Business Diary: Warm welcome for Greggs in home town

A richly deserved honour for Greggs, the bakery business. Eighty years after being founded in Newcastle, Greggs is being given the freedom of the city, in recognition of the contribution it has made to the local economy. There will even be a ceremony at Newcastle Civic Centre to mark the award – presumably with copious numbers of sausage rolls for the guests.

McCall puts a brave face on losses

Good to see such confidence from Guardian Media Group, where chief executive, Carolyn McCall, says the business is "in very good shape, very, very good shape". Just think how many "verys" she's going to need if GMG gets back into the black one day – it lost £90m in its last financial year and the current year's losses are expected to be even higher.

Local authorities brought to book

Time to put your local council's number on your mobile. Several local councils are apparently in talks with a Belfast-based business, Lagan Technologies, which has a new app for the iPhone. It lets you photograph potholes, graffiti, uncollected rubbish or broken streetlights and send the pictures straight to the council worker responsible for sorting out the problem. So now they'll have to find a new excuse not to do anything.

Olympic athletes get the John Lewis list

For years, John Lewis has been the supplier of choice to MPs, so who better than the retailer to kit out the Olympic Village for London 2012? As part of the official partner deal John Lewis signed up for yesterday, it is to supply furniture for public areas of the Stratford Olympic site, as well as some athletes' rooms. No flat packs for these folk.

The fraudsters target your tax return

It's no longer just the fine print of your tax return you have to worry about when filing the form each year. HM Revenue & Customs says 20,000 fraudulent emails were sent out in the week before Sunday's deadline for tax return filing, each one trying to get taxpayers to hand over confidential personal data.

Number of the day: 1

The UK's ranking in the league of Europe's top online spenders last year, spending £38bn during 2009.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk