Aston Villa's Fabian Delph halts Chelsea's Premier League title charge

Chelsea's Willian tackles Aston Villa's Karim El Ahmadi in the Premier League match at Villa Park. Photograph: Michael Regan/Getty Images

The title race is not a foregone conclusion after all. Not only did Chelsealose ground to Manchester City when Fabian Delph's late winner for Villa cut their lead to six points, they ended up short-handed as first Willian and then Ramires were dismissed. Willian picked up a second yellow card for a rather soft foul on the goalscorer, but the stamp on Karim El Ahmadi that brought a straight red card for Ramires was altogether more serious and brought the game to a bad-tempered conclusion with players squaring up to each other in front of the Chelsea bench.

City have three games in hand so can now overhaul Chelsea if they keep winning. Their 2-0 victory at Hull was achieved by 10 men but Chelsea could not show the same drive and determination, even before their numbers were reduced.

Villa spent the first 10 minutes bemused by the movement and interchangability of Chelsea's three-quarter line of Oscar, Willian and Eden Hazard as the visitors opened the game with businesslike intent, moving the ball around smartly and purposefully and always appearing to have a spare man making himself available.

It was impressive to watch, yet Chelsea's approach work did not lead to any openings in front of goal, just speculative long shots from Willian and Oscar. Most of the actual attacking threat was being channelled through the industrious Hazard, and once Villa worked that out they settled down and began to put together some moves of their own.

Christian Benteke could not keep his header down when Fabian Delph crossed from the left, and Karim El Ahmadi should have done better than waft wastefully over the bar with a decent shooting opportunity, though at least Villa boosted their own confidence by showing they knew the way to goal.

When Benteke missed narrowly with a volley from the edge of the area that had Petr Cech scrambling just before half time it was the closest the game had come to a goal, at least until Nemanja Matic bundled the ball over the Villa line a couple of minutes later, only to be recalled for handball by a linesman. It was hard to detect what the official had seen. It was far from an obvious handling offence, yet the player was slow to celebrate the goal as if he knew he might be pulled up.

If that annoyed José Mourinho, he was even more incensed on the stroke of the interval when Joe Bennett escaped with just a yellow card for bringing down Ramires in full flight when the Brazilian would have been through on goal. It was quite a long way out to be considered a clear goalscoring opportunity. Other players may have been able to come across and cover, though it would certainly have been an opportunity and Chris Foy's lenience brought Mourinho to his feet waving an imaginary card, presumably a red one.

Chelsea might have had a goal early in the second half when Brad Guzan failed to cut out a cross and Hazard was presented with the briefest of shooting opportunities, but he chose to pass instead and when the eventual shot arrived from Oscar it was both hopeful and high. Oscar's next shot was lower and on target yet straight at Guzan, who saved it comfortably even though he could only have seen it late.

The visitors were dominating the game by the hour mark, with Villa rarely managing to cross the half way line, though Chelsea's lack of conviction in front of goal was again highlighted by the directness the home side showed when they did come up with the occasional counter attack. Benteke was only inches wide after a one two with Andreas Weimann in the area as once more Villa demonstrated they could soak up pressure and still threaten a goal on the break. Mourinho replaced Fernando Torres with Demba Ba midway through the second half in an attempt to bring more urgency to the Chelsea attack.

Torres had not had one of his better games, losing the ball cheaply on more than one occasion, though the real problem seemed to be that while Hazard, Willian and Oscar could find each other with ease, even in tight situations in the penalty area, they could not find Torres or anyone else in a position to take a shy at goal.

Then with 22 minutes remaining Willian was gone and Chelsea were down to 10. The Brazilian was cautioned in the first half for a foul on El Ahmadi and saw a second yellow, rather harshly in view of the trifling nature of the offence, for the slightest of tugs on Delph. That was all the encouragement Villa needed. Ba was a mere spectator, just as Torres had been, and after Ron Vlaar had missed with a header from a corner, Delph put his side in front. Whether he applied the finish he intended was debatable, though Delph set up the goal by dispossessing Chelsea on half way and if there was a bit of luck in the way he connected with Marc Albrighton's return pass to guide the ball in he probably deserved it. Delph hit the bar in stoppage time. Chelsea could have no complaints, especially after finishing with nine men.

McDonald's lawsuits allege wage theft by fast-food giant and franchise owners

A diner sits next to a help wanted sign at a McDonald's restaurant in Brooklyn. Photograph: Keith Bedford/Reuters

McDonald’s is being sued in three states by workers who allege that the fast-food giant is systematically stealing the wages of tens of thousands of employees.

Seven lawsuits, some of them requesting class-action status, have been filed this week against the corporation and McDonald’s franchise-owners in California, Michigan and New York, lawyers announced on Thursday afternoon.

The lawsuits allege that thousands of McDonald’s workers have their pay pushed below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, through a variety of practices. Some are not paid for all the time they work, some have wages docked in order to pay for their uniforms and some are made to wait for hours until busy periods before they are allowed to clock in, the complaints allege.

“These suits have been filed to stop this widespread wage theft,” said Joseph Sellers, one of the attorneys for the workers, in a conference call. “They highlight a broad array of unlawful pay practices, which together reflect ways in which McDonald’s has withheld pay from its low-paid workers in order to enrich the corporation and its shareholders.”

Heidi Barker Sa Shekhem, a spokeswoman for McDonald’s, said in an emailed statement the company was “currently reviewing the allegations in the lawsuits”.

“McDonald’s and our independent owner-operators share a concern and commitment to the well-being and fair treatment of all people who work in McDonald’s restaurants,” she said. “McDonald’s and our independent franchisees are committed to undertaking a comprehensive investigation of the allegations and will take any necessary actions as they apply to our respective organisations.”

Representatives for the plaintiffs stressed on Thursday that McDonald’s made more than $5.5bn in profit a year on revenues of about $28bn, and that the total annual pay package for Don Thompson, its chief executive, amounts to about $13.75m.

They said that if granted class-action status, the lawsuits could apply to more than 25,000 workers. They declined to estimate a total for the compensation being sought in back-pay but said McDonald’s could also be forced to pay extra damages and legal penalties.

Across three lawsuits filed in California, workers allege that McDonald’s bosses there failed to pay workers for all the hours they worked, prevented them from taking breaks or time out for meals, and even altered records in order to remove hours worked from time-sheets.

“When I took a job at McDonald’s, I knew I wouldn’t be making a lot of money,” Jason Hughes, a plaintiff in one of the California suits, told reporters during the conference call. “But I thought a well known company like McDonald’s would treat me fairly – at the very least follow the law. We have brought this lawsuit because neither has happened.”

In Michigan, two lawsuits filed against McDonald’s and two Detroit-area franchise owners allege that bosses forced workers to buy their own uniforms and frequently made employees who arrived on time for their shifts wait without pay until a number of customers arrived at the restaurant.

“McDonald’s franchisees closely monitor the ratio of labour costs to revenues,” lawyers said in a news release about the lawsuits. “When it exceeds a corporate-set target, managers tell workers arriving for their shifts to wait for up to an hour to clock in, and sometimes direct workers who have already clocked in for scheduled shifts to clock out for extended breaks until the target ratio is again achieved.”

Meanwhile a lawsuit filed in New York alleges that low-paid workers were forced to spend their own time and money cleaning their uniforms, sometimes three times a week, in violation of New York state laws requiring firms to pay employees for uniform maintenance.

“Because McDonald’s restaurants pay so little, forcing workers to clean their Golden Arches uniforms on their own dime drives many workers’ wages below the legal minimum,” said Jim Reif, an attorney who filed the New York lawsuit.

The lawsuits are being assisted by a union-backed campaign that has been pushing since 2012 for a rise in the federal minimum wage to $15 and the right for fast-food workers to form trade unions without retaliation.

City was like a giant hedge fund before crisis, says Bank of England official

Charlie Bean said: 'The international net investment position is the most important figure.' Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

The City operated like a "giant hedge fund" in the runup to the financial crisis, and the resulting crash could leave the British economy with permanent low productivity and stagnant earnings, according to a seniorBank of England official.

Charlie Bean, the Bank's deputy governor responsible for monetary policy, added that the UK's foreign investment hot streak had cooled and was unlikely to fully recover. A shrinking surplus on investment income from abroad could spook markets and trigger a sharp fall in sterling, he said.

Asked whether Britain could be stuck in a "new normal" of a low-productivity and low-investment economy, Bean said: "It is always possible. We do not fully understand the current weakness of productivity. We have done a lot of work on it down to company level to try to get a better picture. There have been some plausible explanations, one of which, of course, is the possibility that the official data may understate the position."

Bean, who leaves the Bank on 30 June after 14 years of service, said the Office for National Statistics was "doing its best", but some surveys suggested that the British economy was growing more strongly.

"Business surveys suggest output growth is a bit stronger than the official data. Employment growth suggests the same. There may be a measurement error in the data. This should not be taken as a criticism of the ONS. Inevitably, the ONS numbers are just estimates. The division of labour is that the ONS does its best to measure what is happening, and we interpret."

Bean added that a sustainable recovery requires three pillars: a rise in business investment, a pick-up in productivity growth and an expansion in exports.

Britain's current account was last in balance or surplus in 1983, but, Bean said, while the foreign investment figure is the most important, its apparent health belies a contribution from the City that is unsustainable.

"Despite our having run deficits for many years, this net position is close to balance … in large part that is a result of our having run a surplus on investment income' In other words, our investments abroad produced better returns than foreign investors achieved in Britain. Up to the crisis, we were a bit like a giant hedge fund."

But he added that the blow dealt to the financial services sector by the credit crunch could have permanent consequences for the deficit. "There has been a recent deterioration in that component of our current account performance," he said. "Is it likely to be long-lasting or temporary? My view is that it may come back a bit, but not all the way back to where we were before the financial crisis.

"Will that leave us in trouble? I would hesitate to say so, in the sense that countries can run deficits for years. But certainly an adverse net position would leave us vulnerable, making it more likely for the exchange rate to fall sharply were investors to lose faith in the economy. We have seen that happen in the emerging markets."

Commenting on his plans after leaving Threadneedle Street, he said: "The first thing I am going to do is take a holiday in Italy. Then I shall re-establish links with academia [he was a professor at the London School of Economics before joining the Bank] and, I hope, do some interesting things, including in my role as president of the Royal Economic Society."

He added: "It will be only semi-retirement."

Thousands of Morrisons staff personal details leaked online

The posting of Morrisons staff personal details online came only hours after Dalton Philips, the chief executive, boasted of new IT systems. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

The personal details of thousands of Morrisons staff including salaries, bank account details and addresses have been stolen and published online.

Police are investigating the serious security breach which occurred on Thursday night and is believed to have been the result of an internal leak, with data copied onto a portable storage device and taken out of Morrisons' Bradford headquarters.

A disc of the data, which has details of staff from director level to the shop floor, was also sent anonymously to a local paper in Yorkshire, the Telegraph & Argus, by a "concerned Morrisons shopper".

The leak appeared timed to cause maximum embarrassment to Morrisons in the wake of a massive profits warning on Thursday, which sent shares diving 12%. It also came hours after the chief executive, Dalton Philips, boasted that new IT systems would help to turn around Morrisons' performance.

Morrisons said that all the staff details published were put on an unspecified location on the web for a few hours and were taken down immediately when they were discovered. It said in a statement: "We can confirm there has been no loss of customer data and no colleague will be left financially disadvantaged." It is working with police to identify the source of the theft, which "initial inquiries" suggested was not the result of an external breach of its security systems.

It said it was now "urgently reviewing our internal data security measures," and was working with UK banks and credit check service Experian to help colleagues secure their bank accounts.

Morrisons said it had contacted staff via email and its Facebook page to inform them of the leak. It also set up an email address for questions. But some staff took to social media to express their anger and complain that they had not been informed.

One post on Facebook reads: "I've been at work for nine hours and nobody has told me – good communication M!"

Another staff member wrote: "Reading about this on Facebook does not inspire confidence, we should have been notified by phone by our HR departments first thing this morning."

Another post on Facebook reads: "Ironic that Dalton Phillips was on BBC Breakfast yesterday stating he'd updated the IT systems from the 1950s. Those systems were probably too old to be hackable!"

Another post appeared to threaten action against those complaining about the leak: "This is further bad publicity for our company at a difficult time, and I'd like to ask all of my fellow colleagues to think carefully about what they say in the public domain and the effect it could have on our reputation."

The leak is the latest embarrassing issue for Morrisons, just weeks after the supermarket group's treasurer and head of tax, Paul Coyle, was arrested and questioned over alleged insider dealing relating to trading in the shares of Ocado, Morrisons' partner for its new online grocery-delivery service.

BP closer to restoring US operations after deal with government agency

BP is still awaiting a US court ruling about whether it was grossly negligent over the Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

BP is closer to restoring its operations and reputation in the US after agreeing a deal with environmental protection authorities that it will enable the oil firm to bid for new drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico.

The British-based group had started legal proceedings against the US environmental protection agency (EPA) which had banned BP from new contracts on the grounds that it had failed to correct problems properly since the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010.

BP said it had now dropped its law suit after resolving outstanding problems with the EPA but the firm will have to abide by monitoring arrangements with the agency for the next five years.

"After a lengthy negotiation, BP is pleased to have reached this resolution, which we believe to be fair and reasonable," said John Mingé, head of BP America. "Today's agreement will allow America's largestenergy investor to compete again for federal contracts and leases."

BP, which claims to have invested almost $50bn (£30bn) in the US over the past five years, is still awaiting a court ruling about whether it was grossly negligent when it caused the biggest sea-borne pollution incident in American history.

The firm is confident it will be judged to have acted responsibly but a gross negligence finding would expose BP to billions of dollars worth of extra fines.

Some environmental groups have expressed opposition to the EPA deal. The Gulf Restoration Network, based in New Orleans, told the New York Times it was outrageous to allow BP to expand its offshore interests given its track record.

Why the European Central Bank should buy American

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi faces legal obstacles if the ECB embarks on quantitative easing. Photograph: Ralph Orlowski/Reuters

The European Central Bank needs to ease monetary policy further. Eurozone-wide inflation, at 0.8%, is below the target of "close to 2%", and unemployment in most countries remains high.

Under current conditions, it is hard for the periphery countries to reduce their costs to internationally competitive levels, as they need to do. If inflation in the eurozone as a whole is below 1%, the periphery countries are condemned to suffer painful deflation.

The question is how the ECB can ease policy, given that short-term interest rates are already close to zero. Most of the talk in Europe concerns proposals to undertake quantitative easing (QE), following the path taken by the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan. This would mean expanding the money supply by buying member countries' government bonds – a realisation of the ECB president Mario Draghi's "outright monetary transactions" scheme, announced in August 2012 in the midst of growing uncertainty about the euro's future (but never used since then).

But QE would present a problem for the ECB that the Fed and other central banks do not face. The eurozone has no centrally issued and traded Eurobond that the central bank could buy. (And the time to create such a bond has not yet come.) By purchasing bonds of member countries, the ECB would be taking implicit positions on their individual creditworthiness.

That idea is not popular with the eurozone's creditor countries. In Germany, ECB purchases of bonds issued by Greece and other periphery countries are widely thought to constitute monetary financing of profligate governments, in violation of the treaty under which the ECB was established. The German constitutional court believes that the outright monetary transactions scheme exceeds the ECB's mandate, though it has temporarily tossed that political hot potato to the European court of justice.

The legal obstacle is not merely an inconvenience; it also represents a valid economic concern about the moral hazard that ECB bailouts present for members' fiscal policies in the long term. That moral hazard – a subsidy for fiscal irresponsibility – was among the origins of the Greek crisis in the first place.

Fortunately, interest rates on Greek and other periphery-country debt have fallen sharply over the last two years. Since he took the helm at the ECB, Draghi has brilliantly walked the fine line required to "do whatever it takes" to keep the eurozone intact. (After all, there would be little point in upholding pristine principles if doing so resulted in a breakup, and fiscal austerity alone was never going to return the periphery countries to sustainable debt paths.) At the moment, there is no need to support periphery-country bonds, especially if it would flirt with illegality.

What, then, should the ECB buy if it is to expand the monetary base? For several reasons, it should buy US treasury securities. In other words, it should go back to intervening in the foreign-exchange market.

For starters, there would be no legal obstacles. Operations in the foreign-exchange market are well within the ECB's remit. Moreover, they do not pose moral-hazard issues (unless one thinks of the long-term moral hazard that the "exorbitant privilege" of printing the world's international currency creates for US fiscal policy). Finally, ECB purchases of dollars would help push down the euro's exchange rate against the dollar.

Such foreign-exchange operations among G7 central banks have fallen into disuse in recent years, partly owing to the theory that they do not affect exchange rates except when they change money supplies. But in this case we are talking about an ECB purchase of dollars that would change the euro money supply. The increase in the supply of euros would naturally lower their price. Monetary expansion that depreciates the currency is more effective than monetary expansion that does not, especially when, as is the case now, there is very little scope for pushing short-term interest rates much lower.

Depreciation of the euro would be the best medicine for restoring international price competitiveness to the periphery countries and reviving their export sectors. Of course, they would devalue on their own had they not given up their currencies for the euro 10 years before the crisis (and if it were not for their euro-denominated debt). If abandoning the euro is not the answer, depreciation by the entire eurozone is.

The euro's exchange rate has held up remarkably during the four years of crisis. Indeed, the currency appreciated further when the ECB declined to undertake any monetary stimulus at its meeting on 6 March. Thus, the euro could afford to weaken substantially. Even Germans might warm up to easy money if it meant more exports.

Central banks should and do choose their monetary policies primarily to serve their own economies' interests. But proposals to co-ordinate policies internationally for mutual benefit are fair. Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India, has recently called for the advanced economies' central banks to take emerging-market countries' interests into account via international co-operation.

ECB foreign-exchange intervention would fare well in this regard. This year, the emerging economies are worried about a tightening of global monetary policy, not the policy loosening that three years ago fuelled talk of "currency wars." As the Fed tapers its purchases of long-term assets, including US treasury securities, it is a perfect time for the ECB to step in and buy some itself.

Boohoo.com fashion website soars on stock market – ending day at £840m

Loud and proud. Boohoo.com makes extensive use of social media. Photograph: boohoo.com

The clamour to invest in fashion website Boohoo.com put a rocket under its share price when it floated on Friday, with the fast-growing fashion website finishing the day with a market value of £840m, nipping at the heels of established FTSE 250 retailers such as Ted Baker andDebenhams.

Shares in the Manchester-based company started trading on the junior Aim market at 50p but within 10 minutes had jumped 70% to 85p. They closed up 40% at 70p

The enthusiastic reaction from investors added to the paper wealth of the Kamani family who have already pocketed £240m from selling some of their majority stake in the business. The 44% stake retained by the family and other board members was worth £370m at close of trading.

Last week the retailer confirmed its IPO had raised £300m, with £50m of that retained for investment. The offer is understood to have been heavily oversubscribed.

The website, which targets 16-24-year-olds, was founded in 2006 by Mahmud Kamani and his business partner Carol Kane. The pair previously ran a successful business supplying high street rivals such asPrimark and New Look and are joint chief executives of the listed company. Boohoo.com, which makes extensive use of social media, has been described as an online Primark, its mainstay being dresses selling for between £12 and £25.

Already shipping to 100 countries, Boohoo.com has impressive margins and made a profit before financial charges of £10m on sales of £92m in the 10 months to December. That compared with profits of just £3.5m a year ago.

But the runaway valuation has fuelled fears that the stock market is once again in the grip of dotcom fever. Shares in AO World, the domestic appliance website, soared as high as 44% during its first day of trading last month.

"As an online-only store, Boohoo.com is unconstrained by politics and a bricks and mortar based retail mindset," said Radcliffe Cole of internet specialists Tryzens. "It also has a loud and proud brand presence. This identity has been developed specifically with their target audience in mind: teenage girls."