Glencore will plead guilty to multiple counts of bribery and market manipulation and pay penalties of up to $1.5bn following US, UK and Brazilian investigations that uncovered corruption at one of the world’s largest commodity traders. The UK Serious Fraud Office on Tuesday charged the group’s subsidiary Glencore Energy UK with seven cases of profit-driven

Shares in some of Britain’s biggest power companies fell sharply on Tuesday as Rishi Sunak drew up plans for a windfall tax on the energy sector to help offset spiralling domestic fuel bills. The chancellor is rushing to complete an emergency energy package to offer relief to households struggling with a spiralling cost of living

Typical household energy bills are set to rise to about £2,800 a year in October, the energy regulator warned on Tuesday, as the scale of the cost of living crisis facing Britain was laid bare. Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, has been putting the finishing touches to a mini-Budget worth billions of pounds to help households

Qatar has pledged to invest £10bn in the UK, including in the technology, healthcare, infrastructure and clean energy sectors, as the British government steps up efforts to woo sovereign wealth fund investment from oil-rich Gulf states. Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, the Gulf state’s foreign minister, told the Financial Times that the funds would be

A pro-Russian former president of Moldova has been detained as part of an investigation into treason and corruption amid worries about threats to the country from the war in neighbouring Ukraine. Igor Dodon, who governed the country from 2016 to 2020, is being investigated over allegations he accepted illicit funding, Moldova’s acting anti-corruption prosecutor Elena

Is there going to be a recession in the US and other leading economies? This question has naturally arisen among participants at this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. This is, however, the wrong question, at least for the US. The right one is whether we are moving into a new era

Snap lost more than a third of its value on Tuesday after the social media group said in an unscheduled earnings warning that it would be stung by worsening macroeconomic conditions. The Snapchat parent said in a regulatory filing late on Monday that since it issued guidance at its earnings on April 22, “the macroeconomic

Chinese and Russian strategic bombers flew over the Sea of Japan as Joe Biden attended a Quad summit in Tokyo, in a joint exercise the Japanese government denounced as “unacceptable”. The nuclear-capable bombers conducted a joint flight on Tuesday that began over the Sea of Japan as the US president was meeting his counterparts from

Times of big global upheaval may not be good for the world, but the dirty secret of journalism is that regular opinion writers find them professionally quite rewarding. Books, however, are a different matter. The economic shocks have been rolling in so fast that the slow process of book publishing leaves years of painstaking work

Food-to-go retailers are passing on price rises to customers, pushing up the cost of a cheap lunch just as commuters start to return to offices in greater numbers. Greencore, the UK’s largest sandwich maker, said on Tuesday that demand had returned to 91 per cent of pre-pandemic levels even though the company was passing on

Next month sees the launch of Wokenwine, the first trading platform dedicated to fine wine NFTs. But what does this mean for drinks? While some NFTs correspond to intangible things (such as Jack Dorsey’s first tweet), a drinks NFT corresponds to a physical bottle. The NFT is minted by the company that makes the product

Cranswick, one of the UK’s largest pork producers, has called for government action to save the pig industry after feed price rises added to labour shortages to place farmers under “unsustainable strain”. Adam Couch, chief executive of the listed group, said ministers must do more in the coming months to ensure that the UK had

The OECD has admitted that its groundbreaking international deal to increase the amount of tax paid by multinationals is falling significantly behind schedule and has no hope of being implemented next year. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mathias Cormann, the OECD secretary-general, said there were “difficult discussions under way” and that the

Six years ago, Britain began an experiment that was called “bold” by some economists and “reckless” by others. George Osborne, then Conservative chancellor, announced the minimum wage for over-25s would accelerate sharply to reach 60 per cent of median hourly pay by 2020. His decision was linked to his determination to cut welfare spending. But

The writer is professor of business at Columbia Business School and a retired partner of Goldman Sachs Much has been written about the wicked declines in financial asset prices this year. These commentaries are often framed in the language of technical analysis. For example, has an equity bear market begun? Far more relevant to investment

Your browser does not support playing this file but you can still download the MP3 file to play locally. This month’s crash in the value of cryptocurrencies has wiped out investments for people all over the world. In Bangalore, 29-year-old Subbaiah watched in horror as his $7,000 crypto holdings in luna and terra collapsed. Even

The diversity of digital assets presently lumped together as “crypto” is a branding disaster that shouts criminality. This is reminiscent of “hedge funds” — widely diverse strategies, little understood but often tagged together in the popular mind as opaque, venal, too-clever-by-half and borderline dodgy. For some, the recent fall in cryptocurrency values (“Crypto’s collapse highlights

Brooke Masters’ report on the US baby formula shortage, with the US government controlling fully two-thirds of the market (Opinion, May 19), calls to mind Milton Friedman’s warning that if you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in five years there would be a shortage of sand. Michael J Bond Mercer

Banks take hugely varying approaches in their commitments to tackling climate change. But there’s at least one point of consensus. You have to be seen to be taking it seriously. A talk entitled “why investors need not worry about climate risk” from an HSBC executive hints at disharmony in the ranks. Predictably, HSBC has moved

As incoming prime ministers from opposition parties tend to do, Anthony Albanese declared that Australians had “voted for change”. In fact, this was an election lost due to the unpopularity of the nine-year-old conservative Liberal-National coalition and especially the outgoing premier, Scott Morrison, more than it was won by the uncharismatic, somewhat gaffe-prone Albanese and