Business Diary: Tax campaigners target Sir Philip

Anyone planning on a spot of retail therapy this weekend might encounter a little difficulty in shops owned by the Arcadia empire of Sir Philip Green. The retail mogul is to be the nexttarget of UKuncut, the campaign launched earlier this year against tax avoidance, which is angry about the way in which Sir Philip's family have arranged their financial affairs (specifically the fact the business is owned by Lady Green and other family, who live in Monaco). Having already staged protests outside Vodafone stores, UKuncut plans to target outlets such as Topshop and Miss Selfridge this Saturday.

Taking Halfords with a pinch of salt

Horses and stable doors? Halfords announced rather breathlessly yesterday that it is now trialling sales of bags of salt in around 55 stores, primarily in those areas of the country that have been worst affected by the wintry weather so far. You can see what the retailer isthinking, but given that each bag weighs in at 10 kilos, might it not have been better to start stocking the stuff beforedrivers' cars got snowed into their drives?

Playboy goes for the hard drive

In need of a new portable hard drive for your home computer? Well, here's an unlikely potential supplier. Playboy, the adult-entertainment business, is moving into the computing market with just such a device. And in addition to the standard features – lots of memory and so on – the device comes with Playboy magazine's entire 57-year back cataloguepre-loaded. That's 100,000 digital pages from 650 issues. Not that they're playing to the stereotype of computer geeks or anything.

Charlie plumbs the depths of publicity

Will BBC3's Britain's Best Young Plumber be a surprise hit? Charlie Mullins, the Pimlico Plumbers boss who is heading the judging panel on the reality show, is certainly working hard to drum up publicity for the programme, which began last night, by slagging off Lord Sugar's The Apprentice. Mullins says: "What we need are more TV shows that put real apprentices on our screens rather than the pantomime of a bunch of jumped-up sales execs running round London trying to impress a Lord."

businessdiary@independent.co.uk