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King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands could lose subsidies of €4.7m over five years if he refuses to keep the 16,000-acre Het Loo crown estate open to the public all year round, says The Times. The king closes the estate – which is also a nature reserve – from 15 September to 25 December “for reasons of his ‘private life’” – widely seen asshorthand for hunting. The government wants for it to remain open at least 358 days a year between sunrise and sunset. A £3m project that saw the Scottish Prison Service issue more than 7,000 inmates with mobile phones when visits were restricted over lockdown has backfired, says ITV News. The “supposedly tamper-proof” phones were hacked by inmates who used them to arrange drug deals and criminal activity. The…

Uranium prices have hit an eight-year high. The nuclear fuel was trading above $44 a pound this week for the first time since May 2013. The launch of a new investment trust by Canadian asset manager Sprott has spurred renewed interest in the commodity. Shares in uranium-linked stocks, including UK-listed Yellow Cake and Aura Energy, have surged, says Will Horner in The Wall Street Journal. Investors are piling in. On WallStreetBets, the Reddit internet forum known for catalysing the surge in GameStop shares earlier this year, Canadian uranium business Cameco is “the third-most-discussed company”. The buying craze has become detached from fundamentals, says Jinjoo Lee in the same paper. Don’t expect to jump in and make a quick buck. Still, on a longer-term view there are reasons to be bullish.…

Eurowag, the Czech digital-payments provider, is planning to float in London, bolstering the city’s attempt to remain the key market for European initial public offerings (IPOs), says Bloomberg. Eurowag, which processes toll and fuel payments for lorries around Europe, is looking to sell €200m of new shares to fund its growth and achieve a valuation of around €2bn. It expects to be included in the FTSE indices. Eastern European firms have raised $5.7bn in IPOs on the continent’s western markets this year, above the $4bn mustered by domestic listings. The company reckons London is “the best place” to find long-term, tech-savvy investors.…

A US judge has dealt a blow to one of Apple’s “most lucrative businesses”, says Simon Duke in The Times. Epic, the developer of the hit videogame Fornite, had accused Apple of “acting as a monopoly” by “forcing users to pay for in-app purchases [in the Epic app] through the iPhone maker’s payment system” and levying a fee of up to 30% of the sale. Google and Apple dominate the smartphone-app market, and their insistence that in-app purchases be paid for through their own billing systems, rather than alternatives such as PayPal, has long irritated other companies. The court agreed that Apple had engaged in anticompetitive conduct. This implies that in future Apple “cannot prevent developers from providing buttons or links in their apps that direct customers to pay in…

Frankfurt has attracted only a handful of bankers over the last four years. If any firms have relocated to Paris, then they are keeping it a secret. Despite all the money and political capital Germany and France poured into making sure London was no longer Europe’s financial capital in the wake of our departure from the European Union, so far it has had very little impact. Some share trading has shifted, mostly to Amsterdam, and so have some deposits, but that is just numbers stored on a server. Most of the real work is being done in London. The City may well feel it is time to relax. But hold on. Perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. London has plenty of competition in Europe – it is just…

Active fund managers come in for a lot of criticism (not least from us). Investors pay them to try to outperform the market. But research shows that most of the time they fail to do that. As a result, passive funds –which cost less and simply track the market, which means that on average, they beat active rivals – have taken off in popularity. However, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that active managers are actually pretty good at one half of their jobs. In Selling Fast and Buying Slow, researchers Klakow Akepanidtaworn, Rick Di Mascio, Alex Imas and Lawrence Schmidt analysed a database of trades made by fund managers across 783 different portfolios, from 2000 to 2016. They found that the managers were good…

How history shaped our health taxes Paul Johnson The Times “History casts a long shadow,” says Paul Johnson. Just as the modern A1 largely follows the route of the old Roman road, so the current social care “mess” can be traced back to the National Assistance Act of 1946, the legislation that established the NHS and claimed to abolish the “infamously stringent” poor law (which put the poor in workhouses). However, it “didn’t quite”, since, unlike the NHS, social care remains needs and means-tested. As for the NHS, it exists in its current form because it was originally paid for by general taxation, despite evidence that other European systems, paid for through a system of social insurance, work “just as well, if not better”. Taxes also have their histories. National…

With inflation front and centre in the financial news, many are asking whether we might see a return to the 1970s. Shortages, double-digit inflation, stagnation – it is certainly not a nice prospect. So it is tempting to take comfort in the view that at first glance at least, the inflation we are currently experiencing looks likely to be transient, meaning we need not worry too much about runaway inflation. This is certainly the judgement of the central banks, and one their representatives have repeated on many occasions. But it is also the conclusion that my former colleague, James Montier, and I came to from our recent study of the “reopening” of the British economy after World War II. What we saw then were sharp, but one-off price rises in…

Elliott Management, “one of the world’s most feared activist investors”, is pushing UK healthcare company Clinigen to explore a radical break-up, says Sky News. Elliott announced last week it owned over 5% of Clinigen, sending the share price up 7.5%. Clinigen and Elliott held talks over the summer about the possibility of the firm disposing of its pharmaceutical services division and Elliott is expected to keep pressing for a sale, including a potential “hostile” campaign to force the board to act, sources told Sky. Clinigen issued a profit warning in June due to delays on clinical trials and disruption to oncology treatments. Its shares “have trod water” over the last year, despite rivals such as UDG Healthcare having attracted bids from private equity.…

The government’s announcement of new tax charges to pay for the cost of social care could be another nail in the coffin for the practice of self-employed people and small-business owners paying themselves through dividends rather than a salary. While the dividend option has long been the preferred route for many self-employed workers, its advantages have been steadily eroded in recent years. “Many small-business owners received little state aid in the crisis” At first sight, dividend tax rates still look advantageous. From next year, basic-, higher-and additional-rate taxpayers will pay 8.75%, 33.75% and 39.35% respectively on dividends they pay themselves from their businesses, a 1.25% increase compared with today. This simply matches the 1.25% increase in national-insurance contributions for taxpayers who receive a salary. Bear in mind, however, that your…

I have a simple investment philosophy: buy good businesses run by competent and honest people, and buy them at a price that leaves enough of a margin of safety for mistakes or bad luck. I try to buy companies that other people are not looking at. That is where I find bargains and an adequate margin of safety, but it also tends to lead me away from big stocks. As a result, Fidelity Asian Values has most of its capital deployed in small companies (those with a market capitalisation of up to £5bn); stocks above that threshold only make up about 15% of the trust’s holdings as at the end of July 2021. The trust also has avalue bias given my focus on companies that are mispriced, either because they…

£38.50, reduced to £35.00 by the case, Bon Coeur Fine Wines 01325 776446, bcfw.co.uk This is the fourth wine that I have written up from the La Rioja Alta wine company in the 783 times I have put pen to paper on this page. That’s a good percentage of appearances for a single wine company, but this red is not from Rioja. I must admit that I got a little excited as I tasted this masterful Ribera, and then my palate took a step back when I learned that the alcohol percentage is a little over 15% by volume! Hefty, but I can assure you that this lusty fellow is impeccably balanced on the palate. It is one of the most expressive old vine Riberas I have tasted, and given…

Book of the week Shutdown How Covid Shook the World’s Economy Adam Tooze Allen Lane (£25) Zhou Enlai, the former premier of China, is often cited as saying that it was “too early to say” what the impact of the French Revolution would be. In reality, Zhou was probably referring to the student unrest of 1968 a few years earlier, not the events of 1789 – but the quote underlines why it always takes time to understand the implications of dramatic events. So historian Adam Tooze has clearly set himself an ambitious task in analysing the impact of Covid-19 while the disease still rages in almost every country. Shutdown is divided into four sections. The first deals with the first few months of the crisis, from the emergence of the…

Coming up next month, the US will bump its head on the debt ceiling. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, warned yesterday that if Congress doesn’t act, it will be The End of The World As We Have Known It. The Treasury would no longer be able to issue new bonds and the US would default on its existing debt. Interest rates would spike, stocks would crater, retirement accounts would take a beating, the value of the dollar would erode and the financial reputation of the world’s only superpower would be tarnished. Democrats were quick to blame Republicans. “We’re paying the credit card, the Trump credit card,” said Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives. Republicans blame Democrats’ $3.5trn budget. Voters choose sides. And the show goes on. “There…

A politician’s waist size may also be a sign of the amount of corruption in their regime, reckons the winner of this year’s Ig Nobel economics prize. Pavlo Blavatskyy of Montpellier Business School estimated the body mass index of ministers in ex-Soviet republics, finding “those places where officials were most likely to be on the take… were also home to the most portly parliamentarians”, says The Times. The link between girth and sleaze goes back a long way. Nero, one of the most corrupt Roman emperors, was also “one of the more corpulent”. Henry VIII (pictured) “grew more rapacious as his frame became more capacious”. Hermann Goering was “the greediest, in all senses” of Hitler’s inner circle. North Korea’s Kim Jong-un “is a model neither of healthy eating or good…

Chinese property is in a “bubble of epic proportions”, says Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg. On some measures it “overshadows the pre-global financial crisis” boom in US housing valuations. In Shenzhen a flat costs 43.5 times the average annual salary, three times the figure for London. The market “stands comparison with the Japanese real estate bubble of the 1980s”, which inflicted a “lost decade” on the economy after it burst in 1990. Turmoil at Evergrande This week has brought new turmoil at Chinese property developer Evergrande. The group has been struggling to service a $300bn debt pile. Once “the world’s most valuable real-estate group”, today Evergrande is “the world’s most indebted property developer”, says Ian Verrender on abc.net.au. It is trying to sell assets to raise cash, but has warned that…

“Most stocks are duds... research [shows] that around the globe [most] individual common stocks have generated long-run shareholder losses relative to a Treasury-bill benchmark [short-term government debt]. The implication is that the large, long-term equity risk premium delivered by the broad stock market was attributable to outsize gains generated by a relatively few high-performing stocks... [research] demonstrates just how great the uncompensated risk is that investors who buy individual stocks (or a small number of them) accept... Such results help explain why active strategies, which tend to be poorly diversified... lead to underperformance... results... highlight the important role of portfolio diversification, the only free lunch in investing. Unfortunately, most investors fail to use the full buffet available.”…

Three to buy Accenture The Daily Telegraph Accenture’s stock is one of the best ways to profit from “the fourth industrial revolution”, which will see major improvements in productivity thanks to the spread of digital technology. The company has become the leading consultant in this field. Its ability to retain staff, which it does partly by issuing new shares for employees as incentives, has allowed it to step ahead of its key rivals. It generates plenty of cash, which makes it a “relatively low-risk” play on digital technology. $341 Dunelm Mail on Sunday Home-furnishings group Dunelm “has had a good pandemic”. It launched a strong e-commerce operation before lockdown and quickly shifted to a click-and-collect service when shops were forced to close. Dunelm’s out-of-town retail parks allowed for social distancing…

• Shares in French drug company Valneva have “crashed” by nearly half on the news that Britain has cancelled a £1.2bn deal “to provide up to 140 million jabs to the UK”, says Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. The UK accuses Valneva of a “breach of contract”. While the company denies the allegations, Valneva’s vaccine “remains stuck” in Phase III (the last stage of clinical trials) over nine months after the deal was agreed. It’s hard to gauge the reasons for the UK government’s “rug pull”, says Lionel Laurent on Bloomberg. The vaccine was originally touted as a “key plank” of Britain’s vaccine strategy, causing Valneva’s shares to triple. The UK has also “poured millions of pounds” into Valneva’s Scottish factory. While cancellation would be understandable if there was…

After a period of political turmoil that has produced “three premiers in 18 months”, Malaysia’s government and main opposition alliance signed an unprecedented agreement on Monday, say Anisah Shukry and Y-Sing Liau on Bloomberg. The bipartisan “confidence and supply agreement” involves the opposition pledging to support the government on key votes, including the upcoming budget. In turn, the government has pledged to work with the opposition on “plans to fight Covid-19, parliamentary reform [and] transformation in governance”. The deal should be a “game changer”, says Liew Chin Tong in the South China Morning Post. For over a decade, the government has “tried everything” to “eliminate opposition”. The previous prime minister, Muhyiddin Yassin, had “no qualms” about using “state apparatuses” to “persecute political opponents both from within his coalition and from…

Billionaires intrigued by the prospect of living forever have begun investing in rejuvenation companies, says The Sunday Times. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly among the backers of Altos Labs, a Silicon Valley start-up that is looking to understand why we age and how to prevent it. Bezos has shown an interest in “slowing the ticking of the clock” before: in 2016, alongside PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, he contributed to a $116m investment in Unity Biotechnology, astart-up developing “therapeutics to slow, halt or reverse diseases of ageing”. Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner, 59, is also said to be contributing to Altos Labs. On its board is Shinya Yamanaka, aJapanese stem-cell researcher who won a Nobel Prize in 2012 for working out how to reprogramme cells to become more youthful. The men…

• Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo (pictured) returned to Manchester United this month to reclaim the number 7 shirt, 12 years after leaving the club. The 36-year-old striker is being paid around £500,000 a week, and cost the club €15m (£12.9m) in transfer fees to his former club, Juventus. However, that amount was recovered before he had even set foot on the pitch, says the Daily Mirror. The club has sold £187m worth of replica shirts, earning it £13.1m in commission. • Staff at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) will have pay rises reinstated in April 2022, says Financial News. A freeze on those earning over £24,000 meant that just 6% of FCA staff received a pay rise in 2021, compared with 81% in 2020. Median pay at the FCA is £55,000.…

An initial public offering (IPO) represents the first time that a company sells shares in itself to institutional investors (such as pension funds) and often also to individuals (retail investors). This process is also known as “floating” or “going public”. Companies go public for a wide range of reasons. They may want to raise funds for expansion and choose to do so by selling part of the company rather than borrowing the money. Alternatively, the current owners – perhaps the original founders, or a private-equity fund – may wish to “exit” (ie, cash in on their investment). An IPO is underwritten by one or more investment banks, which typically earn large fees from the process. A prospectus with details of the company and the offering is issued to potential buyers.…

“[Only] if you have the capacity for happiness. Feeling sad or depressed on a Caribbean beach is the pretty much the same as being sad or depressed in a London tower block.” Comedian Shazia Mirza (pictured) on whether money can make people happy, quoted in The Sunday Telegraph “I don’t see this government as particularly pro-business. I’m terribly depressed... We stand alone, with a huge debt, outside the EU, which I was passionately pro-leaving. But we’re not taking the advantages up. I don’t see where the deregulation is taking place. You need an entrepreneurial nation, and we’re not going in that direction” Robin Birley, founder of the 5 Hertford Street private members’ club, is among libertarian Tory donors unnerved by our statist Brexit, quoted in The Sunday Times “I have…

What is a poor investor do? History does not paint a pretty picture. During the inflationary years of 1972-1982 real (after-inflation) returns on the S&P 500 were effectively flat. Having your money in the stockmarket could protect it from debasement, but that was all – it could not generate spendable returns. Yet when you compare the stockmarket with bonds, it looks like a positively excellent bet – US equities yielded an average of 1.3% a year during this period versus 0% on corporate bonds, and a dismal loss of 1.8% a year on ten-year Treasuries. If you did take a punt on stocks in an inflationary environment, does history indicate that there might be any way to boost your returns and thus prevent your portfolio from simply treading water? Possibly.…

■ Inflows into exchange traded funds (ETFs) have already surpassed 2020’s record total as enthusiasm for low-cost investment vehicles accelerates, says the Financial Times. Inflows worldwide reached $834.2bn by the end of August, ahead of last year’s total of $762.8bn. The influx of new money combined with rising stockmarkets helped global assets held in ETFs soar to $9.7trn, more than double the $4.8trn that these funds held by the end of 2018. Growth has also been boosted by an “exodus” in the US from actively managed mutual funds, which charge higher fees: active funds have now registered net outflows in 12 of the past 13 years, with cumulative outflows now amounting to $2.8trn since 2008. Intensifying competition from ETFs is leading many large active managers to abandon “long years of…

Many small firms will struggle with the increased cost of national insurance, groups such as the Federation of Small Businesses are warning. From April 2022, all employers will pay employers’ national-insurance contributions at a rate of 15.05%, up from 13.8% today. The 1.25% rise is far more costly than it sounds: it is actually a tax increase of 9.06%. If you’re paying someone the living wage, outside of London, your employer’s national insurance contribution will be £2,359.80; next year, you’ll have to find £2,654.68. Meeting those additional costs will not be straightforward for many small companies still battling their way back from Covid-19. It may prevent them hiring additional members of staff as the economy recovers, or prompt some difficult conversations with employees about future pay increases. From an economic…

Watches of Switzerland (LSE: WOSG) sells luxury watches and jewellery in 150 stores in the UK and the US. Its trading update for the three months to 1 August 2021 showed that sales had doubled to £297.5m year-on-year, and were up by 45.8% from the same period two years ago. Net cash stood at £23m, a marked improvement from net debt of £92m in the first quarter of 2020. Watches accounted for 87% of overall sales during its last financial year as people who usually spend money on travel had spare cash for luxury items. A thriving e-commerce business has also helped. The stock has soared by 238% in a year.…

Walter Watts was born in London in 1817. Through his father, he got a job at the Globe Insurance Company, dealing with the cheques that the firm received. He was responsible for making sure that the amount paid out for fire, insurance claims and dividends was properly reflected in the company passbook. In 1833, he testified as a witness on behalf of the bank in the trial of a man accused and later convicted of forging a £150 cheque. A decade later, he embarked on his own life of crime. What was the scam? The company and its auditors simply accepted Watts’ version of the records without question, rather than comparing the entries in the passbook with the cancelled cheques in the archive. Beginning in August 1844, he began to…

Invention A Life James Dyson Simon & Schuster (£25) “James Dyson was a less than stellar student at the boarding school he attended in Norfolk … where his father was a classics master,” says Henry Petroski in The Wall Street Journal. After leaving school, he studied drawing and painting at art school, then interior design and architecture. It certainly wasn’t an obvious background for a man who latterly made a fortune as the inventor of a “revolutionary vacuum cleaner” and other “novel domestic appliances”. In Invention, his “definitive memoir”, Dyson builds on his previous autobiography (Against the Odds, published in 1997), to tell the story of how it happened and how he turned his “paradigm-shifting” products into the basis for “a family-owned global manufacturing empire”. This book is an “entertaining…

£45 The value of a gift voucher received by Billie-Jean King for winning the Wimbledon singles, double and mixed doubles in 1967 – equivalent to £835 in today’s money. £150m The reported cost of new penthouses in Churchill’s Old War Office in Whitehall, London. Buyers can live in spaces where key decisions were made by Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. Notable figures, such as T.E. Lawrence and Ian Fleming, started their careers in the Grade II listed Whitehall building, which is directly across from Horse Guards Parade. Two-bedroom flats start at £5.8m. $600m The estimated value of an art collection owned by New York real-estate billionaires Harry and Linda Macklowe, which will be auctioned at Sotheby’s as a result of their acrimonious divorce. £8,000 How much it will cost…

The woolly mammoth could be brought back from extinction through a $15m project to create an elephant-mammoth hybrid, says The Guardian. Bioscience firm Colossal plans to take skin cells from Asian elephants and “reprogramme” them into “more versatile stem cells” which carry DNA taken from frozen mammoths found in the Arctic permafrost. If all goes well, researchers hope to have their first set of calves in six years. Emma Raducanu (pictured) became the UK’s first female Grand Slam title winner in 44 years after she won the US Open without dropping a set, taking home a cheque for $2.5m. The 18-year-old is the first player to enter one of the four major tournaments from the qualifying rounds and make it all the way through to become champion.…

California’s Cohu is a leading producer of inspection and testing systems for components used in semiconductors. The automotive industry is its biggest customer, with the division comprising almost a fifth of sales, thanks to the ongoing shift towards electrification and autonomous driving. Industrial automation is another structural tailwind. The group’s client list, which includes Intel and Qualcomm, is healthily diversified. Sales have soared over the past few years and should double to $910m this year. Cohu boasts a return on equity of 19% and a solid balance sheet. It is on a 2022 price/earnings (p/e) ratio of 12, abig discount to rival Teradyne, which is growing at a similar pace.…

EasyJet’s shares have “crashed 15%” after the City took a “dim view” of its plans to tap shareholders for £1.2bn, says Oliver Gill in The Daily Telegraph – far more than the £500m expected. The move comes after last week’s rejection of the “takeover swoop” by rival Wizz Air. Analyst Jarod Castle at UBS has downgraded the company as he believes it faces a “more protracted recovery” from the crisis owing to its “heavy reliance” on the UK market. Even before the latest fall, easyJet’s shares had lagged the likes of Ryanair and Wizz Air, which are well above their pre-pandemic prices. The fact that easyJet’s shares “have been hit harder than most during the Covid-19 crisis”, more than halving in price and dropping out of the FTSE 100, is…

Pressure is mounting on Russia’s opposition ahead of legislative elections on 19 September in what critics have described asthe “least free poll for decades,” says Max Seddon in the Financial Times. The vote is significant because it is the last before Vladimir Putin’s current term as president ends in 2024. With “rocketing food prices and slumping real incomes, the Kremlin is eager to demonstrate strong support for the president”. So the outcome is “in little doubt”. Analysts say that only the four Kremlin-controlled parties already in the Duma (lower house) are likely to win any of the 450 available seats. United Russia – which backs Putin – is expected to retain its two-thirds super majority. The rapid expansion of online voting, which is “completely untransparent” and is likely to lead…

The exact date of Australia’s federal election is in the hands of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, but he needs to call a vote by next May at the latest. With £179,173 matched on Betfair, the ruling coalition (between Morrison’s Liberal Party and the smaller National Party) are narrow favourites to win at 1.87 (53.4%), with the Labor Party at 2.13 (46.9%). Betfair also puts the digital odds of an election this year at 6.2 (16.1%), with no election at 1.1 (90.9%). While Australia’s attempts to eliminate Covid-19 have kept cases and deaths low, the slow rollout of the vaccine, as well as the emergence of the Delta variant, has caused voters to sour on the government. Polls suggest that the Labor Party, the main opposition, has been ahead in terms…

The bosses of unions that represent public sector workers are sitting pretty, says The Times. The highest paid among them in 2020 was Tim Roache, former general secretary of the GMB, who received total remuneration of £288,000. That includes gross salary, but also employers’ national insurance, pension contributions and other benefits such as a car, health insurance and housing allowance. Roache, who stepped down in July 2021, is also in line for “an £80,000 payment for long service, and a £500,000 lump sum”. The second-highest earner was Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, whose employers paid £216,387, while Chaand Nagpaul, chair of the British Medical Association, cost his union £203,633. In total, 30 union bosses – four of them employed by the Fire Brigades Union…

Billionaire hedge fund manager Steve Cohen has just announced plans to invest in Radkl, “a quantitative-trading firm specialising in digital assets” including bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, reports Alexander Osipovich in The Wall Street Journal. Cohen is also joining the board at Recur, which focuses on “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs – digital assets used to authenticate ownership of digital items. “While the cryptocurrency market is now a $2trn asset class, we are still in the early stages of institutional adoption... As more professional investors enter this space, there’s a need for institutional acumen and a firm like Radkl,” said Cohen. Yet the 65-year-old, who invested on his own account rather than via his fund, has only recently become a crypto convert. Cohen told attendees at the recent Skybridge Alternatives Conference that…

Most economists seem to believe that economy-wide carbon pricing – such as the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) – will be needed to shift our energy use to renewable sources and tackle climate change. If the scope of schemes like these continues to grow, it will push up the price of carbon-emission allowances – thereby helping to bring about change, but also creating an opportunity for investors. So it’s notable that the first UK-listed exchange traded product to give investors access to this market arrived at the end of August. The WisdomTree Carbon ETP (LSE: CARB) tracks the ICE Carbon Emission Allowances (EUA) futures contract, which is the most liquid exchange-traded carbon futures contract globally. To understand what’s going on with this unusual product, let’s see how carbon pricing works.…

Your smartphone “is your everything now”, says The Wall Street Journal. Once governments start issuing digital driving licences there will be little point in owning a wallet anymore. From paying bills to monitoring our health, we do practically everything through our mobiles. But how often should we replace them? Some technology addicts upgrade their phones every year, lured by the latest innovations (100-megapixel cameras! Super-fast charging!). That’s an expensive habit. The technology has matured so annual upgrades are less game-changing than they used to be. Shoppers have noticed. According to research by consultancy Strategy Analytics last year, consumers in western Europe waited more than three years on average to replace a phone, compared with just over two years in 2015. So when is it time to replace an old phone?…

• Is your company considering taking on an apprentice as it begins to recover from the crisis? If so, it makes sense to take action sooner rather than later. The government is currently offering one-off incentives of £3,000 for each apprentice that employers take on, in addition to the usual £1,000 payment it makes available for such hires. However, this scheme will only operate until 30 September – and apprentices must start work before 30 November. • If you run a business that took advantage of the furloughing scheme during the Covid-19 crisis, now is the time to check carefully that all your paperwork is in order. As the state begins to wind down pandemic support, HM Revenue & Customs is taking an increasingly aggressive stance on investigating potential frauds…

Shares in Avon Protection (LSE: AVON), which manufactures gas masks and body armour suits, have slumped further following investment bank Berenberg’s recent warning that the group’s profits and reputation will suffer if it fails to develop its bulletproof vests. The company was supposed to start shipping its vests earlier in the year but delayed the move by 12 months, which cost it around $600m. The vests had failed one of the US Department of Defence’s initial tests. The shares have lost over a third of their value over the last two weeks and 55.6% over the last 12 months.…

• Prince Charles’s close aide is facing a possible police probe over claims a Saudi billionaire was offered a knighthood and a British passport if he donated £1.5m to the prince’s charities. Michael Fawcett (pictured) has stepped down temporarily as the £95,000-a-year chief executive of The Prince’s Foundation (he has not commented on the claim, while the billionaire denies any wrongdoing). “Spare a thought for the Queen.” says The Sun. She should be looking forward to her Platinum Jubilee next year, “with a settled monarchy ready for transition”. Now she must contend with a potential scandal for Charles, while US prosecutors want to question her favourite son, Prince Andrew, as a witness in an inquiry into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “The only winners in this seemingly neverending mess are the…