News

What price a vote? Long before Google and its ilk brought dual-class shares to public markets, Britain plc routinely disenfranchised swaths of the investor base. Most — think Whitbread in hospitality or WHSmith in retail — merged their voting and non-voting shares in the early 90s. Straggler PZ Cussons, home of Imperial Leather soap, did

Schroders plans to scrap an “anachronistic” ownership structure that has deprived some shareholders of voting rights, as one of the UK’s largest asset managers tries to burnish its governance credentials. Under a plan laid out on Tuesday, Schroders said that each of the company’s non-voting shares, which account for a quarter of the total in

Government plans to enable more adults in England to do training courses throughout their lifetimes will have an important role in tackling the national skills shortage and boosting productivity, according to the minister for higher and further education. Michelle Donelan said the policy to introduce a “life-long loan entitlement” would address the UK’s low productivity

The container shipping industry is riding a wave that has not yet peaked. Denmark’s AP Moller-Maersk has just announced a more than doubling of first-quarter ebitda. Record results come at a cost. High freight rates have infuriated customers. The White House says they are likely to push up US consumer prices by 1 per cent

They say money can’t buy you love, but disagreements with a partner about how to manage your joint finances can give couples plenty to argue about. On this week’s Money Clinic podcast, presenter Claer Barrett meets newly-weds Sahil and Priya, who have very different financial priorities. Although the couple have been together for several years,

US law firm Skadden Arps has lost its top Asia capital markets lawyer as the flow of Chinese companies selling shares in New York and Hong Kong dwindles. Julie Gao is to move to Chinese tech giant ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, where she will take over as chief financial officer. The Beijing-based company has

A bad trump break and a frozen suit combined to cause most declarers to fail in this game contract. Can you do better? BiddingDealer: SouthLove All North East South West — — 1S NB 3S NB 4S West led Q♥. Most declarers won, played ♠AK and then breached diamonds. East took dummy’s J♦ with K♦;

The world’s largest serviced office company, IWG, warned that inflation, Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine could weigh on profits this year, pushing its shares down even as it reported record demand from big companies signing up to hybrid working. The WeWork rival reported improved revenues for the first quarter of the year on Tuesday

The biggest revelation of Colombia’s presidential election campaign is a black female social activist who is no longer running for the top job. Francia Márquez, who was little known outside the Afro-Colombian community until this year, caused a sensation when she won the third-largest number of votes of any candidate in national presidential primaries last

Australia’s biggest liquefied natural gas producer said Asian demand for supplies from “democratic” nations had risen following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called on Canberra to speed up approvals of domestic projects. Meg O’Neill, the chief executive of Woodside Petroleum, said the LNG market had “changed tremendously” since Russia invaded Ukraine and the west imposed sanctions on Moscow, forcing countries

AP Moller-Maersk warned that container trade could decline this year due to the ongoing supply chain crisis even as the shipping group upgraded its annual profit forecasts by a quarter. The Danish company, the world’s largest container line by profits but second-biggest by capacity, boosted its full-year guidance after its first-quarter results came in above

Good morning. Today we process chancellor Rishi Sunak’s continuing slide in the ConservativeHome rankings and Elon Musk’s looming purchase of Twitter (I for one think that $44bn is a very reasonable price given the quality of my tweets). Thank you to everyone who has kindly left feedback on our newsletter — we always welcome suggestions

HSBC’s profits fell by more than a quarter in the first three months of the year, as Europe’s largest lender increased reserves for bad loans in response to war in Ukraine and slowing growth in its core Asia markets. The London-based bank reported profit before tax of $4.2bn for the first quarter, a decline of

Primark owner Associated British Foods has said it will raise prices to offset the impact of rising inflation, which it warned is set to drag down profits this year and next. The FTSE 100 company said higher costs for commodities, transport and energy were being felt across its businesses, which include food groups Allied Bakeries,

Bad news comes thick and fast these days, from climate change to war to inflation. So it is worth pausing sometimes to appreciate good news, especially when it shows the power of policy to change things for the better. Last week brought one such opportunity, when official data revealed just how successfully the UK has

I have been appointed deputy for financial affairs for my brother, who has learning difficulties and is severely disabled. He lives in a residential home a long way from me so I cannot visit him every week. I have been asked by his carers to obtain a prepaid card for him which they will be

A tree gracefully sheds leaves of paper bearing cryptic statements about the future. As people gather around to pick them up, the scene has the valedictory feel of autumn; ominous, too. But what does it mean? The questions multiply throughout Sibyl, the latest stage work from William Kentridge, South African artist, theatre director and all-round

There’s the dropping of names. Then there’s carpet-bombing. Then there’s blitzkrieg. The scattershot of grand writerly personalities throughout John Walsh’s coming-of-literary-age memoir sometimes makes you want to duck for cover. And to wonder whether this author ever spoke to anybody who wasn’t, or wasn’t to become, famous. But Walsh can be forgiven, since this isn’t

Investors managing $3tn in assets are pushing food multinationals Nestlé, Danone, Kraft Heinz and Kellogg to set out new disclosures and targets on health after a successful campaign for changes at Unilever. The investors including Legal & General Investment Management and BMO Global Asset Management have written to the boards of the companies ahead of

Shoreditch has suffered. Stagnated even. Its edge needs serious sharpening after the devastation of the pandemic. One of the early symptoms was the surprising closure of the Ace Hotel, an imprimatur of the area’s global cool, in 2020. Now it has been reincarnated as One Hundred Shoreditch, relaunching last month in a move many are

Admiral John Aquilino, the top US military commander in the Indo-Pacific, recently held an unusual meeting with the head of US Space Command and deputy head of US Cyber Command — in a remote part of the Australian outback. Aquilino and his colleagues, General James Dickinson and Lieutenant General Charles Moore, had flown all the