
Mr Sunak infuriated many senior Tories on Wednesday when he confirmed in his spending review that an election pledge to maintain overseas aid spending at 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product would be abandoned, saving £4bn next year.
On Thursday the chancellor faced questions about which other parts of the Tory manifesto would now be abandoned, including whether the promise not to raise rates for the big money-raising taxes — income tax, VAT and national insurance — was still sacrosanct.
Speaking on the BBC, he was evasive when asked about tax rises, only saying that the current level of spending was “unsustainable”. Asked if the tax lock still stands, he added: “I’m not going to be drawn on future fiscal policy.”
The revelation that government borrowing this year will hit almost £400bn has raised questions about how Mr Sunak will start to deliver what he claims is the Conservatives’ “sacred duty to future generations” to balance the books.
Mel Stride, Conservative chair of the House of Commons Treasury select committee, said it was inevitable the chancellor would look at the three taxes covered by the manifesto lock because they made up about two-thirds of tax revenue.
Mr Sunak claims he will not balance the books by returning to public spending austerity, but his spending review included a pay freeze for most public sector workers and other cuts that suggested tax rises alone will not be enough.
On Thursday Dominic Raab, foreign secretary, will face an angry response from some Tory MPs when he appears in the Commons to defend the “temporary” cut to the overseas aid budget.
However, Mr Sunak insisted that the cut was necessary to allow the government to fund the “priorities” of the British people, including health, education, infrastructure and defence. Early polling suggested the cut to aid spending was popular with voters.
The chancellor was asked to defend his priorities at the spending review, including a “pay pause” for a teaching assistant that coincided with a £4bn a year boost to defence spending.
He said it was “fair” for public sector workers to share the Covid-19 pain felt by workers in the private sector, adding that defence spending would create jobs, including in Scotland.
On Brexit, Mr Sunak insisted that Britain should not strike a deal “at any cost”, in spite of warnings from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility that a “no trade deal” outcome on January 1 could cut 2 per cent from the British economy next year.
“I remain hopeful and confident we can find a path to a deal,” he told the BBC’s Today programme. “If people retain a constructive attitude and approach these talks in a spirit of goodwill, I think we can get there.”