Your three-minute digest
1 Partners of KPMG UK have been accused of despicable behaviour for freezing the pensions of their former colleagues, in some cases for as long as 15 years, while voting themselves pay packets averaging £757,000 last year.
2 Soaring energy and raw material prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are set to have increased losses at British Steel.
3 The volume of proposed redundancies by British businesses rose by 58 per cent to 278,149 in 2023, up sharply from 176,149 in 2022, according to data obtained via a freedom of information request to the Insolvency Service and combined with figures from the Office for National Statistics.
4 A rebound in demand for travel and a brand “overhaul” have driven double-digit sales growth at one of Britain’s oldest luggage retailers. Antler reported a 43 per cent increase in global sales in November and December compared with a year earlier.
5 Publishers are complaining that Google, because of its dominance in internet search, has them “between a rock and a hard place” over the use of their copyrighted output to power its artificial intelligence models.
6 Homeowners who sold up last year made an average profit of more than £100,000. The average seller in England and Wales who had bought a home within the past 20 years sold it for £102,650 more than they had paid, according to data from Hamptons, the estate agency.
7 Every UK city apart from Belfast suffered a rise in the proportion of children living in relative poverty between 2014 and 2021, according to research that has led to claims Britain has been “levelled down” under successive Tory governments.
8 As the owner of Manchester City FC and a third of Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceflight business, Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan has become used to making headlines. Now he is trying to secure a deal to buy the Telegraph newspapers and The Spectator news magazine and is setting his sights set on buying television studios.
9 The numbers charting cancer survival rates suggest that Peter Cowley, 68, a private company investor and business “Angel of the Year”, will die this year from lung cancer. Now he has written a book detailing the hitherto unknown challenges and tragedies in his life.
10 A recruitment platform that promises to be “the better way to find a job in tech” has been bought by a French rival, giving Paul Forster, the co-founder of the jobs website Indeed, a windfall from his investment. Welcome to the Jungle has bought Otta from its founders, all former employees of Nested, the online estate agency.
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