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THG has sold two lossmaking businesses for £4mn as part of the ecommerce group’s streamlining effort to reverse lacklustre performance and regain confidence from investors. The London-listed group said on Friday it sold entertainment products division THG OnDemand to a company led by the unit’s management and funded by investment firm Gordon Brothers. It added

Good morning. Three different by-elections have yielded three different winners. The Liberal Democrats have taken Somerton and Frome while Labour has won Selby and Ainsty, the second-largest by-election swing from Tory to Labour at a by-election ever. But the Conservatives have held Ruislip and Uxbridge by 495 votes. So, something for everyone there. Some thoughts

Nigel Farage, the Brexit-backing politician, this week released a memo from Coutts, the UK private bank, suggesting it dropped him as a customer more because it abhorred his views than because he had failed its financial criteria. Farage then condemned this as “the march of woke corporatism”. Rishi Sunak, prime minister, has pledged to crack

European stocks fell on Friday, as the tech sell-off on Wall Street sent jitters through the market while investors prepared for key central banks to announce their latest policy decisions next week.  Germany’s tech-heavy Dax index was the biggest faller in Europe, down 0.6 per cent. The region-wide Stoxx 600 lost 0.1 per cent, as

UK public sector borrowing unexpectedly fell in June, helped by lower interest payments and stronger tax receipts. Public sector net borrowing hit £18.5bn last month, £0.4bn lower than in the same month in 2022, but the third-highest June borrowing since monthly records began in 1993, according to data published by the Office for National Statistics

It took five men less than two minutes — and a lot of brute force — to steal a six-digit sum of euros in cash. At 2.30am on a Thursday late last month, they planted bombs beside four cashpoints inside a bank lobby in a sleepy Frankfurt suburb. After a series of blasts, they seized

Several months into Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a veteran of Russia’s mass privatisations in the 1990s received a call from an “old-time friend”. “This is privatisation 2.0!” the friend exclaimed enthusiastically, suggesting they join forces “like in the good old times” to get hold of factories owned by western companies that now wanted to

Three and a half years ago I had a New Year’s Eve that I will never forget. Not because of a spectacular house party or dazzling fireworks display, but because I got stranded in a tiny Australian beach town when the only road out became cut off by a rapidly approaching bushfire. Lunch was coated

For most of the border along the 38th parallel, the two Koreas are divided by fences, anti-tank barriers and a wide no-man’s-land filled with millions of landmines. But nothing separates the two warring parties at the “joint security area” in the village of Panmunjom, where an armistice ending fighting in the Korean war was signed

Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have narrowly held on to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat in an unexpected UK parliamentary by-election result but were poised to lose two other seats in a night of political drama. Sunak’s ruling party retained the London seat vacated by former premier Boris Johnson by fewer than 500 votes, but the

UK consumer confidence plummeted in July as the rising cost of borrowing and high prices hit people’s morale, according to data that recorded the largest drop in sentiment for more than one year. The consumer confidence index, a measure of how Britons view their personal finances and wider economic prospects, fell six points to minus

The Nasdaq Composite had its biggest one-day drop in more than four months as investor disappointment with results from Netflix and Tesla called into question the strong, months-long rally in the tech sector. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.1 per cent on Thursday, its biggest daily decline since March 9. Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500

Indian billionaire Ravi Ruia has bought a £113mn mansion in London’s Regent’s Park linked to Russian property investor Andrey Goncharenko, in an off-market deal that underlines the continuing secrecy around the sales of Britain’s most expensive homes. The family office of Ruia, who co-owns the Mumbai-based Essar Group, bought Hanover Lodge this month through a

NatWest chief executive Alison Rose apologised to Nigel Farage for dropping him as a client of its private bank Coutts, as the UK government accelerated plans to clamp down on banks unfairly closing accounts. Rose, who earlier this week was named as one of prime minister Rishi Sunak’s 14-strong “Business Council”, wrote to Farage on

“Members of the opposition deserve bank accounts” ought to be a statement of the obvious. But it was a sentiment British MPs felt the need to reiterate this week after Nigel Farage — a driving force behind the Leave vote in the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum — released parts of a memo showing that Coutts,

The writer is a former investment banker and managing director at Seda Experts “Business travel sucks . . . until I redeem my frequent flyer miles,” proclaims one T-shirt for sale. Air travel for work wastes time, damages your health, pollutes the environment and costs employers a lot of money. And it happens a lot more than it

The UK’s largest asset manager has been buying bonds and selling equities in preparation for a “significant” economic downturn, warning that the Bank of England will be forced to tip the economy into a recession despite signs of cooling inflation.  Sonja Laud, chief investment officer at Legal & General Investment Management, which manages £1.3tn of

The UK competition watchdog has warned supermarkets that it will examine any attempts to rebuild profit margins after the recent fall in inflation and called on the government to reform pricing policies to help consumers. The Competition and Markets Authority said in a report on Thursday that it had found high food price inflation was

The world’s biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, has warned of a deepening semiconductor slump, as the boom in artificial intelligence fails to offset global economic woes and China’s delayed recovery. TSMC now expects its 2023 revenue to drop by 10 per cent, rather than the less than 5 per cent it forecast three

Offering the same service at higher prices suggests a paucity of ideas. Netflix is eliminating free password sharing in a bid to force freeloading viewers to pay up. The result was a 5.9mn bump in subscriber numbers in this year’s second quarter that was hailed as a show of strength by some analysts. But this

Boris Johnson, a late convert to the green agenda, promised “the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth” in his party’s 2019 election manifesto — just four years later the UK’s position as a global climate leader is slipping.  In the run-up to the UN COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021,