It’s looking very much like a Friday in August on Europe’s stock markets. The FTSE 100 has eased to a gentle decline in early trades, down eight points, or 0.1%, to 7,111 points.

Here are the opening snaps from Europe’s main markets:

Millions of homes will be forced to pay some of the highest energy bills for the last decade after the industry regulator gave suppliers the green light to raise their prices by up to £153 a year.

Households across Great Britain which use a default energy tariff to buy their gas and electricity can expect a sharp increase in their bills from October this year after the regulator lifted its energy price cap for the winter.

For 11 million households that pay by direct debit the average dual fuel bill will climb from £1,138 to £1,277 from October this year, up by £139. For another 4 million homes that using prepayment meters – which are typically more socially vulnerable – the average energy bill will climb from £1,156 to £1309, up by £153.

The energy price cap rise comes on top of a £96-a-year increase to the price cap announced six months ago that came into effect from April.

The latest rise in the energy price cap is also expected to trigger a...

The Bank of England has kept UK interest rates at the historic low of 0.1% despite predicting a stronger recovery this year from the pandemic that will push inflation higher than previously expected.

Central bank policymakers predicted that UK inflation would rise to 4% by the end of this year, double their target, up from 2.5% in June, largely due to developments in energy and other goods prices.

But they resisted pressure to increase the cost of borrowing to calm rising prices, saying the increase in inflation this year would prove temporary and was expected to fall back towards a 2% target next year.

Officials also maintained an £895bn stimulus programme that has pushed down long-term interest rates. The BoE is due to buy another £50bn of government bonds as part of its quantitative easing scheme by the end of the year.

China’s liquor and e-cigarette companies have emerged as the latest market casualty in Beijing’s crackdown on “vice industries” after reports from state media that suggest they could be the next targets for stricter regulation.

Shares in e-cigarette and liquor makers slumped on Thursday after reports in the Chinese media of adolescent e-cigarette use and links between alcohol and cancer spooked investors who fear the state may be planning to broaden its crackdown on digital gaming and technology companies.

Earlier this week Tencent, the Chinese tech company, promised to help curb the time children spend playing its flagship video game after state media attacks accusing the gaming industry of peddling “spiritual opium” sent its shares into freefall.

Pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Flynn have been accused by the UK’s competition watchdog of illegally overcharging the NHS for vital anti-epilepsy drugs by abusing their dominance in the market to raise prices overnight.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed its 2016 finding that the pair exploited a loophole to charge unfairly high prices for phenytoin sodium capsules by debranding the drug, known as Epanutin, in 2012 so it would not face price regulation.

The watchdog began reassessing the case after the drugs maker Pfizer appealed against the CMA’s 2016 fine of £84.2m – a record at the time – for raising the cost of the anti-epilepsy drug by up to 2,600%. Flynn Pharma, a drugs distributor, faced a fine of £5.2m for charging excessive and unfair prices for phenytoin sodium capsules.

Mike Ashley is set to step down as chief executive of Frasers Group, the owner of Sports Direct, in May next year and hand over to his daughter’s fiance.

The company, which also owns the House of Fraser department stores and the designer fashion chain Flannels, said it was in discussions about “transitioning” the chief executive role to 31-year-old Michael Murray, who is currently Frasers’ “head of elevation”.

The Doncaster-born son of a property developer began by helping Ashley with personal property deals a few years after meeting his daughter Anna on holiday in 2011.

John Lewis is among the companies “named and shamed” in a government list of employers found to be paying staff below the legal minimum wage.

The employee-owned partnership was one of 191 companies including care homes, childcare services and farms which were fined for owing a total of £2.1m to more than 34,000 workers, as part of the government’s bid to show that it is cracking down on the abuse of workers.

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said the breaches took place between 2011 and 2018, and the employers have since been made to pay back what they owed. They were fined an extra £3.2m, to show that “is never acceptable to underpay workers”.

The business minister, Paul Scully, said it was “unacceptable for any company to come up short” on the government’s minimum wage laws which were put in place “to ensure a fair day’s work gets a fair day’s pay”.

“All employers, including those on this list, need to pay workers...

Among the public services performed by journalism is alerting readers to scams, and the newspapers are currently full of them. When HMRC rings up, threatening a court case unless you press 1 on your keypad, slam down the phone. Texts from Royal Mail asking for money are about as kosher as marketing from Charles Ponzi. And if an email arrives from someone purporting to be from the sainted Martin Lewis, gushing over some new platform for trading bitcoin, it’s a hoax.

Politics is also rife with scams ­– except that you can’t depend on these being exposed by the press. The biggest and most pernicious whopper doing the rounds today is about Boris’s Big State. It runs thus: the prime minister is an utterly alien breed of Tory. He loves public spending and big government, those things abhorred by Conservatives ever since Margaret Thatcher took charge of the party five decades ago and made it her central mission to roll back the state. The Iron Lady’s legacy is endangered by the...

Disabled or elderly passengers who need assistance to board trains will be able to turn up and travel rather than book six hours ahead, under a scheme launched by South Western Railway.

The launch of “assisted boarding points” at stations on SWR, one of Britain’s biggest networks, allows passengers to contact a customer service team who then alert the guard on the next available train to ensure assistance is provided.

SWR said the service would require only 10 minutes’ notice. Standard industry practice is usually to request bookings the day before travel if possible to guarantee assistance.

The points, to be rolled out on all platforms across SWR’s 189 stations in the coming months, will include clear signage with a QR code that customers scan to send details of their journey and the type of assistance they require, such as a wheelchair ramp or visual impairment support.

The rail network described the scheme as an industry first that would make...

Cats are still dying in significant numbers from a mystery illness that investigators believe may be linked to widely sold cat food brands, prompting concern that not enough is being done to warn owners about a nationwide product recall.

Vets around the UK are understood to have been swamped by cases of pancytopenia, a condition in which the number of red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets decreases rapidly, causing serious illness.

The Royal Veterinary College (RVC) said this week it was aware of at least 528 cases in cats over the past few months, of which 63.5% have proved fatal. The true number of deaths could be far higher, it said, because many cases are not reported to vets and only a small percentage of vets pass data on to the RVC.

Certain batches of Sainsbury’s hypoallergenic cat foods, Applaws and AVA (a Pets at Home brand) were recalled by their manufacturer, Fold Hill Foods, in mid-June, prompting an investigation by the RVC and...

Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak will urge UK pension schemes to back Britain’s “entrepreneurial spirit” with billions of pounds of savers’ funds to fuel the economy’s post-pandemic recovery in a message to investment bosses.

The prime minister and chancellor will issue a joint call to action on Thursday aimed at “igniting an investment big bang” that would “unlock the hundreds of billions of pounds sitting in UK institutions”.

Citing the success of long-term investment programmes by Australian and Canadian pension schemes, Sunak and Johnson will say that British pensioners are missing out on “better retirements” after investors focused too heavily on the returns from stock market listed companies.

The boss of one of the UK’s largest insurance firms has suggested that employers in London’s financial district may be struggling more than those in other cities to persuade office workers to return to their desks as coronavirus restrictions ease.

Nigel Wilson, chief executive of Legal & General, said there were “a lot fewer people working in the City” compared with urban centres across the UK, Europe and the US, adding that it may take years for the historic streets to return to pre-pandemic levels of bustle.

“Some 525,000 people work in the City, that’s an awful lot of people,” he said in an interview from his office in L&G headquarters near Moorgate station in the City of London. “When I’m looking out of my office window, the streets look fairly empty.”

Legal & General said it had invested about £30bn in the UK over the last eight years, and in recent years has committed more funding to regional cities to help the government’s “Build Back...

A former model and a management consultant are to cash in about £70m after the beauty site they founded was bought by the fast growing e-commerce company the Hut Group.

Cult Beauty, founded by Alexia Inge and Jessica DeLuca in 2008, has been taken over in a £275m deal, recognising soaring interest in online shopping during the pandemic.

Rihanna, the singer of hits such as Umbrella and We Found Love, is officially a billionaire and the world’s richest female musician.

However, most of her fortune, estimated on Wednesday by Forbes magazine to be $1.7bn (£1.2bn), does not come from chart-topping singles, but from the success of her cosmetics empire.

Rihanna – real name Robyn Fenty – launched Fenty Beauty in 2017 with a dream to create a cosmetics company that made “women everywhere [feel] included”.

The singer, who has described makeup as her “weapon of choice for self-expression” while growing up, said she was driven to create her own range because established brands did not provide a full choice of products for all varieties of skin types and tones. The brand boasted foundation in 40 different shades when it first launched to “make skin look like skin” and has since expanded to 50.

Rihanna, 33, launched the beauty brand, of which she owns 50%, with the French luxury conglomerate...

Spain’s La Liga has agreed a €2.7bn (£2.3bn) deal with CVC that could see private equity involved in the running of a large European football league for the first time.

La Liga, which manages the top two divisions of Spanish football, said on Wednesday that it will create a new business that will take control of most of its activities, in which CVC Capital Partners will hold a 10% stake. The deal will value La Liga at €24.3bn, it said.

Clubs will receive about 90% of the funds from CVC’s investment, including money for women’s football.

The deal comes only three months after 12 of the largest European clubs – including Spain’s Atlético de Madrid, FC Barcelona, and Real Madrid – attempted to form a breakaway competition, the European Super League, that would have given them lucrative cash injections. It quickly collapsed after a huge backlash from fans, players and even governments.

Sports clubs around the world have struggled for revenues in the...

The competition to win a 10-year licence to run the National Lottery has been postponed for a second time, signalling a potential £42m windfall for the incumbent operator Camelot, which is already under scrutiny over the amount of profit it makes.

The Gambling Commission said it had extended the timeline after “representations” from the bidders, which include Camelot, the media tycoon Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, Czech-owned Sazka Group and Italian firm Sisal, which is working with BT.

The delay means the new licence will start six months later than planned, on 1 February 2024, resulting in significant extra earnings for Camelot.

MPs on the digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) select committee opened an inquiry last month into the lottery licence competition, including the regulator’s stewardship of the process.

The committee said it was responding partly to criticism that the amount of money raised for good causes had not increased...

Oil and Gas UK is claiming that the sector is a “major asset” in the push to reduce carbon emissions (Letters, 2 August). But it is the oil industry that has blocked climate action for the past three decades. OGUK touting its “net zero by 2050” ambition – which covers only operational emissions and completely ignores the much more significant “scope 3” emissions from burning the fossil fuels produced – is ridiculous. On top of which, the UK’s track record on operational emissions is abysmal.

The government’s North Sea transition deal failed to address the two core issues of energy transition – setting a clear path to phase down oil and gas production, and backing that up with adequate support for workers and communities affected. Where other countries have ended licensing for oil exploration, the UK government maintains its policy mandating the “maximisation of economic recovery” of oil and gas, meaning companies have to extract every last drop. They claim that this is...

Growth in Britain’s dominant service sector has slowed to its weakest since March after businesses were hit last month by a triple whammy of bottlenecks, workers self-isolating and a less generous tax break for homebuyers.

The latest monthly health check on UK services firms – which account for just under 80% of the economy – found costs rising at their fastest pace in at least 25 years in July, and raised concerns that the best of the UK’s economic recovery from the winter lockdown restrictions might be over.

The report from IHS Markit and the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply said firms were struggling with supply chain delays and shortages of workers exacerbated by the “pingdemic”, the instructions to self-isolate that have been running at more than 500,000 a week.

IHS Markit/Cips said the reduction in the threshold at which stamp duty is paid on house purchases from £500,000 to £250,000 in England and Northern Ireland at the end of...

Profits at Sony Corporation have climbed by more than a quarter as demand for the PlayStation 5 games console, which boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic, continues to outpace supplies.

The Japanese entertainment and electronics conglomerate reported a 26% rise in operating profit in the three months to the end of June to 280.1bn yen (£1.85bn) from 221.7bn yen a year earlier.

The better-than-expected first-quarter results prompted the company to raise its profit forecast for the year to March 2022 to 980bn yen from 930bn yen, anticipating that prospects for its music, movies and electronics divisions will continue to improve as the global economy emerges from the pandemic. That is still lower than the consensus prediction of equity analysts, which forecast a 1bn yen profit for the year.

Sony expects to sell 14.8m PS5s in the 12 months ending March 2022, a figure hindered by a shortage of semiconductors. As a result, the production volumes of its popular...

Taylor Wimpey, one of the UK’s biggest housebuilders, has returned to profit and upgraded its earnings targets after building a record number of homes in the first six months of the year.

The High Wycombe-based firm built more than 7,300 homes in the first half of 2021, almost all of which have been pre-sold, allowing the company to lock in the benefit of soaring house prices triggered by cheap loans, the government’s stamp duty holiday and a pandemic-driven preference for larger houses.

The FTSE 100 housebuilder reported a pre-tax profit of £287.5m for the six months to early July after a £40m loss in the same period last year in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Pete Redfern, Taylor Wimpey’s chief executive, said the company expects to complete between 13,200 and 14,000 houses in 2021, and reach an operating profit for the year of about £820m.

“We have a clear purpose to deliver high-quality homes and create thriving communities and a...

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business.

Data overnight from China showed that the country’s services sector accelerated in July, hitting its highest level since May, although the spread of the Delta coronavirus variant in the country is threatening the recovery.

The Caixin /Markit services Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) climbed to 54.9 in July, up from 50.3 the previous month. Any reading over 50 represents monthly growth rather than contraction.

The survey, which tends to focus on smaller firms in China’s coastal regions, contrasted with official data which had showed a slight slow-down in Chinese services data in July.

Sweaty Betty, the upmarket British workout gear brand, has been sold to a US footwear firm in a $410m (£295m) deal that will all but sever ties between the company and the husband-and-wife team who founded it.

After a year-long sale process that had been expected to fetch as much as £400m, the Michigan-based footwear manufacturer Wolverine Worldwide said it had struck a deal at a lower price with Sweaty Betty’s backers.

Named after the comic book character Betty Cooper, a musician in a garage band from the 1960s American series Archie Comics, the company was founded by Tamara Hill-Norton, who opened the first store Notting Hill in 1998. The brand combined fashionable designs with the latest in sportswear technology, counting the “bum sculpting” legging among its best sellers.

The private equity group L Catterton was Sweaty Betty’s largest shareholder with more than 60% of the business, after it injected funds in 2015.

The other major shareholder...

A “non-piracy incident” is under way off the coast of Fujairah, in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) reported on Tuesday.

The UKMTO warning notice, based on a third-party source, advised vessels to exercise extreme caution in the area, about 61 nautical miles east of Fujairah.

UKTMO provided no details regarding the vessel or vessels involved.

However, on Tuesday afternoon a Singapore-flagged chemical tanker in roughly the same position off Fujairah named Golden Brilliant updated its AIS tracking status to “Not Under Command”, according to Refinitiv ship-tracking data.

This status indicates a ship is unable to manoeuvre due to exceptional circumstances.

Last week, an attack on an Israeli-managed tanker off the coast of Oman killed two crew members and was blamed on Iran by the United States, Israel and Britain.

Iran denied involvement in the suspected drone attack and said on Monday it would...

A group of the UK’s biggest financial institutions plan to hasten the phasing out of coal power in Asia by buying out fossil fuel plants in order to shut them down within 15 years.

Finance giants including lenders HSBC, Citi and BlackRock Real Assets together with UK insurer Prudential are working with the Asian Development Bank on the plans, according to a report by Reuters. There have also been “promising” early talks with Asian governments and multilateral banks.

But climate campaigners have said that HSBC’s involvement in the plan was a “cynical” attempt to distract from the bank’s ongoing investments in coal power before the Cop26 climate talks.

Adam McGibbon, a campaigner at Market Forces, which calls for financial institutions to use their wealth to protect the environment, said HSBC participated in a $400m (£290m) loan to the Indonesian coal giant Adaro Energy earlier this year which produced 54m tonnes of coal in 2020.

McGibbon said the...

About half a year into Joe Biden’s presidency, it is time to consider how his administration’s economic doctrine compares with that of Donald Trump and previous Democratic and Republican administrations.

The paradox is that the “Biden doctrine” has more in common with Trump’s policies than with those of Barack Obama’s administration, in which the current president previously served. The neo-populist doctrine that emerged under Trump is now taking full form under Biden, marking a sharp break from the neoliberal creed followed by every president from Bill Clinton to Obama.

Trump ran as a populist – commiserating with left-behind white blue-collar workers – but governed more like a plutocrat, cutting corporate taxes and further weakening the power of labour vis-a-vis capital. Nonetheless, his agenda did contain some truly populist elements, particularly when compared with the radically pro-big business approach that Republicans have pursued for decades.