Global business

Renault faced a storm of criticism over its botched internal investigation into an alleged case of company espionage. The carmaker sacked three senior executives previously this year, claiming they'd sold information about the company's electric car business. It apologized to the men last week afterwards French prosecutors found that a crucial piece of evidence had been falsified.

As expected, Hewlett-Packard unveiled plans to expand into cloud computing services, in which data are stored and run directly from the Web. HP has hitherto concentrated on selling the servers on which the data in the cloud are held.