Theresa May may have been more prescient about Brexit than we all thought. While the prime minister’s constant reminder that “Brexit means Brexit” has been, well, not very helpful at all, we now know that May expanded on her thoughts in front of Goldman Sachs bankers before the EU referendum.

“If we were not in Europe, I think there would be firms and companies who would be looking to say, do they need to develop a mainland Europe presence rather than a UK presence?” May said at the private Goldman event.

In the last 48 hours, General Motors and Morgan Stanley, two of America’s biggest companies, have added credibility to those remarks.

Businesses have rightly become frustrated with May’s government about its handling of Brexit and the lack of information about what it actually might look like.

However, patience is also now running out with how businesses are handling the fallout from the referendum.

GM, the owner of Vauxhall and factories at Ellesmere Port and Luton, said it was “prepared to take whatever action is necessary” to get its European business back on track and described the situation in the UK as a “speed bump on our path to where we want to take the business”.

Meanwhile, James Gorman, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, went even further and told a Bloomberg conference that there was nothing good about Brexit.

“From our perspective, just narrowly from the financial sector and from our institution, there’s nothing good about Brexit,” he said. “We love the rule of law in England, our folks like working in London. You have all the infrastructure – the pipes, the plumbing, it’s all there.

“None of this is good. We’re going to have to move employees and their families from London to other places, and we’re trying to minimise the absolute number of people we have to do that with.”

How exactly are these comments supposed to be helpful for GM and Morgan Stanley’s UK employees? There are roughly 4,500 staff working for Vauxhall in the UK and at least 5,000 for Morgan Stanley.

Chief executive after chief executive has issued warnings about the uncertainty caused by Brexit, but concrete action is thin on the ground. One of the only companies to actually take action so far was Unilever, which tried to put the price of Marmite and other products up by 10%, but look how that turned out.

Some companies appear to be using Brexit as a negotiating tool to get support from the government. Many Nissan workers in Sunderland think this is what Carlos Ghosn, the boss of the company, is doing. Ghosn has warned that the production of the Nissan Qashqai could move away from Sunderland because of the referendum result.

Brexit is not an excuse for multinational companies to use their UK workforce as a bargaining chip. Any goodwill for businesses having to deal with the uncertainty caused by leaving the EU is eroding as they play games with the livelihoods of their staff.



Despite the referendum result, there are still many reasons for multinational companies to be based in the UK and the City of London. This was proven on Wednesday when Axa Investment Managers announced it would go ahead with construction of the tallest skyscraper in the City, the 62-storey 22 Bishopsgate. The new office building would not be going ahead unless the developers were confident there would be businesses and employees to fill it.

Banks

Brexit – bank and City regulators want it to be known – will not lead to any let-up in the rules being imposed on the sector.

Andrew Bailey, the newly installed boss of the Financial Conduct Authority, even appeared to suggest on Wednesday that a tough regulatory regime would make London an attractive place to do business.

His successor at the Bank of England, where he was deputy governor for prudential regulation, warned bankers at the Mansion House City banquet that financial markets needed robust regulation after the referendum. Sam Woods also told bankers that he wanted them to publish more information about their businesses.

Threadneedle Street intends to start publishing information about how much capital banks hold every quarter, and Woods has put them on notice that he is keen for them to publish their regulatory returns. This will stop banks being able to give their own views on their level of bad loans, for instance, and they will be forced to use the standardised definitions set by regulators.

As dry as this might sound, it matters.

Panther Securities

The award for business moan of 2016 can be handed to Andrew Perloff, the chairman of property company Panther Securities.

Given the fallout from the Brexit vote, this was a competitive category this year, but Perloff’s rant about business rates is unbeatable.

In a remarkable stock market statement, hecalled the government’s changes to the controversial tax on commercial property as “disgraceful, sneaky and unfair”. He finished the statement by saying: “If this is the best they can do on a rates revaluation then I doubt if they could create a profitable hot dog stall outside of Wembley stadium on cup final day, even if they issued themselves the only licence.”

Perloff is a Ukip donor and has a history of making colourful public statements, but at least he calls it as he sees it.