Asked about reports of the job offer, Mr Mitchell confirmed he had met the PM, adding that there was an "important job to be done in Europe".

BBC: Andrew Mitchell

Weighing on sentiment on Monday was a decline in the number of jobs on offer in Australian according to an ANZ index of job advertisements for July.

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The group listened intently as one of the executives launched into an unflattering tale of how the employee had used the executive's perfectly good job offer as a bargaining chip for a fat buyback.

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In the early 1990s, he got an offer from a Kansas-based networking interoperability company and dropped out of the University of Houston to take that job.

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As it turned out, the report, which measured activity between October and December, was pretty ugly after all, as the company came short of expectations, announced a slew of job cuts and refused to offer an earnings forecast.

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