As I noticed the other day, the credit crunch is proving good news for cheap-o German supermarket Aldi, with families of all classes swinging in to buy expensive essentials – olive oil and aloe vera toilet paper – at cheap prices (they claim to save between £30 and £100 on a weekly shop). Sales figures from the last 3 months are up 21% and boss Paul Foley has declared that he intends to open one store a week until he reaches his target of 1,050 outlets in the UK. No surprise then that Tesco intends to put an end to that. In a top-secret (!) project, they’re developing a new range of own-brand products. Tesco’s own-brand products fall into three ranges: Value, at the budget end, Finest, a premium brand, and standard products in between. The chain’s research has found that 80% of customers regularly buy from the Value range, 70% buy from the Finest range and most cherrypick from both.

A prime case of when business and politics collide: French energy giant Total had been planning to develop the huge South Pars gas field in Iran, but good-looking boss Christophe de Margerie says this will not now go ahead because it is politically too risky –  a huge blow to the Iranian energy industry. The decision is no-doubt linked to the fact Iran test-fired a series of missiles amid weeks of rising tensions with Israel and the US over its nuclear ambitions. De Margerie’s comments seem to be as much about brand building:  “Today we would be taking too much political risk to invest in Iran because people will say: ‘Total will do anything for money’.” Total was the last major Western energy group to have seriously considered investing in the country’s huge gas reserves, and was one of the few companies in the world with the technology to do it. Be honest, no matter what the pay was, would go and work there if ordered?

If you think it’s the worst time to look to the airline industry for a career, think again: Canadian firm Bombardier Aerospace is investing half a billion pounds in Northern Ireland, which will sustain over 800 jobs – the largest ever investment made in the area by a single company. The money will be used to design and manufacture wings for their 110 to 130 seat C-Series aircraft, the greenest in its class incidentally. Announcing the investment, Bombardier said greener fuel-efficient technology used in the C-Series would “revolutionise” the 100 to 149 seater market. Lufthansa has provisionally ordered 30 planes with an option for 30 more.

If you’ve got a piss-up that needs organising and the keys to the brewery, don’t leave it to the bosses of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 to handle your party arrangements: 3 months on from opening the £4.3bn building is still a Bermuda Triangle to some 900 bags a day that go missing for passengers transferring between planes – that’s a 1 in 12 chance you’ll lose your luggage. The blame apparently lies with the state-of-the-art automated baggage handling that saw the cancellation of more than 500 British Airways flights after opening. That cost the airline, the terminal’s sole tenant, at least £16m. Colin Matthews, BAA chief executive, agreed with a committee of MPs that the T5 opening had been “a national humiliation”.