Business

Diageo, the struggling owner of Guinness and Johnnie Walker whisky, is facing an investor backlash next month over nearly £8.5m in stock awards handed to the frontrunner to become its next chief executive. Sky News has learnt that investors in Diageo are being urged to vote against its pay report at its annual meeting in…

Britain’s hopes of becoming a critical minerals superpower have been dealt a severe blow after one of its leading companies abandoned its plans to build a rare earths refinery near Hull. Pensana had pledged to build a £250m refinery on the banks of the Humber, to process rare earths that would have then been used…

The Government has vowed to pursue a company linked to Baroness Michelle Mone for millions of pounds paid for defective PPE at the height of the COVID pandemic after a High Court deadline passed without repayment. Earlier this month, the High Court ruled that PPE Medpro, a company founded by Baroness Mone’s husband Doug Barrowman…

The chancellor is weighing plans to hand hundreds of millions of pounds in tax incentives to small businesses in next month’s budget as she seeks ways to pitch the government as pro-enterprise to Britain’s private sector. Sky News has learnt that officials have drawn up proposals to lift the cap on a scheme called Enterprise…

Price rises in the UK are to be the highest among the G7 club of industrialised nations, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Inflation will be the highest among the club both this year and next, the world’s lender of last resort said in its World Economic Outlook. As a result, the body’s chief…

Six months ago the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that the world economy was heading for a serious slowdown, in the face of Donald Trump’s tariffs. It slashed its forecasts for economic growth both in the US and predicted that global economic growth would slow to 2.8% this year. Today the Fund has resurfaced with…

The jobs market continued to slow, with 9,000 fewer vacancies in the three months to September, official figures show. It is the 39th consecutive period where vacancy numbers have dropped. Having fewer job openings can mean it is harder to find work. Money blog: Big retirement age surprise awaits 14% of Britons There was also…

Tens of thousands of Vodafone users are reporting problems with their internet The outages began on Monday afternoon, according to the monitoring website DownDetector, which reported more than 130,000 issues with Vodafone connections. A spokeswoman for the company said: “We are aware of a major issue on our network currently affecting broadband, 4G and 5G…

The founder of Argentex Group, the foreign exchange group which collapsed this year amid market turmoil triggered by President Trump’s tariffs regime, has secured backing from Australia’s most powerful financial group for his latest venture. Sky News has learnt that Macquarie’s Commodities and Global Markets group has taken a minority stake in Tenora, an FX…

Former PM Rishi Sunak has been hired by tech giant Microsoft. The ex-Tory leader, who remains an MP in parliament, has joined the Seattle-based tech firm as a paid part-time senior adviser and will give the company “high-level strategic perspectives on macro-economic and geopolitical trends” as well as how these “intersect with innovation, regulation and…