The water industry regulator has fined just one privatised utility for breaching regulations designed to prevent sewage spills in England since the rules came into force almost 30 years ago, according to official data. Despite hundreds of thousands of sewage spills into rivers and coastal waters in recent years, Ofwat’s only fine for breaching the
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Blackstone clients asked to pull $4.5bn from a closely followed real estate fund in March, even as the firm’s executives were promoting investment opportunities in the sector that they said would arise from US economic turbulence. Withdrawal requests at the $70bn fund, called Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, or Breit, rose 15 per cent in
Ferry operators are exploring rationing the number of coaches that pass through the UK’s busiest port in an effort to avert a repeat of last weekend’s travel chaos, sparking a furious reaction from transport companies. Some coaches were left waiting for up to 14 hours to board ferries from Dover as the Easter holiday getaway
The best definition of populist government, I think, is passing laws you know won’t work, to solve a problem that you don’t really think exists, because it polls well. Both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak, in part because they share an essential “ideal son-in-law” energy, are often presented as having, if not vanquished populism, at
The writer is chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, and the author of ‘The Wrath to Come’ “Unprecedented Government scandal,” read the headlines, as revelations of bribery, corruption, pay-offs and cover-up in the White House rocked the US. The administration was accused of “unprecedented corruption”,
The CBI said on Monday that it was expanding an inquiry into misconduct at the industry trade body after allegations of sexual harassment, cocaine use and rape emerged, separate to earlier claims about director-general Tony Danker. Danker stood aside last month pending the outcome of an independent investigation by law firm Fox Williams into allegations
Donald Trump was set to fly to New York on Monday to face criminal charges in a Manhattan court, marking an ominous new chapter in American political and legal history surrounding the former US president. Trump said he would depart at noon from his estate at Mar-a-Lago, on the Atlantic coast of Florida, and head
Canada’s Teck Resources has rejected a hostile bid from Glencore that would have created a £95bn natural resources giant and resulted in a vast restructuring of the FTSE 100 mining company. The unsolicited offer represents the biggest acquisition attempt by Switzerland-based Glencore — the world’s most profitable coal miner and a major commodities trading house
Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google have both released artificial intelligence-based chatbots in recent weeks. Their respective conversational engines — ChatGPT Plus and Bard — differ in the way they respond to complex queries, ingest text and come up with creative answers. The chatbots are trained to generate their responses using written data from the internet, like
In a crowded Kyiv restaurant, phones begin to vibrate. It is a missile alert. Residents are urged to go to bomb shelters. But no one moves a muscle — apart from a waiter who ambles over to ask if anybody would like dessert. That incident last week captured the strange mixture of normalcy and wartime
Russian authorities have detained a woman in St Petersburg on suspicion of orchestrating an explosion in a café in the centre of the city that killed a prominent pro-war blogger. Maxim Fomin, known publicly as Vladlen Tatarsky who was one of the most vocal supporters of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, was killed on Sunday afternoon
Oil prices jumped and Goldman Sachs raised its year-end forecast for Brent crude after Opec+ nations announced surprise production cuts of more than 1mn barrels a day in the face of weaker demand. International oil benchmark Brent crude rose as much as 8.4 per cent to a high of $86.44 a barrel in early Asian
EY has been banned from taking on listed companies as new audit clients in Germany for two years over flawed work for disgraced payments company Wirecard, in a landmark ruling by the country’s audit watchdog Apas, according to people familiar with the matter. The Big Four firm and five current and former employees have also
Russia’s security services are confiscating the passports of senior officials and state company executives to prevent overseas travel, as paranoia over leaks and defections spreads through Vladimir Putin’s regime. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still raging, security officers have tightened up travel requirements within the state sector, demanding the surrender of travel documents from some
As Donald Trump prepares to turn himself in over alleged hush money payments, the former president is the focus of other state and federal investigations which pose even more serious legal risks. Trump’s next set of legal problems could arrive in the state of Georgia, where Fani Willis, the Fulton county district attorney, is weighing
Credit default swaps are a form of insurance against bond defaults. In this story, they feature as instruments of deception rather than “weapons of mass destruction”, the label once applied to all derivatives by Warren Buffett. You can speculate about whether investors were deceived by their own instincts or other factors. This does not change
If you asked a few months ago where the next financial crisis might emanate from, most people probably wouldn’t have said regional banking. Rather, they might have guessed at the shadow banking sector, which has grown dramatically since the global financial crisis of 2008. It remains far less regulated than the traditional banking sector. When
Crude oil prices surged after Saudi Arabia and other members of the Opec+ group announced surprise production cuts of more than 1mn barrels a day on Sunday, putting Riyadh on a collision course with the US. Oil prices leapt by 8 per cent when trading opened in Asia on Monday morning following news of the
Tens of thousands of finance workers could be exempted from post-crisis rules which hold them personally accountable for failings on their watch as the UK government presses ahead with plans to boost the City of London’s competitiveness. The government vowed to overhaul the old system — known as the Senior Managers & Certification Regime —
Finland’s centre-right opposition clinched victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, inflicting defeat on centre-left prime minister Sanna Marin. The National Coalition party, led by Petteri Orpo, was poised to come first with 48 seats, followed by the eurosceptic populist Finns party on 46, both notching up strong gains, with 99 per cent of the vote counted.
One of Russia’s most influential pro-Kremlin war bloggers, Vladlen Tatarsky, was killed in a blast at a restaurant in St Petersburg on Sunday. The incident took place at around 6pm local time, in the centrally located Universitetskaya Embankment, according to the ministry of internal affairs, which confirmed Tatarsky’s death. St Petersburg governor Alexander Beglov said