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

Gatwick Airport has warned that UK travel will continue to lag substantially behind Europe and the US if the government doesn’t simplify travel rules (in particular testing). Passenger numbers were “very low” at 569,000 in the first six months of the year and Gatwick made a loss of £245m.

Like others in the travel industry, Gatwick is calling for no test requirements for travellers from “green list” countries, and for double-vaccinated travellers returning from amber countries; and a single lateral flow test for non-vaccinated people coming back from an amber destination.

Chief executive Stewart Wingate says:

Companies offering Covid tests to travellers may be skewing the market by not charging VAT sales tax, a Guardian investigation has found, adding to pressure on the government to intervene and regulate pricing.

Guidance from the UK’s tax authority, HMRC, states Covid tests are only exempt from VAT, which amounts to 20% on the sale price, if administered by a registered health professional or if the company selling them has sales of less than £85,000 a year.

The Guardian has seen communications from a number of companies telling customers they have not been charged tax on home testing kits sent out by post.

One invoice for a Covid-19 self-testing kit from Eurofins, charged at £44.90, states that zero VAT has been charged.

Another invoice for a Covid-19 home testing kit from Expert Medicals provided to a UK resident says £0 taxes have been charged while Nationwide Pathology charged £40 for a day 2 PCR test with an invoice making clear no “sales tax”...

The directors of Vectura finally emerged and spoke late on Thursday: stuff all our previous ethical boasts, we’re happy to see a healthcare company – one that develops inhalers to treat lung diseases, no less – sold to a tobacco giant for the sake of a few extra millions in a a billion pound bid contest.

It wasn’t quite like that, of course. The board, chaired by Bruno Angelici, merely pushed out a statement that muttered about “fiduciary duties” and noted that the Philip Morris 165p-a-share bid represents a “superior price” to the 155p from private equity firm Carlyle. It amounts to the same thing.

The UK’s competition watchdog said it is ready to help the government take rapid action against covid testing companies if it finds they are breaching consumer law amid rising concerns about rip-off pricing and unreturned or delayed results.

Adidas is selling Reebok to the US brand management company Authentic Brands Group for up to €2.1bn (£1.8bn), as the German sportswear firm concentrates on its core marque after pressure from investors.

Reebok was bought for €3.1bn in 2006 in a blockbuster deal designed to help the trainers and clothing company take on rival Nike, but it never returned to its 1980s heyday and Adidas investors demanded action.

Founded in 1958 in Bolton and now based in Boston in the US, Reebok will become part of the ABG conglomerate, which has bought up more than 30 labels, including Aéropostale, Airwalk and Forever 21, that are sold at about 6,000 stores. It also owns Sports Illustrated magazine.

“This is an important milestone for ABG, and we are committed to preserving Reebok’s integrity, innovation, and values – including its presence in bricks and mortar,” said Jamie Salter, the group’s founder, chair and chief executive.

ABG, which recently filed for an...

Pret a Manger has rowed back on plans to slash staff bonuses in a partial U-turn on proposed pay cuts after workers threatened strike action.

However, the coffee shop chain has not reversed a decision to cease paying for break times, so that a worker on an eight-hour shift, including a legally required half-hour break, will still see a pay cut of just over 6% a shift v pre-pandemic levels.

Pret workers, the vast majority of whom earn basic pay of the legal minimum £8.91 an hour, threatened to down tools this week after being told a temporary cut in paid breaks would be made permanent.

A service bonus, linked to performance judged by a mystery shopper, was ditched last summer and reintroduced in April this year at 50p an hour, down from £1 before the pandemic hit. Workers were told last week that change would also be made permanent.

With the town centres which it serves emptied of workers during the pandemic, Pret has been under severe financial...

Gifs are embeddable clips, usually no more than a few seconds long. The most popular gif of 2020 was Thank You by Red & Howling, which shows a cartoon dog expressing its thanks to pandemic essential workers, which Giphy says was viewed more than a billion times.

The CMA said in its provisional findings that “our initial view [is] that the only effective way to address the competition issues that we have identified is for Facebook to sell Giphy, in its entirety, to a suitable buyer”.

The watchdog found that Facebook’s ownership of Giphy, which it aims to integrate with its Instagram social media site, could lead to it stopping supplying gifs to other social media sites. Or Facebook could demand more user data from Giphy’s social media customers to continue to get access to its gifs, increasing the company’s already “significant” market power.

“Millions of people share gifs every day with friends, family and colleagues, and this number continues to grow,”...

Electric heat pumps are expected to be a key part of the government’s upcoming plans to make the UK’s homes greener, warmer, and more energy efficient. Around 40% of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions come from our homes, meaning we will need better home insulation and low-carbon alternatives to the traditional gas boiler. But do electric heat pumps keep homes as toasty as fossil fuels? Or are heat pump installers charging a high price for a lukewarm heating option?

We would like to hear from anyone who has installed an air-source heat pump or a ground source heat pump in their home. Does it do the job, or do you long for your old gas boiler? And do you think it’s worth the cost?

John Lewis is to open a 1m sq ft warehouse in Milton Keynes that will employ 500 people as it tries to meet surging demand for online shopping.

The new facility at Fenny Lock, which it has leased from Tesco for 11 years, will be John Lewis’s second biggest distribution centre after nearby Magna Park.

Winchester has become the least affordable city in the UK to buy a home, as property prices average 14 times people’s earnings.

The Hampshire city has overtaken Oxford, according to analysis by Halifax, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender. A home in Winchester will set buyers back an average £630,432 – the highest in the country and up 8% on 2020, while average earnings are £45,059.

Price growth in Winchester is far outstripping that across the UK in relation to wages, Halifax said. Its analysis of 61 UK cities in the year to June shows that the average home costs 8.1 times average earnings, up from 7.5 times last year. The ratio has increased for eight consecutive years.

Russell Galley, the managing director of Halifax, said: “We can see from our research that affordability is significantly better in the north and there are now just two cities – Plymouth and Portsmouth – with better than average affordability in the south.”

The housing market has...

Deliveroo doubled the number of orders from customers to 149m in the first six months of the year as the appetite for takeaways continued to grow despite the reopening of bars and restaurants.

The food delivery platform revealed a 110% increase in orders across the UK and Ireland compared with the first half of 2020, and announced it now offers takeaways from more UK restaurants and food merchants than any other service.

The company has been on a restaurant recruitment drive, signing up 10,000 new sites in recent months, increasing the base by almost 30%. Deliveroo said it was also continuing to grow its network of on-demand grocery delivery options because of a “strong conviction” that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift in consumer behaviour towards buying food online.

Demand for food delivery services from Deliveroo and rivals including Uber Eats and Just Eat Takeaway boomed during the coronavirus pandemic, when lockdown restrictions...

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

The UK’s travel recovery has begun, according to Heathrow Airport, which has reported its busiest month since the pandemic began -- despite ‘barriers to travel’ remaining.

More than 1.5 million passengers passed through its terminals in July -- 75% more than a year earlier, following the easing of travel restrictions.

But.. that’s still over 80% down on July 2019 -- when 7.75 million customers travelled through Heathrow in a typically busy pre-pandemic summer month.

Heathrow says the “long road to recovery” has started:

Medics, health charities and politicians had raised serious concerns about prospect of a big tobacco company taking over a firm that makes products that treat conditions caused by smoking. PMI advocates a smoke-free future, but makes about 75% of its revenue by selling cigarettes.

Simon Dingemans, a managing director in Carlyle’s European buyout advisory group and a former finance director at GlaxoSmithKline, said: “Carlyle believes its offer is in the best interests of the business and its stakeholders, including its employees, partners and customers, as well as, most importantly, the patients it serves and helps to provide with effective and accessible medicines.”

Carlyle had offered to buy Vectura at a price of 155p-a-share, compared with PMI’s bid of 165p-a-share. To prevent Vectura falling victim to a prolonged bidding war, the Takeover Panel regulator had organised a five-day auction due to start on Wednesday.

The extremely rare head-to-head auction will...

David Cameron is under growing pressure to answer further questions about his involvement in Greensill Capital, given he reportedly made up to $10m (£7m).

After BBC Panorama reported on the sum he made for a part-time job over two and a half years, the former prime minister was urged to divulge what he knew about the company’s financial troubles before it collapsed this year.

The new low-cost long-haul Norwegian airline Norse Atlantic Airways has announced plans to fly between Europe and the US from early 2022, as it aims to fill the gap in budget transatlantic air travel left by Norwegian’s departure from long-haul routes.

Norse, which was formed in March by Norwegian airline industry veterans, will initially fly from Oslo, London and Paris to New York, Los Angeles and Fort Lauderdale.

The carrier’s chief executive, Bjørn Tore Larsen, said the airline intended to be flying its entire fleet of 15 Boeing 787 Dreamliners – featuring Viking-inspired branding – by summer 2022.

The airline plans to start recruiting pilots and aircrew at the end of 2021, and expects to have about 1,600 staff by next summer, all of whom will be directly employed.

Norse initially hoped to be airborne at end of 2021, but Larsen said the slower-than-anticipated lifting of coronavirus travel restrictions for long-haul routes meant the airline was...

The UK housebuilder Bellway has said business is almost back at pre-pandemic levels, but warned of rising costs for fixing fire safety issues relating to cladding at some of its developments.

Revenues climbed 41% to £3.1bn in the year to the end of July – just 2.5% below 2019’s level – as demand for homes booms across the country.

The company completed 10,138 homes in its latest financial year, more than a third more than in 2020 when building and sales were dented by lockdowns, close to the pre-Covid level of 10,892 recorded in 2019.

“Bellway has delivered a strong performance with volume output once again above 10,000 homes and housing revenue approaching 2019 levels,” said Jason Honeyman, the chief executive, who took home £1.09m in the year to July 2020 despite receiving no annual bonus.

“Going forward, we are in an excellent position to continue our long-term growth strategy. The group benefits from a substantial order book and a robust...

Inquiries for office space bounced back to pre-Covid levels in the second quarter, according to IWG, as the world’s biggest workspace provider benefitted from the boom in demand for hybrid working solutions.

The company, formerly known as Regus, added a record 900 new clients in the first half and experienced a “very strong recovery” in meeting room and day office usage in the second quarter as the company begins to see a recovery from the pandemic.

Revenues from the hiring of meeting rooms and day offices surged 40% between the first and second quarters this year, as lockdowns came to an end and businesses adopt new hybrid working patterns, where employees split the week between their home and an office desk not necessarily inside their corporate headquarters.

“The significant move to hybrid working has created unprecedented demand for our flexible work products,” said Mark Dixon, the chief executive of IWG.

“This fundamental shift in the way...

In north-east England, green shoots are beginning to emerge after decades of economic decline. From the Tyne’s former coal heartlands to the Humber, local communities are poised for a green revolution, sparked by plans to build the world’s largest offshore windfarm at Dogger Bank in the North Sea.

Paul O’Neill, a manager at the County Hotel in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, believes the offshore wind industry could “change the reputation” of the region.

“This city was built on coal money. And there’s still this idea in the south that everything up here is grim with coal,” said O’Neill, the son of a miner who worked in the Throckley pits just outside Newcastle. “This could be a new revolution for the north-east,” he says.

The rush to invest billions of pounds in the UK’s offshore wind industry has put the region in line for a green jobs windfall. A recent flurry of government grants to support offshore wind manufacturing companies in the Humber and Newcastle is...

The BRC said reform of business rates was vital to ensure investment in bricks-and-mortar retailing amid signs of a permanent shift towards online shopping during the Covid-19 crisis.

Its monthly retail sales monitor showed annual sales growth of 6.4% in July, well down on the three-month average of 14.7%.

Helen Dickinson, the BRC’s chief executive, said: “July continued to see strong sales, although growth has started to slow. The lifting of restrictions did not bring the anticipated in-store boost, with the wet weather leaving consumers reluctant to visit shopping destinations.”

Dickinson added that online sales remained strong, with the BRC figures showing a digital penetration rate of just under 50% for non-food items, up from 30% two years ago.

“Many shops and local communities have been battered by the pandemic, with many high streets in need of further investment,” the BRC chief executive said.

“Unfortunately, the current broken business...

David Cameron made about $10m (£7m) from Greensill Capital before the finance firm he lobbied on behalf of collapsed, according to the BBC.

BBC Panorama said it had obtained documents showing the former prime minister received the sum partly from cashing in shares he held in the company in 2019, in addition to an annual salary of $1m (£720,000).

According to the documents, Cameron was going to be paid $4,569,851.60 (about £3.3m) after tax for a tranche of his Greensill shares. His spokesperson told the BBC that Cameron’s remuneration was a private matter and added: “He acted in good faith at all times and there was no wrongdoing in any of the actions he took.”

It comes after Cameron was cleared of breaking lobbying rules in a government-commissioned report authored by Nigel Boardman and published last month.

The former prime minister was revealed to have directly lobbied senior Whitehall officials and the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, asking for...

The billionaire boss of South Korea’s Samsung empire will be freed from jail on Friday after serving part of a 30-month sentence for bribing former South Korea president Park Geun-hye. Lee Jae-yong, Samsung’s vice-chairman and de facto leader, will be released on 13 August, the country’s justice minister announced in a live TV briefing.

Lee was caught up in a huge corruption scandal that brought down the government Park in 2016. Park was sentenced to 20 years in prison and fined 18bn won (£12m).

Lee, 53, has served 18 months of a revised 30-month sentence. He initially served one year of a five-year sentence from August 2017, which was later suspended. That court decision was then overturned and while the sentence was shortened, he was sent back to jail in January this year.

“The decision to grant [the] Samsung Electronics vice-chairman … parole was the result of a comprehensive review of various factors such as public sentiment and good behaviour...