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Reports of possible furlough fraud have doubled since October to more than 26,000, says Jill Treanor in The Times. The scheme, which has cost taxpayers £57bn since it launched a year ago, has protected around 11.4m jobs. There have also been 24,000 reports of potential misuse of the £46bn “bounce back” loan scheme. A Singaporean blogger was ordered to pay S$133,000 (£71,900) in defamation damages to prime minister Lee Hsien Loong for reposting an article from a Malaysian news outlet, linking the prime minister to the financial scandal at Malaysia’s state fund, on his Facebook page in 2018, reports Reuters. A total of 45 people responded to Leong Sze Hian’s post, which he shared without comment. Lee’s lawyers said the links were “false and baseless”.…

Platinum has gained 63% over the past year but now it could be palladium’s turn to shine. The two “cousin” metals, both part of the platinum-group metals (PGMs) on the periodic table, are used in catalytic converters and other industrial applications. Palladium is trading around $2,670 an ounce, with platinum on $1,177 an ounce. Analysts at Citi think palladium could hit $3,000 by the third quarter of this year, says Jack Denton in Barron’s. A surge in catalytic-converter demand as many countries tighten emissions standards should lead to a sizeable global deficit in the metal this year and next. Russian producer Nornickel says problems at two of its Siberian mines will mean 15% to 20% lower production of PGMs than planned this year. Russia is the world’s largest producer of…

Global markets bottomed in the second half of March last year as the pandemic took hold but have roared back over the past 12 months. The MSCI Emerging Markets index has subsequently soared by 86%, surpassing its previous 2007 all-time high of 1,265 in the process. Yet the index has come off the boil since mid-February and recently lost all of its gains so far this year, says Bloomberg. A stronger US dollar and rising bond yields mean investors are feeling less inclined to chase higher returns in risky sectors such as emerging markets, preferring to stick with “safer” US Treasuries. The economic recovery in emerging economies may also lag behind the developed world’s thanks to a slower vaccine rollout.…

Romania’s UiPath is set to become the biggest new business-software listing since Snowflake’s “blockbuster” initial public offering (IPO) last September, says Tim Bradshaw in the Financial Times. The firm revealed its plans to float in New York last week, just two months after raising $750m in a funding round that valued it at $35bn. UiPath claims it can eliminate the need for employees to carry out “low-value, manual tasks” thanks to artificial intelligence that automates “routine and repetitive business processes” from extracting data to filling in forms. “The IPO will provide the biggest new test of investors’ appetite for fast-growing but loss-making software companies.”…

British online car retailer Cazoo will make its stockmarket debut in New York after it agreed to merge with special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Ajax I in a deal that values the company at $7bn, says Kalyeena Makortoff in The Guardian. The deal is a “blow” to the City and the London Stock Exchange, which reportedly “lobbied for the car retailer to list in its home market”. This also represents another victory for SPACs, which offer a “cheaper, quicker way for a private company to join a stockmarket”. The agreement will provide Cazoo, known as the “Amazon of used cars” with up to $1.6bn in funding, to “fuel its growth and expand its operations across Europe”. The deal is particularly good news for the Daily Mail and General Trust, says The…

Export controls may be imposed. Supplies are being held up at factories. Police in Italy are carrying out raids, looking for any evidence of stock being withheld or sent abroad. The grim farce of the European Union’s coronavirus vaccine crisis has taken twist after twist. Supplies will soon pick up: so much has been ordered that the developed world at least will be awash with vaccines. The continent will finally be able to get on with inoculating its citizens by summer. But this will not end the long-term consequences of this crisis. They will run and run. A catastrophe from the start The EU’s vaccination campaign has been a catastrophe. The European Commission hijacked procurement, bought the wrong vaccines, in the wrong quantities, put itself at the back of the…

Late last week, stockmarkets were rattled as the share prices of a handful of big-name tech and communications stocks – including Chinese tech giant Baidu and US media group ViacomCBS – plunged, as huge blocks of their shares were sold into the market. It turned out that a family office called Archegos Capital Management, run by former hedge-fund manager Bill Hwang, had run into trouble in the wake of a“margin call” (see below) from its lenders, triggering the sale of more than $20bn-worth of shares. So what happened, and is it anything that you need to worry about? “Past fund blow-ups have occurred closer to tops than bottoms” Archegos’s problems appear to have been triggered by ViacomCBS specifically. Between the start of the year and 22 March, shares in the…

Go online to educate investors Editorial Financial Times It might seem surprising that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has an Instagram account, but “needs must” when four out of ten young people don’t “fully appreciate” that they can lose money on high-risk investments, says the Financial Times. The pandemic has led to an “explosion” in retail investing. People may have received government handouts that they want to trade, jobs are scarce, “interest rates puny and house prices out of reach. Making a slow buck no longer makes sense”. Add in a global equity rally, shrinking trading fees and a“proliferation of new trading apps” and that explosion becomes understandable. “Fledgling traders are driving the rise, and are more likely to be drawn to high-risk investments.” Sadly, retail investors are also more…

aei.org Last month marked the 245th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It’s a shame Joe Biden doesn’t appear to have got round to reading it, says Mark Jamison. In his first 100 days as US president, he has “demonstrated his preference for controlling other people’s money over letting them build future wealth”. Growing up on my parents’ farm in Kansas, I had already seen by experience the truth of the analysis Ilater read in Smith’s books. Far-off bureaucrats and politicians rarely make decisions that are helpful to business. Successful businesses focus on consumers’ needs, don’t waste money, and make both owners and employers successful. Future wealth depends on investment decisions being made by people with skin in…

The 2020-2021 tax year will end at midnight on 5 April. You have until then to make the most of the allowances designed to help you reduce how much tax you pay. Make the most of all of them and you can shield thousands of pounds from the taxman every year. Every tax year adults can put up to £20,000 in an individual savings account (Isa). This money can then grow tax-free forever – or until you withdraw it. But you must deposit your cash into an Isa before midnight on 5 April otherwise this year’s allowance is gone, and you are eating into your 2021-2022 allowance instead. If you are looking for a last-minute home for your allowance the simplest option is to put it in an instant-access cash…

End-of-financial year planning for small businesses can be difficult – not least because the date of the end of their year may vary. But with 5 April, the last day of the 2020-2021 tax year, almost here, business owners need to be on top of their affairs. The 5 April date has particular significance for personal taxation. For many small business owners, the key consideration is often dividend payments; each tax year, you can take £2,000 worth of dividends from your business with no tax liability, but unused portions of this allowance cannot be carried over to the next tax year. So, if you can use the allowance, it makes sense to do so. Above £2,000, basic-rate taxpayers pay 7.5% tax on their dividends, higher-rate taxpayers 32.5% and additional-rate taxpayers…

The world is undergoing rapid change amid the degradation of the natural environment and the looming breakdown of the global climate system. There is therefore a worldwide pan-industrial effort to use resources with much greater efficiency. To exploit this secular theme, we identify companies that either deliver or benefit from the efficient use of resources. We have strict criteria covering both quality and value. We like to own firms with enduring assets that generate predictable longterm cash flows. They must benefit from high barriers to entry (so it is difficult for potential rivals to gain a foothold in the market) and trade at a reasonable valuation. This approach has served us well: the Menhaden investment trust’s net asset value (NAV) has risen by an annual 11% in the past five…

The World Turned Upside Down: America, China and the Struggle for Global Leadership Clyde Prestowitz Yale University Press (£23) “Prestowitz argues that America’s own emergence as an economic superpower owes much to rejecting free trade” The Covid-19 pandemic, as well as China’s behaviour in Hong Kong and towards the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, has caused governments across the world to reassess their attitude toward Beijing. In The World Turned Upside Down, veteran US trade negotiator and Asia expert Clyde Prestowitz says that such a rethink is long overdue. Not only has US foreign policy over the last thirty years been based on naïve assumptions, but it has also been seriously counterproductive. According to Prestowitz, things began to go wrong under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton in the 1990s, when…

• “Greed is good!” That was the mantra of Michael Douglas’s horrible character, Gordon Gekko (pictured), in the hit film, Wall Street, says Rod Liddle in The Sun. That movie came out towards the end of the 1980s, adecade of unrelenting greed, when we were “sick to the back teeth of City boys making millions by moving money around”. Gordon Gekko, “with his slicked-back hair, expensive shirts and ludicrous braces, summed up everything that was wrong with that culture”. Last week, Boris Johnson echoed this villain in lauding capitalism’s role in the successful development of a vaccine. The prime minister later regretted it, but – whisper it – he, like Gekko, had a point. Corporations are out to make “vast amounts of money. Without that incentive, many medicines wouldn’t get…

Chewing gum manufacturers face paying higher taxes unless they agree to cover the costs of cleaning up what Boris Johnson has described as “a monstrous acne of sticky grey blotches” from Britain’s streets, says Tim Shipman in The Times. The proposed chewing gum tax is part of the prime minister’s push to “make Britain’s high streets more attractive”, as part of the post-pandemic “build back better” plan. The Local Government Association and the Clean Up Britain campaign both back the idea, while Johnson was a “vocal supporter” of such measures as mayor of London. The government now seems likely to “justify a crackdown on environmental grounds”, as chewing gum contains plastic. Apparently at any given time there can be as many as 300,000 pieces of gum on Oxford Street in…

No matter how bad your week was, at least you didn’t halt “global trade during a pandemic by parallel parking [a] 50,000-ton cargo ship in a tiny canal”, says Twitter user Oliver Fletcher. The grounding of the Ever Given container ship halted traffic on the Suez Canal for almost a week before the vessel was finally freed on Monday. The blockage resulted in vast maritime tailbacks as hundreds of container ships waited to pass between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, disrupting an estimated £7bn of trade in goods every day, according to shipping data from Lloyd’s List. Shipping line Maersk warned that knock-on congestion at ports could potentially take “months” to clear. A crucial chokepoint The Suez Canal carries about 12% of world trade. It reduces shipping times between…

“The legal case for suing Hargreaves Lansdown for its role in the Woodford affair seems flimsy... Hargreaves Lansdown’s sin was to keep [Woodford’s] fund on its best-buy list while its performance collapsed [but] it did not offer financial advice and did not take a commission... in defending its reputation Hargreaves faces a dilemma: does it stand up for customers or does it honour the fund manager code of silence? ... To prove... it was a victim too, Hargreaves would have to throw Woodford and Link, the company that ran his fund, under a bus. This would break the first rule of the fund management club: you never talk about the fund management club... I fear that [investors’] anger may be wasted if they are hoping to win compensation from Hargreaves…

Three to buy Kingfisher Mail on Sunday B&Q and Screwfixowner Kingfisher had an “extraordinary” 2020. The DIY group has benefited from “our desire to make the same four walls look nicer”. But the firm owes its success to more than the lockdown boom: CEO Thierry Garnier’s five-year plan has focused on improving performance in France, a key market, cutting some costs and investing in its digital presence. Turnover for the year to 31 January 2021 was up by 7.2% to £12.3bn and pre-tax profits grew from £103m in 2019 to £756m in 2020. The firm’s cash pile is “reassuring on the dividend front”, and its long- term strategy “seems to be paying off”. 325p Ford Shares Ford’s investments in electric and autonomous vehicles are yielding positive results. As activity recovers…

• AstraZeneca’s CEO Pascal Soriot has accelerated the company’s development of “novel drugs” over the last seven years to fight off a takeover bid from Pfizer, says Lex in the Financial Times. Another success is the partnership with Oxford University to make a Covid-19 vaccine. But his “bullish forecasts” about production have generated “distrust” in the EU after AstraZeneca had to scale back promised deliveries to the bloc dramatically. The group is also “unlikely” to hit the sales target of $45bn by 2023 it set in 2014. Soriot must curb his “tendency to overpromise”. • Cineworld has reported a “blockbuster” $3bn pre-tax loss for 2020 and has warned that it could go bust within a year, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. Covid-19 has not only “turbo-charged the use…

US president Joe Biden’s efforts to bring Iran back into the 2015 deal to restrain its nuclear ambitions, scrapped by Donald Trump, have been frustrated by a 25-year co-operation agreement between Iran and China, say Hannah Lucinda Smith and Didi Tang in The Times. The deal, signed in Tehran last weekend, will see China raise investment in Iran’s infrastructure and energy sectors in return for cheap oil, bringing Iran into China’s “Belt and Road” project. The two countries had already built ties – China imports around 306,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day. The news alarmed some in the West, but it is probably not a big game-changer, says Najmeh Bozorgmehr in the Financial Times. China has been Iran’s most important commercial partner for a decade and Iran is sceptical…

• Cazoo, the online used-car dealer founded by British entrepreneur Alex Chesterman (pictured) 18 months ago, is to go public in a deal with a US-listed special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC), says The Daily Telegraph. The deal will value the firm at an estimated £5bn, with Chesterman – who also founded Lovefilm and Zoopla – holding about 25%, worth £1.25bn. Other shareholders include the Daily Mail’s parent firm, which owns a 20% stake. • David Schwimmer, chief executive of the London Stock Exchange, is getting a 25% pay rise of £200,000, taking his base pay to £1m. The increase is being justified by the completion of the group’s £20bn takeover of data firm Refinitiv in January, which makes the timing “unfortunate”, says The Times. “Shares in LSE Group have slumped by…

When investors buy shares or other financial assets, they might borrow money with the aim of boosting their returns. This is known as “leverage” or “gearing”, because using borrowed money amplifies movements in the underlying asset price, making both gains and losses far greater. You can view it as being similar to buying property with a mortgage. If you put down a 20% deposit on a £100,000 house, and the price rises by 10%, you’ve made £10,000, or a 50% return on your £20,000 deposit. If instead you had only put down a 10% deposit, you’d have made 100% – doubling your original £10,000. When an investor borrows to bet on markets rather than houses, they also put down a deposit. In this case, it’s known as “margin”. “Margin” is…

“Suddenly, you’ve got a few quid in your pocket and you go into the pub and you think: do I buy everybody a drink, or will I be perceived as a flash b*st*rd, and if I don’t buy anybody a drink, am I a tight b*st*rd? How do I navigate this?” 1990s pop star Marti Pellow (pictured), former lead singer of Wet Wet Wet, on becoming famous, quoted in The Guardian “If you can do your job from anywhere, someone anywhere can do your job. Lesser-skilled workers in Western countries have been through this already, when jobs in factories, call centres and back offices were offshored. Parisian graphic designers and New York bankers may be about to find out what that feels like.” Financial Times columnist Simon Kuper on the…

bbc.com/worklife Firms that have been forced into remote-working are now facing a difficult decision, says Peter Yeung. Should they let workers stay at home, bring them back to the office, or something inbetween? Some bosses, particularly in the finance industry, are itching to get back. Goldman Sachs’s CEO David Solomon says that remote working is “an abberation… we are going to correct as quickly as possible”. Barclays’ CEO Jess Staley has voiced similar sentiments. Although the move to remote working has pushed digitalisation and created more efficient ways of working, Solomon fears the impact on collaboration and on the firm’s 3,000 new starters. “I do think for a business like ours, which is an innovative, collaborative apprenticeship culture, this is not ideal for us,” he says. Others in finance agree.…

■ The pandemic has resulted in a big increase in people accessing their pension savings. The problem is many of them don’t realise they are triggering a “tax trap”, says Josephine Cumbo in the Financial Times. Every week in 2020 5,000 over-55s dipped into their pensions. What many don’t grasp is that by doing so they “triggered a reduction in their annual allowance – the amount they can pay into a pension while still getting tax relief – from £40,000 to £4,000”. This can cause huge problems for anyone who hadn’t finished building up their pension. The vast reduction in allowance means those who plan to continue paying into their pension could have to give up pension contributions from their employer to keep inside the limit, Nathan Long from Hargreaves…

• Sky, one of the UK’s biggest broadband providers, has launched a new service aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a move that could trigger further competition in the sector. Sky’s Connect service is available over 12, 24 and 36-month contracts; it is seeking to wrestle market share from incumbents, including Vodafone and BT. Both these companies have also launched new deals for SMEs in recent months, with internet connectivity now regarded as a potential source of competitive advantage by many small businesses. In practice, however, the cheapest deal for SMEs will depend on their individual circumstances, including how and when they use broadband. Price-comparison sites can help small businesses identify the cheapest deal. • Accountants are giving SMEs a final warning to get on top of the…

Naked Wines (Aim: WINE) hosts an online platform that connects wine drinkers with independent winemakers around the world. Customers pay a fixed fee each month. Last year the company had 750,000 customers in the US, UK and Australia. The firm has upgraded its sales forecast for the 12 months to the end of March 2021 after a “stellar” first half of the year saw revenue soar by 80% to £157m, says Giulia Bottaro on Proactive Investors. People trapped at home in lockdowns bought more wine. The stock has jumped by 182% over the last 12 months.…

For much of his career, Alistair Greig worked as a successful financial adviser, operating out of the remote Scottish village of Cairnbulg. In 2006, he left the company he worked for, Park Row Associates, and struck out on his own, setting up Midas Financial Solutions, which had its head office in Aberdeen. Midas offered wealth-management services, giving advice on a wide variety of financial products, including pensions, mortgages and savings. Later, in 2013, Greig also set up a classic-car company, AJZ Motors, in Boston, Lincolnshire. What was the scam? Much of Midas’s work was legitimate, but Greig used it to identify clients who had large amounts of money on their hands, for example from selling their house. Greig and his advisers (who were not aware of the fraud) would then…

Value(s) Building a Better World for All Mark Carney William Collins, £30 As governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008-2013 and then of the Bank of England from 2013-2020, Mark Carney was at the “heart of the economic establishment”, says Diane Coyle in the Financial Times. Yet parts of his latest book read as if they’ve been written by someone “more likely to have been marching on the streets during the Occupy movement” than running the rich world’s central banks. The work is partly a history of economic thought, partly an appraisal of the efforts of policymakers to tackle the 2008/2009 financial crisis. It concludes by calling for radical changes to the global financial system and corporate governance, and for action to tackle climate change and speed the post-virus…

The Germans have marvellous words for things. Katastrophenhausse, for example. Even without knowing the language, you know you’re not going to like it. Economist Ludwig von Mises coined the term, and it is usually translated as a “crack-up boom”. It’s what happens when you inflate the money supply. There are two parts to it – the boom, and then the crack-up. Lottery winners often go through a similar phenomenon. First, they get a lot of money. Then, they lose their wives, their jobs, their friends – and finally, their money, too. A flood of free money loosens the moorings of a society. Soon it is floating high above the ground in a kind of “miracle fog”, where everything seems possible – even replacing real jobs and real earnings with fake…

£70,275 The price of a limited edition 1kg Britannia gold proof coin with a face value of £1,000 and the first to depict Britannia as a woman of colour. Artist P.J. Lynch created the design for the Royal Mint, “reflecting the diversity of Britain today”. £50,000 How much Adar Poonawalla, chief executive officer at the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, has agreed to pay in weekly rent for a mansion in Mayfair, a record for the exclusive London neighbourhood, says Bloomberg. €5,000 The price of a bottle of 2000 vintage Pétrus that, along with 11 other bottles, spent ayear on the International Space Station. The mission was arranged by two French entrepreneurs who founded the company Space Cargo Unlimited, who concluded the wine had improved. £17.5bn…

Author George R. R. Martin (pictured) signed a five-year, eight-figure deal with broadcaster HBO this week, say James Hibberd and Lesley Goldberg on The Hollywood Reporter. Martin struck a deal to license his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novels in 2007. The filmed adaptation – Game of Thrones – proved to be HBO’s biggest ever hit, and several prequels are in the works, even though Martin is yet to finish the original series of novels. The world’s largest painting was sold for £45m this week, all of which is going to global children’s charities, says the BBC. British artist Sacha Jafri spent eight months painting the 1,600 sq m artwork and planned to sell it in 70 parts, but French businessman Andre Abdoune bought the entire work.…

Canada’s Lundin Gold, which operates the Fruta del Norte mine in southeast Ecuador, is well worth a look, says Wirtschaftswoche. Covid-19 closed the mine for four months last year shortly after operations began, but the group managed to meet its 2020 targets, producing positive cashflow. The mine yielded 202,000 ounces at a cost of around $773 an ounce – 30% lower than the sector average. There are around 5.4 million ounces of gold in the region altogether, and it also bodes well that it is very high-grade, yielding ten grammes of gold per tonne of stone. Downward pressure on the gold price is now easing – if it turns around, cheap producers such as Lundin should benefit most.…

Shares in investment banks Credit Suisse and Nomura sank by more than 10% this week after they warned of “substantial losses” , says Quentin Webb in The Wall Street Journal. Credit Suisse says its loss could be “highly significant and material” to its first-quarter results, while Nomura reckons it could lose up to $2bn (it made $2.82bn between April and December 2020). The losses stem from “fire sale of stocks” involving around $30bn of assets that occurred after Archegos Capital Management, a family investment vehicle managed by Bill Hwang, failed to meet a margin call (see page 18). The banks, which lent the fund money to bet on stocks, had to sell off the stricken fund’s losing positions. Both banks should have been more alert to the risks, say Antony…

The “best Punch and Judy show in town” seems set to continue with the “glad tidings” of Alex Salmond’s new political party, Alba, says Julie Burchill in The Daily Telegraph. On Monday Scottish first minster Nicola Sturgeon took a “thinly veiled swipe” at her new election rival, saying she would “not indulge those who put ‘self-interest’ above country”, says Mure Dickie in the Financial Times. The launch of Alba has “seriously complicated” the SNP’s campaign strategy ahead of 6 May elections that Sturgeon hopes will “provide a push for a second referendum on leaving the UK”. It is possible that Alba could deny the SNP a majority at Holyrood, easing pressure on Boris Johnson to agree to another referendum. However, polling expert Professor Sir John Curtice says that Salmond has…

Alex Salmond’s new political party (see page 8) has lengthened the odds on the Scottish National Party getting an outright majority in the May elections. Indeed, with £3,894 matched on Smarkets, it is now at 2.02, an implied probability of less than half, down from a peak of more than 83% in late February. Still, with the SNP recovering a bit in the polls, it still looks like it’s securing close to a majority so I don’t see value in betting on it getting a majority or not getting one. One market where there is some value is on the London mayoral election. At the start of this year, I recommended that you bet on Sadiq Khan (pictured) to be re-elected. With £4.1m matched on Smarkets, punters think this is…

Building society bosses try to look virtuous, says Jeff Prestridge in The Mail on Sunday. But their six-figure bonuses, “at a time when the pandemic has raged” and savers “have experienced savage cuts to the income they receive on their deposits” seem “egregious and terribly unmutual”. Yorkshire Building Society has announced an additional £1m investment in the communities it serves – a “commendable” sum that is belittled by the combined £528,000 bonuses paid to CEO Mike Regnier and two executives. Coventry boss Steve Hughes only joined the society shortly after the pandemic began in March. Yet he received a full year’s executive bonus of £140,000, an “annual success” bonus of £23,000 and £160,000 for resigning from rival Principality. Meanwhile, Richard Fearon, who runs Leeds, also enjoyed a £190,000 bonus, taking…

At least some of the $1,400 cheques being sent to millions of Americans this month are likely to end up in the stockmarket, as the stimulus encourages more private investors to start trading, reckons Kenneth Griffin, the founder of huge hedge-fund group Citadel, whose flagship fund has made an average annual gain of 19% over the past 30 years. Griffin welcomes the new wave of private investors, seeing it as “a way for more Americans to benefit from the US stockmarket”, reports Robin Wigglesworth in the Financial Times. However, the increasing influence of investors who trade shares such as video-game chain GameStop on the back of “memes” and social-media campaigns rather than fundamentals, will have a lasting impact on markets, he warns. “Certain stocks are now almost exclusively owned by…

cato.org/blog Laws that prevent firms raising prices in emergencies are counter-productive, says Ryan Bourne – and especially so in emergencies that are long term, such as that sparked by Covid-19. If prices are prevented from rising when demand soars, shortages of goods will result. If prices were instead allowed to rise, that would be an incentive for firms to increase supply. There might be other unintended consequences of anti-price-gouging laws. One examined in a new paper by Rik Chakraborti and Gavin Roberts is that they might help spread the virus. If shelves are empty as a result of price controls, consumers will go on a search for what they are looking for. In a pandemic, this might mean more social contact, risking a greater spread of the virus and leading…

“Second-home owners could see their tax bills rocket” warns Melissa Lawford in The Daily Telegraph. HMRC wants to stop people falsely classifying their property as a holiday let. Under current rules you can class a property as a holiday let for tax purposes if you intend to make it available to rent for at least 140 days in the coming year. Your property thereby becomes liable for business rates rather than council tax. “A total of 60,000 properties are registered this way,” says David Byers in The Times. “However, HMRC says that [96% of them] have been declared as having a rateable value of £12,000 or less, which means they are also exempt from business rates.” The exemption means that most second-home owners pay no council tax or business rates…

Some 10,000 businesses entitled to a payout from their insurer for a Covid-19 business-interruption claim have already received some cash, new data from regulators reveals. But more than half of those with valid claims have yet to see their cases settled. The figures, released by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the City regulator, have angered some small business groups. They point out that insurers were told to settle claims promptly in January’s Supreme Court hearing held to determine whether business-interruption policies covered losses related to Covid-19. The FCA is taking an increasingly aggressive approach to the issue, publishing data for individual insurers on the progress they have made so far. It says Hiscox currently has the highest number of cases outstanding. MS Amlin and Axa also have many claims where…

Shares in gold miner Centamin (LSE: CEY) have struggled recently despite record revenue for 2020 due to rising gold prices, says Yoosof Farah in Shares. Pre-tax profit at grew by 82% to $315m, but investors have been rattled by the group’s decreasing gold production. Output was down by 6% in 2020: the firm “failed to fully capitalise on the gold rally” owing to operational problems at its only producing mine. A recent fall in the gold price and a safety problem at a mine in the fourth quarter of 2020 have also rattled the market. The stock has slipped by a fifth in a year.…

The first time I met Johan Reyneke, nearly 20 years ago, his beaming smile, firm handshake and scintillating wines marked him as someone at peace with his confident, ethical and holistic stance on both farming his land and making his beautiful wines. Johan embodies the spirit of biodynamic farming like no one else I have met. As he wisely noted, “Some people dismiss it as old-fashioned nostalgia, but we like to think of it asancient wisdom. And we embrace it as much as we can. Not just because it’s better for the earth, but because it makes for better wine.” Johan’s entire portfolio isa joy to behold and somewhere in the middle of the pack sits this extraordinary Cornerstone, which is not only a stunning “claret-shaped” red, but also a…