News

The UK’s FTSE 100 hit an all-time high on Friday, as the blue-chip index dominated by multinational companies overcame the drag of a domestic economy headed for recession. The FTSE added as much as 1.1 per cent on the day to trade at 7906.58, eclipsing its previous peak in May 2018, before closing at 7902.

Apple broke a 14-quarter streak of revenue growth as supply chain problems in China delayed delivery of iPhones during the critical holiday period. Total revenue in the quarter fell 5.5 per cent to $117.2bn, below forecasts of $121.1bn, according to Refinitiv. Analysts had been pricing in a 2 per cent decline after Apple warned of

Adani Enterprises has called off its $2.4bn equity fundraising in the latest blow to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani, who has seen shares in his industrial empire tumble after a short seller made allegations of fraud and stock manipulation. The decision to pull the share sale and refund investors marks an abrupt turn after Adani Enterprises’

EU member states have warned Brussels against giving Ukraine an unrealistic expectation of rapidly joining the bloc, ahead of a summit in Kyiv where Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing for progress on accession and reconstruction. Zelenskyy is due to host his EU counterparts Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel this week, where he is expected to lobby

The Biden administration has stopped providing US companies with licences to export to Huawei as it moves towards imposing a total ban on the sale of American technology to the Chinese telecom equipment giant. Several people familiar with the discussions inside the administration said the commerce department had notified some companies that it would no

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak has sacked Nadhim Zahawi as chair of the Conservative party after his ethics adviser found he committed “serious breaches” of the ministerial code by failing to be transparent about his tax affairs. Sunak finally jettisoned Zahawi on Sunday after weeks of negative coverage in the latest political scandal to hit

In politics, they say, the cover-up is often worse than the crime. Nadhim Zahawi’s “error” in overlooking millions of pounds he owed in tax is gobsmacking enough, to those of us who are slogging to file our own returns by next week’s deadline. But his denials of what turned out to be true should have

The UK tax authority has admitted that it gave misleading information last summer when it said no government minister was being investigated, even though Nadhim Zahawi was the subject of a probe. HM Revenue & Customs has now apologised for wrongly stating last June that no ministers were under investigation — mistakes it blames on

The new chief executive of Rolls-Royce has given a brutal assessment of Britain’s flagship engineering group, telling employees it must transform the way it operates or it will not survive. In a global address broadcast to staff, parts of which were shared with the Financial Times, Tufan Erginbilgic warned that investors were losing patience with

The US and Germany will send main battle tanks to Kyiv, a significant increase of western military aid that was condemned by Russia and prompted cheers throughout Ukraine. The US will be sending 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine — or the equivalent of one Ukrainian tank battalion, senior Biden administration officials confirmed on Wednesday.

Germany is to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, in a move that marks a significant breakthrough in western efforts to bolster Kyiv’s fight against the Russian army. A person familiar with the matter confirmed that Germany would send the tanks, although he would not provide details on how many and what type were under

Nadhim Zahawi was fighting for his political life on Monday after prime minister Rishi Sunak ordered an ethics inquiry into the tax affairs of the Conservative party chair. Sunak’s support for Zahawi was highly conditional, after he declared that “there are questions that need answering” over Zahawi’s dispute with HM Revenue & Customs. Downing Street

The eurozone will avoid a recession this year according to a widely-watched survey of economists which illustrates the sharp about-turn in global economic sentiment in the past couple of weeks. As recently as last month, analysts surveyed by Consensus Economics were predicting the bloc would plunge into recession this year. But this month’s survey found

Banks are gearing up for the biggest round of job cuts since the global financial crisis, as executives come under pressure to slash costs following a collapse in investment banking revenues. The lay-offs — which are expected to be in the tens of thousands across the sector — reverse the mass hirings banks made over

Google’s parent company will axe 12,000 staff, pushing total tech job losses in the past 12 months above 200,000, as industry bosses concede they overextended during the pandemic’s digital boom. The industry-wide cull has affected more than 50,000 people across just four Big Tech companies that also include Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. Apple is the

Reed Hastings is stepping down as chief executive of Netflix, the company he co-founded 25 years ago, in a shake-up at the top of one of the most powerful studios in Hollywood. Hastings, who launched Netflix in 1997 as a DVD-by-mail service, wrote in a blog post that he has been increasingly delegating management in

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel, closed almost all of its eight-year bet on cryptocurrencies shortly before the market began to crash last year, generating about $1.8bn in returns. The San Francisco-based fund made its first investment in bitcoin in early 2014 and went on to invest large sums in

Business leaders and top government officials have expressed optimism about the global economy as China drops Covid controls, the US embarks on a green investment boom and western Europe adjusts to the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Gita Gopinath, deputy managing director of the IMF, signalled that

US drugmakers AbbVie and Eli Lilly have become the first pharmaceutical groups to pull out of a pricing agreement with the UK government in protest at a sharp rise in clawback payments. Eli Lilly said on Monday that the payments, which apply to branded medicines and have risen to more than a quarter of industry

US companies are turning to convertible bonds as fundraising in Wall Street’s main equities market is at its lowest level for three decades. December was the busiest month of last year for convertible issuance by deal count according to Refinitiv data, as activity picked up over the second half of 2022. The amount US-based companies