Rishi Sunak says he is suspending anti-obesity measure to avoid restricting consumer options during cost of living crisis
The government is to delay its planned ban on two-for-one junk food deals – a key anti-obesity measure – for another two years amid the cost of living crisis.
Rishi Sunak will shelve the expected measure targeting multi-buy promotions on products high in fat, sugar or salt (HFSS) to avoid restricting consumer options while prices remain high.
Continue reading...Billionaire had an estimated wealth of $7.4bn and left no indication of who would take over after his death
Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s longest-serving prime minister since the second world war, was a billionaire who had investments in everything from property and banking to the media and football. His death, at the age of 86, raises questions over the fate of an empire that was closely entwined with a political career that spanned almost three decades.
Berlusconi had an estimated fortune of $7.4bn (£5.8bn) as of April 2023, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But he left no indication, at least not publicly, of who would take over his empire after his death.
Continue reading...Ken Murphy says higher costs of grocery imports because of Brexit are partly to blame for rising prices
The chief executive of Tesco has said food inflation has probably peaked but warns that prices are likely to stay high.
Ken Murphy, the head of the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, said the price of milk, bread, cooking oil and some vegetables such as broccoli had come down this month but inflation continued in other essentials, including rice and potatoes, as aweather issues and locked-in increases in the price of labour and energy continued to bite.
Continue reading...President Tinubu’s policies please foreign investors, but a devalued currency and soaring petrol prices mean ‘national sacrifice mode’ is widely unpopular
Nigerians are feeling the strain as their new president pushes through a series of unpopular policies that have earned him praise from foreign investors.
Bola Tinubu, who was sworn in on 29 May, has surprised many observers by taking a running start to his tenure of Africa’s most populous country. In little over two weeks he has banished a longstanding petrol subsidy, ejected the country’s central bank governor and ended restrictions on the rate of the naira, Nigeria’s currency.
Continue reading...Report by cross-party MPs criticises previous ‘lack of urgency in addressing market failures’
MPs have urged the government to set out its plans to protect households from high energy bills this winter as they said about 1.7 million people, including some of the most vulnerable groups, had been left waiting too long to receive previous support.
The public accounts committee (PAC) said that although schemes were introduced quickly, the government “did not have the bandwidth” to make sure help reached all groups in a timely fashion.
Continue reading...Start of superstar’s world tour ‘seems to have coloured inflation’, says economist, after tens of thousands of fans flocked to the capital for concerts
Swedish inflation fell below 10% in May, official statistics showed, but was still higher than expected with some analysts suggesting superstar Beyoncé had tipped the scales.
Consumer prices rose by 9.7% in May year-on-year, down from 10.5% in April, the first time inflation has come in under 10% in over six months.
Continue reading...Competition commission accuses firm of favouring its own services to detriment of rivals
The EU has ordered Google to sell part of its advertising business, as the bloc’s competition regulator steps up its enforcement of big tech’s monopolies.
The competition commission said it had taken issue “with Google favouring its own online display advertising technology services to the detriment of competing providers of advertising technology services, advertisers and online publishers”.
Continue reading...Instant Brands, which blames rising interest rates for financial problems, will continue to serve retailers
The maker of Pyrex kitchenware and the Instant Pot pressure cooker has filed for bankruptcy protection, blaming rising interest rates for its financial difficulties.
Instant Brands, controlled by the private equity investor Cornell Capital, said late on Tuesday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of Texas, as it tries to restructure liabilities of as much as $1bn (£790m).
Continue reading...City train stations at 70% of pre-pandemic capacity amid warnings of potential effects of bringing workers back full-time
Workers are returning to offices in inner Sydney as a handful of large companies, including big banks, tell employees to come back from their kitchen tables.
The corporate-led trend is observable in public transport usage figures that show a recent uptick in office returns. It marks a shift in working arrangements after Australians appeared to have largely settled into their new hybrid habits.
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Continue reading...Almost £150m to be spent on research labs to help future-proof industry and lift creative economy
Ministers are seeking to future-proof the UK’s multibillion-pound film and TV production industry by investing almost £150m in a network of research labs across the country tasked with developing the next generation of special effects using tech such as artificial intelligence.
The scheme aims to build on Britain’s reputation for producing hi-tech hits from Star Wars to Harry Potter, and is part of wide-ranging plans to drive the UK creative economy. The government has earmarked millions to support grassroots music venues hammered by the Covid pandemic, and is tripling a fund designed to find and support the next generation of homegrown superstars like Adele and Ed Sheeran.
Continue reading...Katy Gallagher hits back at Coalition attacks, saying she conducted herself with ‘highest levels of integrity’ over Higgins allegations. Follow live
First Nations people call on government to sign nuclear weapons prohibition
A group of people are on their way to Canberra to call on the prime minister to sign the treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons and speak to MPs about their experience surviving the British nuclear testing program in Western Australia and South Australia in the 1950s.
Our mob were not informed of those tests that were about to take place on our traditional lands.
Consent was never given by Anangu for the Emu Field tests. The government did not come and ask Anangu if it was okay to test on our traditional lands.
Everyone knows the commonwealth doesn’t have the power to cap rents. There’s eight different states and territories across the country all doing different things. Some of them have ruled it out.
We have data and evidence it doesn’t work and it puts downward pressure on supply. What we need to do is add to supply. That’s what we’re doing, not just with our housing Australia future fund and our other investments. We have homes under construction today because we made that money available.
Continue reading...Unemployment rate unexpectedly falls to 3.8% in three months to April, in sign of strength for jobs market
UK wages grew at a faster than expected pace in April, reinforcing expectations the Bank of England will raise interest rates next week.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show growth in average regular pay, excluding bonuses, strengthened to 7.2% in the three months to April – the highest level on record, excluding the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...Property developers struggle to rebuild confidence in housing market after three years of economic pain
Gold bars, new cars and mobile phones are among the incentives being offered to potential homebuyers by Chinese property developers as they grow increasingly desperate to boost sales.
Huafa Tianfu, a developer in the eastern city of Hangzhou, has been offering up to a kilo of gold bullion to tempt people into buying its flats.
Continue reading...Nearly 70% of office workers say their firms have not increased number of black, Asian or ethnic minority leaders
The number of senior business leaders from ethnically diverse backgrounds has not significantly increased since the death of George Floyd sparked global protests and $50bn (£40bn) of corporate pledges to address racial inequality in the workplace.
Three years on from the killing of Floyd at the hands of US police officers, which prompted chief executives including Apple’s Tim Cook and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs to declare that leaders also need to do more to address racial disparities in their own companies, nearly 70% of office workers say their firms have not increased the number of black, Asian or ethnic minority leaders.
Continue reading...Households and firms can expect more financial pain despite Britain dodging technical recession, says KPMG
Britain will be left with deep scars from the pandemic despite narrowly escaping a second recession within three years and growing signs of an economic pick up, according to new forecasts.
A new report by the accountancy firm KPMG has found that the economy has enjoyed a better start to the year than it had thought, and is now expected to grow by 0.3% this year, compared with its previous prediction of an uplift of just 0.1%.
Continue reading...AustralianSuper, Australian Retirement Trust, Hesta and Aware Super say they won’t enter into new contracts with the firm
Australia’s biggest superannuation funds have either frozen, or are reviewing, future work contracts with PricewaterhouseCoopers Australia, as the fallout from the tax leaks scandal proves costly for the embattled firm.
Four of the country’s biggest funds, AustralianSuper, Australian Retirement Trust, Hesta and Aware Super, say they will not enter into new contracts with PwC, after the professional services firm used confidential information obtained through its work for the government for commercial gain.
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Continue reading...Jeremy Hunt hopes suspending tax on oil profits if Brent crude falls below $71.40 a barrel will aid investment
Jeremy Hunt has offered the North Sea oil and gas industry a ‘get-out’ clause from the windfall tax on fossil fuel profits if wholesale energy market prices fall back to normal levels.
The chancellor hopes to boost investment in the North Sea by agreeing to suspend the windfall tax on oil profits if the market price for Brent crude falls below $71.40 a barrel, and gas prices fall below 54 pence a therm, for a period of six months. The global oil price is currently about $75 a barrel, and the UK’s gas price is about 64 p/th.
Continue reading...Residents will no doubt have to pay a price for their authority’s risk taking and subsequent bankruptcy
Winning in the rollercoaster business of commercial property development is hard. Look at the share prices of the two FTSE 100 titans, regarded as the most diversified and solid operators in the sector. Since the financial crisis of 2008-09, which caused commercial property prices to crater, Landsec’s shares have been as low as 350p and as high as £13 and are currently 626p. British Land’s trajectory is similar.
Their investors collect dividends (most of the time), largely funded from rental income, but they also know that the value of the assets can be volatile. Less diversified firms have done much worse. Intu, a former shopping centre giant, collapsed in 2020 and an air of financial crisis has hovered over Hammerson for years. This is territory for conservative financing and strong risk-management safeguards.
Continue reading...GDP shrank 0.1% in first quarter of 2023 and final three months of 2022 after revisions to earlier estimates
The eurozone slipped into recession in the first three months of the year, after official figures were revised to show the bloc’s economy shrank as the rising cost of living weighed on consumer spending.
Figures from Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency, showed gross domestic product (GDP) fell by 0.1% in the first quarter of 2023 and the final three months of 2022 after revisions to earlier estimates. A technical recession is generally defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Continue reading...Losing Telegraph newspapers will not turn remaining twin Frederick Barclay into a pauper, but it’s a bitter end to brothers’ empire-building
From humble beginnings growing up in a west London house so close to the railway line the window frames rattled when a train passed, the Barclay twins, Frederick and David, became an extraordinary, energetic and eccentric power couple.
They built an empire of glitzy hotels and made many millions in shipping and retail before plunging into the world of newspapers but – largely – eschewed the trappings of life in the London fast lane to live in strange isolation in a sprawling mansion on a small rocky island just off the French coast.
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