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By Tony Grew - 22nd September 2010
The business secretary has announced a "wide-ranging consultation" on executive pay, takeovers and "corporate short-termism".
In an address to the Liberal Democrat conference in Liverpool, Vince Cable told party members that the government is not laissez-faire about the way big business operates.
"I am shining a harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour," he said.
"Why should good companies be destroyed by short term investors looking for a speculative killing, while their accomplices in the City make fat fees?
"Why do directors forget their wider duties when a fat cheque is waved before them?
"Capitalism takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can."
Cable attacked the Labour party as "deficit deniers" and will warn that the cuts to public spending are "bound to hurt".
Labour "left Britain exceptionally vulnerable and damaged: more personal debt than any other major economy; a dangerously inflated property bubble; and a bloated banking sector behaving as masters, not the servants of the people," he said.
"A proper debate is impossible with people who start from the infantile proposition that there isn't a problem; and simply hark back to a failed world of 'business as usual.'"
The business secretary's speech was the highlight of the last day of the Lib Dem conference, the party's first since they entered into a coalition government with the Conservatives.
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