NatWest chair Howard Davies said he plans to continue leading the bank and has appointed law firm Travers Smith to investigate the closure of Nigel Farage’s Coutts account. “At yesterday’s board meeting, we agreed the terms of reference of an independent review led by Travers Smith into the handling of Mr Farage as a customer
News
In 2004, Jeffrey Epstein asked his private bankers at JPMorgan Chase for a favour. He wanted to open a bank account and arrange a credit card for a teenager who was said to have come to the US from Slovakia for “modelling work”, according to documents filed this week in a New York federal court.
On Wednesday, a respected former US intelligence official told a congressional committee that, in effect, aliens exist. He spoke under oath and with no trace of doubt. He claimed that the US government had operated a secret programme for retrieving non-human spacecraft since the 1930s. It had even retrieved bodies. He knew of “multiple colleagues”
When Mattel hosted a New York screening for its Barbie movie earlier this month, film-maker Greta Gerwig marvelled at how “brave” the toymaker had been at letting her play with its brand. The film’s portrayal of an idiotic all-male Mattel board and questioning of its role in encouraging consumerism and bizarre body images was a
It’s not often these days that one thinks of Britain as having advantages over other developed countries, and less often still that those advantages stem from unity across a famously divided electorate, but for some time now support for the pursuit of net zero has been broader and deeper in the UK than any peer
Simon needs to sell his home so he can move closer to his ageing parents. The 50-year-old lawyer found a house to buy a mile from them and, in April, accepted an offer on his home in Hampshire. However, a day before he was due to exchange contracts this month, the buyer reduced the amount
Donald Trump has been accused of attempting to have surveillance video footage at his Mar-a-Lago estate deleted ahead of an FBI search, as federal prosecutors added more criminal counts to a case over the former US president’s handling of classified documents. The Department of Justice filed the expanded indictment on Thursday. Federal prosecutors also added
Pacific tours: French president Emmanuel Macron visits Papua New Guinea, following US defence secretary Lloyd Austin, who was there on Thursday. Austin and US secretary of state Antony Blinken will meet their Australian counterparts in Brisbane on the last leg of their Pacific tour aimed at boosting Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy. Japan monetary policy: Investors are
Intel’s partial rebound in the latest quarter from an inventory-driven drop in PC chip demand has given Wall Street a rare moment of financial outperformance to celebrate as the struggling US chipmaker seeks to stabilise its business and complete a four-year turnaround plan. The company’s shares rose more than 7 per cent in after-market trading
Is artificial intelligence best seen as a business accelerant — something that brings new, “smart” features to existing products and provides a lift to tech companies’ revenues? Or is it a disruptive new platform, with the potential to change the balance of power in the tech industry? That question has been hanging in the air
Kering has agreed to buy 30 per cent of Valentino from Qatar’s Mayhoola, as part of a “strategic” deal that gives the French luxury group the option to take full control of the Italian fashion house by 2028. The €1.7bn all-cash purchase is “part of a broader strategic partnership” between Kering and Mayhoola, the investment
Good afternoon. There was an interesting and encouraging little flutter in Brexitland this week when the Sunday Times published a front-page story about the UK government seeking youth mobility deals with EU member states. Encouraging because it shows that Rishi Sunak’s government is moving away from the blinkered approaches under Boris Johnson and David Frost
French cosmetics group L’Oreal is still on the lookout for deals, hot off the back of its biggest acquisition after it agreed to pay $2.5bn for luxury skincare company Aesop. Chief executive Nicolas Hieronimus said the world’s largest beauty group had firepower left after buying the Australian maker of $40 soaps in April, pointing out
Coutts chief executive Peter Flavel has stepped down, saying that he bore “ultimate” responsibility for the bank’s treatment of former UK Independence party leader Nigel Farage. The private bank and its owner, NatWest, have been engulfed in a crisis since Farage revealed last week that Coutts had closed his account in part because of his
Economic growth in the US was stronger than expected in the second quarter of 2023, as activity proved resilient in the face of the Federal Reserve’s campaign of aggressive interest rate rises. The world’s largest economy grew 2.4 per cent on an annualised basis between April and June, according to preliminary figures released by the
The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletter At moments of stress, the EU invokes Jean Monnet’s maxim that Europe will be forged in crisis and will be the sum of the solutions adopted to address those crises. That is comforting when you are in the thick of it. But when
The European Central Bank has raised interest rates back to their record high, but signalled that eurozone borrowing costs may have peaked. The ECB’s decision on Thursday to raise its benchmark deposit rate by a quarter-percentage point to 3.75 per cent matches a high last reached in 2001, when it was trying to boost the
Shell reported its lowest quarterly profit in almost two years after oil and gas prices and refining margins all fell in a sign that the run of bumper earnings sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was drawing to a close. The UK headquartered group, which is Europe’s largest oil and gas company, made adjusted earnings
The writer is the author of several books on the City and Wall Street The financial crisis of 2008 turned banking into a highly political business, guaranteeing the sustained interest of governments and their arm’s length bodies. Especially in the UK, where the now discredited light-touch regulation was once an article of faith, the authorities
Centrica has reported an almost 10-fold surge in first-half earnings at British Gas, the UK’s largest household energy supplier, threatening to reignite consumer anger at the sector’s profits at a time of high household bills. Margins at British Gas, which has about 7.5mn customers, were boosted by higher gas and electricity prices, the company said
The losses from Ukraine’s much vaunted counteroffensive were heavy and early. Pushing into the country’s sprawling southern fields earlier this summer, Kyiv lost almost a fifth of Nato kit provided for the operation, according to Ukrainian and western officials. Kyiv’s military response across much of the frontline is now becoming clear: to change tactics. The