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Greens and Left best for business: survey

Sweden’s Green Party has the best ideas to help the country’s small business owners, a new survey reveals, with the Left Party ranking a close second.

According to a survey carried out by the Swedish Federation of Business Owners (Företagarna), a proposal by the Green Party to lower payroll taxes is the most beneficial for small businesses.

The proposal, which calls for a 10 percent reduction in payroll taxes on wage payments up to 2.5 million kronor ($360,000), was viewed favourably by 60 percent of the survey’s respondents.

And a proposal by the Left Party which would absolve companies with fewer than 10 employees from the need to cover sick pay expenditures was seen as extremely beneficial to Sweden’s small business climate by 50 percent of business owners, according to the survey.

The third best proposal came from the Centre Party, which called for the scrapping of rules requiring that the last employee hired is the first one fired at companies with fewer than 50 employees.

Currently, only companies with fewer than 10 employees are allowed to partly sidestep the rule.

In order to protect the survey results from being skewed by party loyalties, respondents were not allowed to see which political parties put forward each proposal.

While the results of the survey were somewhat surprising, Företagarna CEO Anna-Stina Nordmark Nilsson remained circumspect about their significance.

“It’s one thing to propose business-friendly reforms, and another thing to implement them. Therefore, we plan to follow up with the parties to see if they actually push for their proposals. And with a year left until the election, it’s high time to start doing so,” she said in a statement.

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BUSINESS

France’s EDF hails €10billion profit, despite huge UK nuclear charge

French energy giant EDF has unveiled net profit of €10billion and cut its massive debt by increasing nuclear production after problems forced some plants offline.

France's EDF hails €10billion profit, despite huge UK nuclear charge

EDF hailed an “exceptional” year after its loss of €17.9billion in 2022.

Sales slipped 2.6 percent to €139.7billion , but the group managed to slice debt by €10billion euros to €54.4billion.

EDF said however that it had booked a €12.9 billion depreciation linked to difficulties at its Hinkley Point nuclear plant in Britain.

The charge includes €11.2 billion for Hinkley Point assets and €1.7billion at its British subsidiary, EDF Energy, the group explained.

EDF announced last month a fresh delay and additional costs for the giant project hit by repeated cost overruns.

“The year was marked by many events, in particular by the recovery of production and the company’s mobilisation around production recovery,” CEO Luc Remont told reporters.

EDF put its strong showing down to a strong operational performance, notably a significant increase in nuclear generation in France at a time of historically high prices.

That followed a drop in nuclear output in France in 2022. The group had to deal with stress corrosion problems at some reactors while also facing government orders to limit price rises.

The French reactors last year produced around 320.4 TWh, in the upper range of expectations.

Nuclear production had slid back in 2022 to 279 TWh, its lowest level in three decades, because of the corrosion problems and maintenance changes after
the Covid-19 pandemic.

Hinkley Point C is one of a small number of European Pressurised Reactors (EPRs) worldwide, an EDF-led design that has been plagued by cost overruns
running into billions of euros and years of construction delays.

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