The tobacco company Philip Morris International (PMI) has sealed its controversial £1.1bn takeover of the asthma inhaler maker Vectura, after more than half of the target company’s shareholders agreed to sell their stock.

PMI said it had either bought shares, or received acceptances of its offer, reaching just under 75% of the company, well ahead of the 50% it needed.

The offer has become “unconditional”, meaning the remaining shareholders cannot prevent it and can in effect be compelled to sell.

The takeover of a respiratory disease specialist by a cigarette company has sparked outrage among health charities and public health experts around the world.

But the Marlboro maker has argued that its transition away from cigarettes requires it to move into fields such as respiratory medicine, where it already has some expertise.

Jacek Olczak, the chief executive of PMI, said on Thursday:

Tobacco company Philip Morris International (PMI) has sealed its controversial £1.1bn takeover of asthma inhaler maker Vectura, after more than half of the target company’s shareholders agreed to sell their stock.

PMI said it had either bought shares, or received acceptances of its offer, reaching just under 75% of the company, well ahead of the 50% it needed.

The offer has become “unconditional”, meaning the remaining shareholders cannot prevent it and can in effect be compelled to sell.

The takeover of a respiratory disease specialist by a cigarette company has sparked outrage among health charities and public health experts around the world.

But the Marlboro maker has argued that its transition away from cigarettes requires it to move into fields such as respiratory medicine, where it already has some expertise.

Jacek Olczak, the chief executive of PMI, said on Thursday: “We are very excited about the critical role Vectura will play in...

The Co-op has faced criticism as it begins selling groceries via Amazon and revs up 300 more delivery robots with the aim of almost tripling online sales to £200m.

The convenience store mutual said shoppers would be able to order from its full range of 3,000 grocery items via Amazon, if they are signed up to the US online specialist’s Prime subscription service.

The tie-up will initially launch in Glasgow and surrounding areas but there are plans to expand to other towns and cities later this year and eventually to go nationwide. Orders over £40 will be delivered free by Amazon’s Flex service, all of whose couriers are self-employed, and assembled at Co-op stores by the shop staff.

The Co-op now sells £70m a year of groceries online both directly, via food courier group Deliveroo and robot delivery specialist Starship Technologies.

About 200 of Starship’s autonomous robots, which resemble wheeled cool boxes and have been compared to squat versions...

The digital bank Monzo is muscling in on the UK’s booming “buy now, pay later” market and will be offering its customers credit limits of up to £3,000.

Monzo is one of the first UK banks to launch into the fast-growing but controversial BNPL sector, which is dominated by financial technology companies such as the industry leader Klarna and PayPal.

Monzo, which has more than 5 million customers, said it had taken the “best bits” of BNPL, credit cards, loans and overdrafts to create its Monzo Flex product, which it is introducing from Thursday.

BNPL credit allows customers to stagger payments for goods such as clothes, beauty items and furniture with no interest or fees – unless they fail to pay back on time, in which case some firms will impose late fees.

The prize for most undervalued flotation of the year goes to Darktrace. The Cambridge-based cyber security firm floated in April at 250p. Price now: an astonishing 731p. How does that happen? How does a £1.7bn valuation become £5bn in five months?

Well, the company has done its bit in by delivering the trading numbers it said it would, plus a bit more, which clearly helps the mood. The fresh news in Wednesday’s first set of full-year figures wasn’t the thumping headline loss of $149m (£108m). It was the second post-float upgrade in revenue forecasts for the year ahead.

But the the upwards tickle in revenue forecasts is only a small part of the answer to the undervaluation. The heart of it seems to have been Darktrace’s desperation to get a listing as a way to demonstrate independence from Mike Lynch, the Autonomy founder (and still 16% shareholder in Darktrace with his wife) fighting extradition to the US on fraud charges. For public company status, it was...

A senior Tory MP has proposed a law that would stop “scurrilous” employers using gagging orders to silence victims of sexual harassment.

Maria Miller, who chairs the select committee on women and equalities, said employers were being allowed to “conceal unlawful wrongdoing” through the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

Such contracts are intended to prevent ex-employees leaking confidential or sensitive information but Miller warned they were also being used to “silence the disclosure of wrongdoing experienced at work”.

NDAs were “driving the wrong culture in the British workplace – a culture where poor management can be covered up and where the silence of employees who have experienced significant wrongdoing can effectively be purchased, even motivating a small number of employees to vexatiously seek payouts from employers by making spurious allegations”, she said.

“We simply have to break this damaging cycle.”

The pressure to crack...

British Airways has operated its first passenger service directly powered by sustainable aviation fuel, a London to Glasgow flight that the airline said produced 62% less CO2 emissions than a similar journey a decade ago.

The airline said the combination of the fuel – partly made from recycled cooking oil – with optimal flight paths, electrified airport vehicles and its newest plane slashed emissions. BA said it had offset the CO2 produced, making the flight carbon-neutral.

While about 6.4 tons of CO2 were still produced by flight BA1476 on Tuesday, the airline said the flight was intended to demonstrate the progress made by the aviation industry in its attempts to decarbonise ahead of the Cop26 summit.

The service was operated by BA’s special liveried “sustainability” plane, an Airbus A320neo, its quietest and most fuel-efficient short-haul model. The fuel was a 35% mix of sustainable fuels (SAFs) from BP – close to the maximum proportion currently...

Prices are climbing in the shops and consumers face an autumn crunch. Official figures show inflation rose at the fastest rate in a decade in August, as the impact of Covid-19 and Brexit drives up the cost of living.

Surpassing the forecasts of City economists, the 1.2 percentage point increase in the consumer price index was the largest since Gordon Brown handed the Bank of England independence to manage inflation in 1997. At 3.2%, the CPI is now the highest since March 2012.

Questions will be asked about how Threadneedle Street will respond. But there is a tougher challenge for the Treasury: is this really the right time to take more money out of people’s pockets?

The average UK house price fell by £10,000 in July compared with a month earlier, official figures show, as the housing market appeared to cool after the phasing out of the stamp duty holiday.

The average UK house price was £256,000 in July, which was £19,000 higher than a year earlier, according to data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Average house prices in the year to July rose by 8%. However, the increase was down on the 13% recorded in the 12 months to June. The housing market fell slightly in July, as many homebuyers had rushed to complete their purchases before the stamp duty holiday deadline of 30 June.

From 1 July 2020 until June 2021, buyers did not have to pay stamp duty on the first £500,000 of a purchase price of a property in England and Northern Ireland, provided the purchase was completed in time. The threshold at which stamp duty begins in the two nations fell to £250,000 on 1 July this year, and will return to the...

Thousands of workers at CVS stores across California are demanding better pay, increased safety standards, healthcare improvements and more security for workers in new union contract negotiations.

The demands followed the drug chain’s report of record profits over the past 18 months, in part due to keeping stores open throughout the pandemic and offering Covid-19 testing and vaccines in stores. CVS reported a profit of more than $7bn in 2020 and posted a $2.8bn profit in the second quarter of 2021. CVS is ranked the eighth largest retailer in the US based on 2020 sales and its parent company, CVS Health, is the fourth largest corporation in the US by revenue.

CVS has offered a wage increase of just 5 cents an hour for most workers in the contract negotiations.

“We made over a $7bn profit for this company in 2020. They made that off our backs. We were the ones who took the risks, but they only want to offer us nickels and dimes for a raise, to give us...

Thousands of people who bought leasehold homes from housing developer Countryside Properties will be freed from costly contract terms, following an investigation by consumer watchdog the Competition and Markets Authority.

The CMA has been looking into the practice by Countryside and other property developers of doubling ground rent every 10 to 15 years.

These increases, which are written into property contracts, leave some house owners struggling to sell or mortgage their homes, while their rights to their property can also be at risk if they fall behind on ground rent payments.

Countryside Properties has now voluntarily given formal commitments to the CMA to remove terms from its leasehold contracts that cause ground rents to double.

The company will also remove terms from updated contracts that meant the ground rent increased in line with the higher retail prices index measure of inflation. Affected leaseholders’ ground rent will now remain at...

The leap in CPI inflation from 2.0% in July to a nine-year high of 3.2% in August is the first step in a rise that may take inflation to 4.5% by November. But as inflation will fall back almost as sharply next year, we don’t think the MPC will raise interest rates until 2023.

About 0.9ppts of the rise in CPI inflation in August was due to base effects linked to the sharp fall in consumer prices in August 2020, most of which was driven by the Eat Out to Help Out restaurant discount scheme.

But 0.3ppts of the rise was due to a strengthening in underlying price pressures. The 5.9% m/m rise in hotel prices in August was much stronger than the 0.6% m/m decline you usually get at this time of year, which pushed up its inflation rate from 5.7% to 11.6%. And the rise in food inflation from -0.6% to +0.3% is probably due to the pass-through of higher shipping and commodity costs as well as some product shortages.

What’s more, a further rise in inflation to at...

Call it an embarrassment of riches at JD Sports. Profits, like the share price, are flying, to the point where the company predicts £750m for the full-year, or £150m more than the City had expected, which must be the largest profit upgrade ever announced by a UK retailer.

The embarrassment, or difficulty, lies in the fact that JD accepted a large helping hand from the public purse – notably £61m in UK furlough cash – and is keeping its Covid support, a stance that looks increasingly hard to sustain.

Many other UK retailers, from Primark downwards, long ago accepted that, when post-lockdown trading turned out better than feared, they ought to pick up the tab for protecting jobs. There’s no obligation to do so, but a pattern has been established and JD, a company now worth an astonishing £11bn, is an outlier.

JD said in July it will consider repaying payroll support when its full-year results are in, and it’s sticking to that script now. And it’s being...

SSE could face pressure to break up its energy business as the activist hedge fund Elliott Advisors pushes for a spin-off of its renewable energy division after building a stake in the company.

The hedge fund has reportedly begun talks with senior SSE executives after investing in the company over the summer, and has joined industry analysts in calling for the company to separate or sell its renewables business.

Elliott has not publicly confirmed its position in SSE’s shares, which was first reported in the Betaville financial blog in August, and has declined to comment on media reports this week. SSE has also declined to comment.

The campaign would mark Elliott’s second UK-based target this year after the $48bn fund took aim at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline earlier this year, calling for its boss Dame Emma Walmsley to reapply for her job.

SSE’s chief executive Alistair Phillips-Davies and chairman Sir John Manzoni completed a big overhaul...

About half a million households will be moved to a new energy supplier after Utility Point and People’s Energy became the latest energy companies to go bust amid record energy market prices.

The latest casualties bring the total number of failed energy suppliers to seven in the past year, including five within the past five weeks, as the market price for gas and electricity has reached new all-time highs.

Bournemouth-based Utility Point supplied gas and electricity to about 220,000 homes, while People’s Energy, based in London, supplied gas and electricity to about 350,000 homes and about 1,000 non-domestic customers. In total, about 2 million people have been affected by the seven supplier failures.

The regulator, Ofgem, will appoint new suppliers to take on the households and companies left stranded by the latest market failures through a “safety-net” process which protects customers outstanding credit balances.

Neil Lawrence, Ofgem’s retail...

Amazon is offering sign-on bonuses of up to $3,000 in some locations as it aims to hire 125,000 delivery and warehouse workers across the US amid a recruitment frenzy.

The online retailer and tech company said it was also raising its average starting wage to $18 an hour, up from $17 an hour announced in May, amid fierce competition for hourly paid workers in the US.

Dave Clark, chief executive of Amazon’s global retail business, said: “We take our responsibility as an employer seriously and want our employees to succeed and thrive.”

Amazon’s minimum pay is still $15 an hour in the US but the company is being forced to offer increased incentives to support the expansion of its operations to cope with the shift to online shopping ahead of the peak Christmas season.

In 2021, Amazon has opened more than 250 new logistics facilities and in the US, and will launch over 100 more in September alone.

Last week, the company said it would put $1.2bn...

I was pleased to read your article exposing government bias against genuine renewables (UK ministers ‘met fossil fuel firms nine times as often as clean energy ones’, 10 September). The dirty energy industry still has Boris Johnson’s government completely under its thumb, despite the climate and biodiversity crises we are facing.

Over the past year, Johnson has repeatedly promised to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss. Yet the UK remains Europe’s top subsidiser of biomass electricity, which is made by logging our planet’s forests and burning the trees in power stations. Enormous sums of money flow to Drax and others because the UK has wrongly defined biomass energy as “green” despite the objection of scientists, communities and public interest organisations. The reality is that just like burning fossil fuels, burning trees for electricity pumps enormous amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and exacerbates climate change. It also results in...

The owner of JD Sports, Blacks Leisure and Millets has upgraded annual profit expectations by £150m after sales were boosted by US shoppers spending their Covid fiscal stimulus cheques on trainers and athleisure gear.

The retail group, which owns more than 3,000 stores in the UK, US, Europe and Asia, raised its target for the year to £750m after pretax profits soared to a record £364.6m in the six months to 31 July, almost nine times that of the same period a year before when retailers were hit by high street lockdowns around the world. Sales rose 56% to £3.9bn in the half year.

JD Group said all US businesses benefited from the US government’s fiscal stimulus package which gave direct payments to individuals, much of which was spent in stores. The group’s executive chairman, Peter Cowgill, said JD outlets had performed particularly well thanks to their understanding of their customers’ “aspirations and expectations”.

Pretax profits, before exceptional...

Britain’s economic recovery from the winter lockdown is showing signs of stalling amid shortages of workers and supplies due to the double whammy of Covid and Brexit, according to a Guardian analysis.

Despite the easing of most government pandemic restrictions, consumer caution appears to have crept higher in the past month as the Delta variant fuels a persistently high infection rate, while UK businesses have come under pressure from global supply chain disruption and staff shortages.

Figures from the Bank of England show debit and credit card spending has fallen to 94% of its pre-pandemic level in recent weeks as the initial buzz from shops, pubs and restaurants reopening fades to a lower level. Footfall in town and city centres remains below pre-Covid levels, while retail sales unexpectedly dropped in July.

“The recovery has stopped in its track,” said James Smith, an economist at the Dutch bank ING. “The rise in self-isolation clearly had an effect...

The number of daily new Covid infections has remained elevated in the past month after the removal of most pandemic restrictions, fuelled by the Delta variant. The latest daily figures up to 25 August show 35,847 people tested positive for Covid-19 across the UK, an increase from the start of the month. Almost 48 million people have had a first shot of a coronavirus vaccine, about 88% of the adult population. More than 42 million have had a second, about 77%.