The Button

Progress is unstoppable, reader, and it has reached even this modest establishment. The website has grown a Subscribe button. Hit it.

From now on, whenever a new company, a new character, a new insolvency or another lovely black BMW appears on these pages, you will hear about it straight away. You will no longer have to drop by every few days to see whether I have dug anything up. Some of you, I suspect, drop by rather more often than that, and not out of affection.

Go ahead and sign everyone else up. The form, I am pleased to report, has better manners than its author: nobody becomes my reader against their will, and nothing happens until the lucky person confirms it themselves. So sign up your family, friends, colleagues, former colleagues and former employers. Be generous.

While I had the tools out, I tidied the place up a bit.

The search has been rebuilt from scratch, and it now finds almost anything: a name, a company, a town, a half-remembered word you are fairly sure you saw here once. Go and look for something obscure. If you cannot find it, tell me. Either the search has failed, or I have.

Have another look at the corporate structure. It keeps growing. New companies, new connections, new faces, and by now it looks rather like the family tree of an old European dynasty. And, like every old dynasty, remarkably well protected.

And while you are wandering about, do drop in on Assets. Do you love BMWs as much as I do? If not, the new BMW Fleet card should put that right. It is a modest affair for now: a few beautiful cars, a few beautiful photographs, and a few paragraphs on corporate theatre. There is a story behind these cars, inevitably. But some things one hangs on the wall first, admires for a while, and only then explains how they got there.

One more item, and a small confession. Until now the insolvencies section of this website existed mostly in my head. It had one entry, Malte Liedtke, and I was not sure it deserved a section of its own. It does now. Malte has company. A limited one, naturally. Last week the court in Leipzig appointed a preliminary insolvency administrator for SOLARWORKS, a company owned and run by Timo Zeier. I did not learn of this the very second it hit the court records, and I apologise unreservedly to those readers who rely on me for German insolvency news ahead of Bloomberg. I shall try to do better, though something tells me I will get plenty of practice. This section may yet become a regular feature.

We shall come back to Timo Zeier, and to Malte, and to the BMWs, and to the family tree, and to a number of other stories standing patiently in the queue and pretending not to push.

That is the housekeeping done, and it is the last of it. That, after all, is what the button is for: so that you miss nothing, and I can get back to the documents.

Consider this one an interval. The next dispatch has no buttons in it, no cars, and no cards being moved about. It has considerably fewer jokes, too. The subject does not lend itself to them.

Hit the button.