Business Diary: Drinking with the sharks

We're big fans here of BrewDog, the Scottish brewer with an eye for a marketing gimmick (it recently sold shares in itself to its customers). Still, is Sunk Punk, its latest new brew, just a gimmick too far? The beer's unique selling point is that "it has been brewed at the bottom of the North Sea in order to break an age-old curse on the Scottish shoreline". Also, the ingredients have a distinctly maritime feel, and include buckweed, distilled sea-salt and rum. BrewDog describes Sunk Punk as "idiosyncratic".

Belgium callsin expert on bank losses

Belgium, home to disaster-prone Dexia, has realised the markets are running the slide-rule over the finances of its banking sector, so it's called in a top investment bank to do some highly specialist work on just how problematic this might be for the country. The identity of that bank? Step forward UBS, best known right now for losing £1.5bn thanks to an alleged rogue trader, right. Very reassuring.

How many PRs does it take...

How did Glasgow's Braehead shopping centre – wheresecurity guards called police after a dad tookphotos of his daughter eating ice cream – blunder into such a PR disaster? In addition to Braehead's own press office, there's a PR agency (MacDonald Media) for the centre, while owner Capital Shopping Centre employs three more agencies – Hudson Sandler, College Hill and Porterfield PR. What have they all been up to?

Longer oddsat bookmaker

To the betting industry, where Victor Chandler has told a number of punters it is "restructuring our approach to how we administer accounts". Some accounts are no longer good enough to receive its "best odds guaranteed" offer, where if you take a price on a horse that wins and its starting price turns out to have been more generous, Victor will pay out at the better price. The meanies.