Author: Press room

The former finance chief of Regal Cinemas is the leading candidate to replace Mooky Greidinger as chief executive of Cineworld, as the ailing cinema chain’s lenders plot a major management shake-up following bankruptcy proceedings according to several people close to them.A potential management reshuffle would probably mean Greidinger, Cineworld’s chief executive since 2014, would be forced to relinquish control of his third-generation family business, the people said. Originating from a single cinema founded by Greidinger’s grandfather in 1930 in the Israeli town of Haifa, the younger Greidinger transformed the business into the world’s second-biggest cinema chain with 751 sites in…

Struggling western central bankers should spare a thought for their Turkish counterparts. There, unorthodox policies are both stoking inflation and crimping bank lending. To boost the latter ahead of May’s election, three state-owned banks underwent a $5.8bn recapitalisation on Friday.Real interest rates remain deeply negative at the insistence of leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Since 2018, the country’s unorthodox approach to fighting inflation has instead focused on shrinking bloated foreign debts. Turkey has shrunk its current account deficit and pursued a forced “Lira-isation” to reduce dollar dependence. Its rationale is that the latter makes domestic prices more vulnerable to external shocks.To…

Russian and Belarusian tennis players will be allowed to compete in this year’s Wimbledon Championships after a ban in place since last year was lifted on Friday by the UK’s governing body for the sport. The Lawn Tennis Association last year barred players from the two countries from entering tournaments held in Britain following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian athletes and teams were also expelled from a range of other sporting events, including international football competitions. However, the decision prompted a backlash from the sport’s global governing bodies and put the UK at odds with the US, France and…

Three of Britain’s largest energy suppliers on Friday lost a legal challenge against the UK government over its handling of the high-profile sale of Bulb, the power supplier that was quasi-nationalised and sold to Octopus with as much as £4.5bn of taxpayer support.Centrica, Iberdrola SA’s Scottish Power and Eon had brought a judicial review against the UK government, alleging its decision-making had been unlawful in allowing the Bulb sale to go ahead. The Bulb transfer last October was the largest state bailout since the 2008 financial crisis. Bulb collapsed in November 2021, when wholesale prices spiked above the regulator’s price…

Just after sunset on Tuesday, Humza Yousaf led his family in Islamic prayer and broke his Ramadan fast in unusual surroundings: the 18th-century chandeliered drawing room of Bute House, grand Edinburgh residence of Scotland’s first ministers. Yousaf, 37, had just made history. Scotland’s devolved parliament had that day confirmed him as the nation’s first Muslim first minister, as well its youngest and its first from an ethnic minority. Now the new leader of the governing Scottish National party can focus on an even bigger goal: ending the 316-year-old union between Scotland and England.Nearly a decade after Scots in 2014 voted…

Capita, one of the UK government’s biggest contractors, said it was investigating an IT outage that has left staff unable to access emails. The company, which provides IT services and staff to a number of UK government and public sector bodies including the Ministry of Defence and Transport for London, said on Friday that it was investigating a “technical issue” with its systems. The extent of the outage as well as its cause is still being investigated. A spokesperson for the company said in a text message. “We are aware of a technical issue with our systems, which we are…

Buy-to-let landlords relying heavily on mortgage finance will struggle to make a profit in 92 local authorities in England and Wales — more than a quarter of councils — according to research that underlines the growing pressures on rental property investors.Steep rises in mortgage interest rates have hit returns in many parts of the country, in spite of a period of strong growth in rents, the report by estate agent Hamptons International found. An investor borrowing to buy a rental home with a deposit of 25 per cent — generally the minimum for buy-to-let — on a two-year fixed-rate deal…

The writer is an FT contributing editor and writes the Chartbook newsletterFaced with a rash of banking crises it is tempting to declare, plus ça change. There is nothing more inevitable than death, taxes and bank failures. But what about the bailouts? The publicly subsidised takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS and the hasty extension of guarantees to all SVB’s depositors are just the latest in a recent series of such actions. They suggest that we have entered a new era, one in which thoroughgoing liquidation of financial bubbles is politically unthinkable and so moral hazard and zombie balance sheets pile up.Both these interpretations…

In her later years, my mother never went anywhere without her handbag. It contained a home-made folder in which she’d listed all her ailments, and the copious numbers of pills she was taking. Her fear was not of people finding out she was a depressive diabetic with heart problems. It was that no one would know, if she was admitted to hospital in the middle of the night, because the NHS is so hopeless at joining up information.This weekend, privacy campaigners are raging that NHS England has asked all hospital trusts to upload patient information on to what will become…

Donald Trump will turn himself in to New York prosecutors on Tuesday, his lawyer said, insisting the former president would “not be put in handcuffs”. Joe Tacopina added he expected the charges — the first criminal indictment in history of an ex-US president — to relate to payments to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels.“He is not going to hole up in Mar-a-Lago,” the defence lawyer told US television networks on Friday, referring to Trump’s Florida estate. “The president will not be put in handcuffs” before his court appearance, Tacopina added. In a post on his Truth Social…