Friday High Five – highlights of the week

One story has dominated this week, and the effects will echo around the business community of the region for some time to come.

Next Friday Lawrence Jones will be sentenced at Manchester Crown Court.

It will be an opportunity for his victims to see justice being served on a man described in our long read yesterday as ‘a stain on our city’.

There are more questions for more people.

Elsewhere, the industrious and hard working team at TheBusinessDesk.com brought you exemplary coverage of Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn statement, laying bare the details not just in his breezy parliamentary speech, but in the document that accompanied it.

There is still much more to emerge on how a Lancashire County Combined Authority – without a directly elected Mayor – will manage the complex relationships between district councils, the county and the still secure better outcomes for the county of my birth to (seriously) “compete with Manchester and Liverpool”.

I’ll be honest, I don’t really understand what Atom Valley is, and where the jobs for the future of manufacturing in Greater Manchester’s Innovation Zone will come from.

If we had any doubts about the mess on the public markets this week it was that undervalued re-commerce business MusicMagpie was looking for a way out, and that AO World is sticking to what it does best.

I came back into journalism a year ago to do three things: Write the truth about bad people who were getting away with it; do interviews in front of audiences with inspiring people (like I did at JMW yesterday); and examine the efforts of people who are determined to make this region better than they found it.

Have a great weekend.