This BBC podcast is supported by the UK.
Lowe's knows that no matter your paint project, saving is at the top of your list.
That's why when you shop today, you can buy one, get one free.
Select Valspar and HGTV Home by Sherwin-Williams.
One coat coverage, interior paints via rebate.
Shop these deals in-store or online today at Lowe's.
We help, you save.
Selection varies by location.
While supplies last.
Discount taken at time of purchase.
See sales associate for details.
Offer valid 821-93.
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper?
OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage, and 80% less for networking.
Better?
In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.
Right now, with zero commitment, try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com strategic.
That's oracle.com strategic.
Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Roger Hearing and on this edition, the people of Guyana vote for a President and Parliament to decide what to do with the country's new oil riches.
We have a special report on Africa's unpaid and unsupported caregivers.
The rapidly rising spiral of payments in English Premier League football, as Liverpool spends 170 million on one player.
And not sinking, but rising.
Forty years after the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic, the fascination with the world's most famous ship just gets bigger and bigger.
But let's start with Guyana, which is a country that has one of the world's fastest growing economies, earning billions since 2019 from its offshore oil.
Its 800,000 population has been voting on Monday for its president and parliament.
And a major issue is how those billions are going to be spent.
Another shadow hanging over these elections is how to deal with a threat from Guyana's neighbour Venezuela, which claims almost half Guyana's territory.
Well, joining me now is Neil Marks, editor of the cable and online news agency, The Newsroom, based in Georgetown, Guyana.
Neil, thanks for being with us here on World Business Report.
What are some feeling about this election?
What is it really deciding?
What are the issues?
It's deciding, thank you, it's deciding how, like you said, to spend this oil revenue.
Guyana has been a poor country for a very long time and the oil revenues have really helped to leapfrog development here.
And so whoever wins these elections will get a chance to manage those oil resources, and people are hoping that it will be in their interest.
So the current incumbent president and his party, are they hoping that what they've done so far is enough to please people?
I mean, presumably some people don't think it is.
Correct.
But what they have been doing.
Yes, they're hoping that it will result in them getting back into office.
President Irfan Ali has really pushed through an infrastructure drive that we've never seen, obviously in our history.
I mean, it's like a 24-7 construction zone in Guyana.
We get excited about things like a new four-lane bridge spanning the Damarara River, which straddles the city regions with the highest populations in this country.
We see state-of-the-art public hospitals, hotels and malls coming up all over the place.
So what they have done also is to invest in social programs.
So there have been also a lot of cash grants given out cash grant given out to ordinary citizens, to children in public schools, and increasing pensions.
So yes, Irfan Ali is hoping that these things will get him re-elected.
The opposition has however, argued that if they were to get into office, that they will renegotiate the contract that the government has with Exxon and the other major players, Hess and the Chinese Sino.
And at the same time, I mean obviously looking at the record of the government, as you say.
The opposition has been pointing this out.
I think last year the Inter-American Development Bank said 58 percent of Guyanese were still living in poverty.
I mean, that seems the oil was discovered back in 2019.
It seems strange that they are still in that position.
It does seem strange and the government has argued against those statistics and that they don't seem to be right.
So, for example, in Guyana, there isn't a Guyanese, in my estimate, that would be out of a job.
If you don't have a job, it's because you don't have one, because...
If you look at the construction sector or things like security or the cleaning jobs in most of the government hospitals that I've gone to, they're run by people who have come in together, either Cubans or Venezuela, in order to fill that labor gap.
Now, I think the polls have closed or pretty close to closing at the moment.
I'm not sure how much longer they're open.
Is there a sense of how this voting is going over what the population think really at the moment?
So yeah, polls closed in just about half an hour and we're not allowed to do exit polls in Guyana, so we don't know the way people are voting.
But people have reported that this has been a smooth process.
They've been able to vote peacefully.
It's a far cry from way back when, when Guyana used to have... violent elections.
And so the polls have gone very smoothly.
It's just a wait and see, really.
And what about the threat from the neighbor Venezuela, which is clearly very difficult at the moment?
Venezuela claims Esequibo, which is a fairly big part of Guyana's territory.
And of course, the part that mainly is onshore from where the oil rigs are likely to be.
So this complicates matters, doesn't it?
It does.
And the Azteca region is also where we have all of our gold and diamond reserves.
And just yesterday, army and police who were transporting elections day staff and ballot boxes came on the fire from the Venezuelan.
Sure, it's obviously something that sparked some alarm, given Venezuela's continued claim to the Azteca vote.
The government here in Guyana is holding on to its main partners, including the United States, for support.
And you would know of the US ships sailing presumably into Venezuela to tackle narcotrafficking.
Guyana is well pleased with that.
Is there any real fear, though, that Venezuela will try and take over in Ezequibo?
Because with, as you say, the U.S. military support, it seems unlikely, doesn't it?
It does seem that all Maduro is doing is ranting really, and that there's no prospect of him trying to lay hold of the Azteca region.
Now I'm sure you're aware Neil, what the general feeling is with countries that experience sudden oil wealth.
It's what they call the curse of oil.
In the end, it doesn't actually help them necessarily.
Many developing countries have found that.
Is there a sense that Guyana can defeat that, can actually make this work for almost all its people?
It certainly is what we've seen the government here try to do with investing in what they call the non-oil sectors to ensure that, when we don't have any more oil, or even when we do have oil, that all these other sectors are thriving.
Agriculture, for example.
Guyana has the most land and fresh water than all of the Caribbean.
It can really feed the Caribbean.
And so there's been heavy investment in a sector like this to ensure that we don't suffer that curse.
Neil, thank you so much for bringing me up to speed on that.
Neil Marks there live on the line from Georgetown Guyana, where the voting has got about another half hour to go.
Now, the boss of one of the world's biggest food companies has been fired.
The Swiss firm Nestle, which makes KitKat chocolate bars and Nespresso coffee capsules, amongst many other products, say he failed to disclose a romantic relationship with a subordinate.
Laurent Frex, who'd only been in the post for a year, was dismissed with immediate effect, and he isn't going to receive an exit package either.
Several top executives at big companies have been fired in recent years over personal relations with colleagues, most recent, of course, being the CEO of a tech company caught on a kiss cam at a Coldplay concert with the firm's HR chief.
I got John Revel, Reuters senior correspondent in Zurich, to tell me about this latest case.
He is being dismissed from the company after having an undisclosed relationship with a subordinate at the company, which Nestle said it was a breach of the company's code of business.
Basically, it wasn't the fact he had a relationship.
It's the fact he basically didn't disclose it to the rest of the management or the board.
So then there was an investigation and he's been dismissed.
It's pretty abrupt and pretty unusual to get rid of someone at the top of one of the biggest companies in the world like this.
It's very unusual.
I mean, Mr. Forex only came in exactly a year ago today.
So there's quite a lot of upheaval at Nestle.
He replaced previous CEO Mark Schneider and took charge on 1st September 2024.
And then earlier on this year, the chairman, Paul Bulker, announced that he would be leaving early.
He's going next year.
And this is very much unusual for Nestle, which is actually famous having a sort of longstanding and long serving CEOs and chairmen.
So it's kind of quite a big period of flux for the company.
And they're obviously pretty cross with him because he's left without any kind of financial settlement, hasn't he?
They're very cross with him, I suspect.
I think it's not the fact he had an affair.
I think it's the fact that he was questioned about it.
And I think he denied it, originally.
Yeah, and it was on a company, internal company hotline, apparently, which seems extraordinary.
Basically, the possible relationship first came to light when there was a report in spring to an internal company hotline And then investigation was opened into the matter.
But there was no direct outcome of that.
Concerns persisted.
So there was a second probe that was launched by the chairman and the new incoming chairman.
And that confirmed the relationship.
Mr. Frex had initially denied the relationship to the board.
Then, obviously, it's all come out now.
And I think, obviously, they're not very happy with it all.
So he's leaving.
I mean, he's a longstanding company veteran.
So, yes, a very unusual turn of events, really.
And, John, could it be related to other things as well?
I mean, I know Nestle shares have fallen 17% over the past year.
I mean, it doesn't say much for the man in charge, does it?
It's not a good performance, no.
But there's a lot of...
Other factors going on out there.
I mean, Nestle is a big ship and it takes a long time to turn it around.
So, all right, his performance hasn't been that great, but he's only been in a year.
And for Nestle to fire somebody after a year, I've been following Nestle since 2010.
And before that, this hasn't happened before.
So I think probably there's been investors have been unhappy with the performance of the company.
But I don't think it's been fired because of that.
I think it's purely because of the sort of breach of company rules, really.
And his successor, Philippe Navratil, I think at least the immediate successor.
Will he be able to pick things up?
Because I suppose people will read into this that you know perhaps systems aren't working as well as they should, if they only pick this thing up late.
Navratil, he's also a company insider, which is the Nestle way.
Mark Schneider, the previous CEO, was the first outsider in decades, and that really didn't work out.
So they went for Frex as a kind of the internal safe pair of hands.
That hasn't worked out for different reasons.
And now they've gone for Philip Navratil.
Navratil.
His background is that he was head of Nespresso, which is very successful, or everyone knows what Nespresso is?
George Clooney et al.
It's a very successful business.
And he's very highly thought of in the company.
So we'll have to just wait and see, really.
But I mean it is a choppy environment out there with competition from very fierce amongst against private label, own supermarket, own brands, and also with rising prices because of tariffs etc.
John Revel, Reuters senior correspondent in Zurich.
Now, in many parts of Africa, the burden of care for people with disabilities and those with chronic illnesses largely falls on families, often with little formal support.
Caregivers across the continent quietly sustain families, communities, even health systems.
Yet because their work is uncounted and unpaid, their struggles remain invisible.
The absence of local data, research and supportive policies only deepens the burden.
The BBC's Brian Wahenya has been speaking to two caregivers who share their experiences, as well as the resilience that keeps them going.
Babies!
28-year-old Jane Moshiri's day starts by helping her husband Brian out of bed.
11 years ago, he was left paralyzed after a road accident.
Since then, he's needed constant care.
Because he has a spinal cord injury, he has no control of the bladder and the bowel.
Like for many in Kenya, her husband's caregiving started at home, quiet, unpaid and unseen.
She left her job to be his full-time caregiver, but she admits the sacrifice has been greater than she imagined.
Sometimes I find it hard being a caregiver and wife because sometimes I feel like he sees me like a caregiver more than the wife.
Across Africa and in many parts of the world, most care for people with disabilities or chronic illnesses is carried out informally, usually by women.
I am a caregiver.
I take care of my mom, who has schizophrenia, and my brother Joseph, who is autistic.
That seven-year-old Viona Wamoyo has carried a different kind of burden for the last 14 years.
Complicated family dynamics have left her alone to care for her mother and brother, both who live with mental health challenges.
The demands of caregiving cost Viona her relationship.
She is now raising her 10-year-old daughter alone.
Hi.
Hi, Viona.
Hello.
We introduced her to Jane, complete strangers who quickly bonded over this shared responsibility.
How do you feel about the possibility of being a caregiver for the rest of your life?
The thought of it is mind-blowing, but I think I'm mentally prepared and I'm so ready to give him the best care.
And for you?
I am in it longer than you.
I'm a decade plus in.
But I think I have accepted it and I'm okay with it.
So which part of caregiving do you enjoy doing?
I have witnessed, especially my mom, in very, very dire situations.
Her being at peace, her being safe, Joseph being healthy and smiling and clean.
I think that's my relief.
Studies show that three in five caregivers suffer from physical, emotional and economic strain.
Psychologist Faith Goko says many caregivers themselves end up suffering mental health challenges.
One that stands out is guilt, which actually people don't think.
It's a mental health challenge where you feel, as a caregiver, that you have to be there every minute, every second.
If you're not there, maybe this person will not be able to function well, which in most cases, yes.
But that now leads to where the caregiver neglects their own mental well-being, and their life revolves around the person receiving the care.
Unlike parts in the Western world where governments provide disability benefits and respite services, there is little form of support in Africa.
I don't really socialize that much.
I don't do a lot of trips, partying.
People my age, what they do.
Jane and Fiona understand this struggle.
And so do I, because I am Jane's husband.
One, two.
I am the one she lifts into a wheelchair, the one she dresses and turns in bed every night.
I know the love and sacrifice behind every act of care and how much the world depends on people like her and Fiona caregivers who often go unseen.
The personal story of BBC reporter Brian Wahenya there ending his report.
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper, or faster, but you only get to pick two.
What if you could have all three at the same time?
That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have, since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure database, application development and AI needs, where you can run any workload in a high-availability, consistently high-performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds.
How is it faster?
OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second.
Cheaper, OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking.
Better in test after test.
OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds.
This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads.
Right now with zero commitment, try OCI for free.
Head to oracle.com slash strategic.
That's oracle.com slash strategic.
We all know that feeling.
You finally managed to get away on vacation and the worrying starts.
Will that bogus beware of dogs sign keep your home safe?
What about that fake camera you set up?
And will someone finally find your old hide and key rock?
That's where ADT comes in.
All that stuff, it's safe-ish.
It seems fine when you don't really think about it.
Instead, ADT provides security solutions that keep you actually safe, giving you real peace of mind.
Because vacation is supposed to be, you know, relaxing.
Don't settle for safe-ish.
Visit ADT.com today to learn more.
You're with World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
Now here in the UK, the football transfer window has just closed.
Now that means the top clubs can no longer bid for the players they want from other teams.
And the amount that's been spent is mind-boggling.
Liverpool's agreed to play a record $170 million to get Alexander Isak from Newcastle.
And it's being reported its total spending on new players this summer will be over $600 million.
Also a new record.
And that's just one team.
So is the English Premier League now caught in a huge inflationary spiral?
I asked Dr Christina Philippou, Associate Professor in Accounting and Sport Finance at Portsmouth University.
The majority of the sales that are happening are effectively happening to each other, which is really not surprising because ultimately, what is a transfer fee?
It's buying somebody out of their contract.
And why do you want to pay that money as a club?
It's because effectively on-field success breeds off-field success.
So if you're playing well, then you bring in more money.
If you bring in more money, then you can buy better players, and therefore, in order to do that, you need to buy them in from somebody else.
And then you're kind of creating that spiral.
I imagine it can also help with building better facilities and this kind of thing.
But the amounts of money that these teams now have just seem to be getting larger and larger.
Yeah, I mean, there is an element of that.
I mean, there's obviously not just from transfer funds.
A lot of the teams are actually spending more than they're managing to sell.
What we are seeing, though, is a lot of clubs are getting more money from other sources.
So Chelsea, obviously, the Club World Cup, there was a huge influx of prize money from that.
Champions League money tends to be quite high.
The Premier League as a whole is managing to keep pushing broadcasting income up, despite the fact that, you know, a lot of other sports are really struggling and a lot of other football leagues are struggling to kind of maintain their broadcasting income.
The Premier League is still doing really well on that front.
Commercial income is still kind of rising and you can see that.
You know.
Take a look at Manchester United, for example.
They're still doing incredibly well on the commercial income side, even though they haven't been doing particularly well on the pitch for a few seasons.
So there is that element of kind of Success breeding success.
And the Premier League is so far ahead as a league from you know, the next, the next leagues, which are, you know, La Liga and the Bundesliga.
So there is so much more money there, which means that that creates a problem itself, because obviously then what happens is people, the kind of wages that they pay, can only be afforded by a select number of teams.
I was going to ask about that because the imbalance with Europe and anywhere outside the Premier League seems so extreme that you wonder how it then affects the whole ecosystem, because they're buying in players that obviously have played in those other leagues.
Yeah, I mean, it does have an imbalancing effect.
And that can be problematic for particular leagues.
What we are effectively seeing is there are very kind of small number of clubs that can afford these players.
And that is why we're kind of seeing more of that back to that kind of hamster wheel effect of a lot of the money is kind of sloshing around the same clubs, because there are a limited number of clubs that can actually afford these player wages or afford to break these contracts, even if they wanted to.
So we've seen Saudi for the last few years, the Saudi Pro League that's kind of put money in and that's created sort of a new ecosystem for a new outlet for players where a league can actually afford to buy them.
But beyond that, it's, you know, the big Champions League hitters and the Premier League teams.
Is there a risk in the end, of a kind of bubble in all this, or just the sheer popularity of what is out there and the public's demand for it means that this increase in money will just keep going up.
You're not getting all that cash, so you can't pay for these transfer fees as a block.
So it's a debt and that can be problematic, and particularly because it's so interrelated, as we said.
And yeah, I mean, there are risks inherent with the system.
Like I said, broadcasting is decreasing across most sports.
Broadcasters are less willing to pay huge, huge amounts than they once were.
The competition is less.
The way people consume sport is different.
You know we're seeing far more sort of small clips and you know the consumption patterns are changing.
So that means that the traditional systems don't work in the same way.
So the money doesn't flow in the same way.
There isn't the same competition to show things on TV.
So there are potential risks.
And if that money starts to slow down, then that obviously will have an impact on wages, on what can be left over to spend on facilities and other things.
Dr Christina Philippou there of Portsmouth University.
Now the Titanic, the famous so-called unsinkable passenger liner, sank after an encounter with an iceberg 123 years ago in the North Atlantic Ocean.
But it's 40 years since the wreck of the ship was found on the ocean floor.
The oceanographer, Dr Robert Ballard, was the man who led the project that found the ship.
We were embarrassed. quite honestly.
Our feeling was, why are we celebrating?
Why are we jumping up and down?
And it spoke to us.
We were at the very spot where all these lost souls had gone down and they were no longer lost.
Dr Robert Ballard.
Well, in the decades since the Titanic, industry has thrived like never before, with wreck-viewing expeditions museums books souvenirs, replica dinners, themed hotels and, of course, movies.
I'm the king of the world!
And documentaries.
The world's most famous ship.
And podcasts.
From the captain on his last voyage before retirement to the snowball fight using pieces of icebergs.
Well, we're joined now by Nelson Aspen, author of Kindred Spirits a Titanic tale and host of the Titanic Talk podcast.
Nelson, thanks for being with us.
It is extraordinary how much this has become an industry so long after what happened happened.
That's right, 113.
I heard you say 123, but it's been 113 years.
And the appeal of Titanic is stronger than ever.
I'm told that, right behind God and Coca-Cola, Titanic is the most recognizable word that we can speak of.
So God bless Dr. Ballard for rejuvenating the interest, because I think that was very significant.
When he found the wreck 40 years ago, it had been missing for 73 years.
And once he found it and the dives down began, that piqued the interest of James Cameron.
He wanted to make the film to sort of justify his dives down to the wreck, which he incorporated into the storyline of, So that rejuvenated interest in Titanic for a new generation, the discovery of the wreck, just as Cameron's film, continues to rejuvenate interest generation after generation after generation.
And the interest, of course, and this is perhaps the point, makes a lot of money.
I mean all the museums, all the various theme park type arrangements, places associated with the Titanic.
I mean, it is a marketing opportunity as much as anything else.
Why do you think I wrote the book?
So, yeah, I mean, of course it is.
But it also stirs very deep feelings inside of people.
I call I call our our our people titaniacs.
We are besotted with.
The universal appeal.
Everybody has some either knowledge or interest in the Titanic story, because it affects us in ways that no other disaster does.
But why?
Why does it do that, Nelson?
I mean, what's the attraction?
I can't quite put my finger on it, except for the fact because no one would romanticize 9-11.
I mean, it was the 9-11 of its day.
And yet we look at it with humor and love and affection.
And I think it's perhaps because it is, in spite of the fact that it's tragic.
You know it's epic in its tragedy, but it also represents a gentle time, a kinder time that we'll never see again.
Before Titanic, there were no world wars.
You know, the Titanic was the end of an era and ushered us into the dramas of the 20th century.
And people still want to experience that in some vicarious form, won't they?
That's correct.
And there's there's no limit to how many times people want to see the movie or go to the museum or hear the stories.
And there are so many.
Yeah, read my book.
And my book is about basically an obscure passenger, sort of a footnote in Titanic history.
But there were fifteen hundred lives lost.
There are fifteen hundred stories as well as the stories of their families.
The families suffered.
There's yeah.
There's something for everyone in this Titanic.
A human tragedy, but one that, as you say, has crystallized an era and certainly launched a thousand movies, books and many other things besides.
So launch, you see, not sink.
That's the important point.
Nelson, thank you so much for being with us.
Nelson Aspen there.
And that's it from this edition that sails proudly on of World Business Report.
