After a slow start marred by delays and supply shortages, Europe’s vaccination drive is stepping up a gear in nations including France, Germany and Italy even as they struggle to control a third wave of the pandemic. France announced an acceleration of its much-criticised Covid-19 vaccination campaign on Sunday, increasing the gap between the two
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Chinese regulators have fined Alibaba a record Rmb18.2bn ($2.8bn) after finding that the ecommerce group had abused its market dominance. The fine, which was set at 4 per cent of Alibaba’s 2019 revenues, concludes an antitrust investigation into the company founded by Jack Ma. It comes as Chinese authorities have stepped up scrutiny on dealmaking
Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, have voted resoundingly against unionisation, a major blow to the US labour movement and its hopes of gaining a foothold within the ecommerce giant. Around 55 per cent of the facility’s almost 6,000 workers cast a postal ballot. The “no” vote passed the required threshold of 1,607
For decades the international corporate tax system has irritated almost everyone — apart from shareholders of the world’s largest multinationals and countries with low tax rates. As companies’ share of profits in the global economy has risen and wages have fallen, large countries have found it ever harder to tax those profits. That could finally
The Biden administration has proposed a new model for taxing multinational corporations, calling for the world’s biggest businesses to pay levies to national governments based on their sales in each country as part of a deal on a global minimum tax. In documents sent to the 135 countries negotiating international taxation at the OECD in
The world’s leading economies are close to agreeing a set of principles that would revolutionise the taxation of multinationals after France and Germany threw their support behind a new US approach to the issue. Talks on how to make it difficult for international companies to shift profits round the world to minimise tax have been
Two senior Credit Suisse executives are leaving the bank as it deals with the fallout from billions of dollars of losses in the blow-ups of Archegos Capital and Greensill Capital. Lara Warner, the group’s chief risk and compliance officer, and Brian Chin, head of the investment bank, are set to depart, according to people with
China’s central bank has asked lenders to rein in credit supply, as the surge of lending that sustained the country’s debt-fuelled coronavirus recovery renewed concerns about asset bubbles and financial stability. New loan growth hit 16 per cent in the first two months of the year. The People’s Bank of China responded in February by
A record number of companies are abandoning attempts to list on China’s answer to the Nasdaq, as regulators increase scrutiny of technology businesses after scuppering Ant Group’s $37bn initial public offering. A Financial Times analysis of figures released by Shanghai’s Star Market, which was launched to fanfare in July 2019, shows a record 76 companies
A police officer died along with the driver of a vehicle that rammed barricades at the US Capitol Building on Friday, provoking a lockdown at the seat of Congress. Yogananda Pittman, acting chief of the United States Capitol Police, said a suspect and one of the force’s officers were dead while a second officer was taken to hospital
US stocks hit a new record, propelled higher by technology shares, while government bonds rallied in the return of a popular pandemic trade that banks on continued social curbs and supportive monetary policy. A rally in tech stocks helped power the benchmark S&P 500 pass 4,000 points for the first time, rising 1 per cent