Closing summary
The chief executive of Barclays has said he is “deeply dismayed and shocked” at the “depravity and the corruption” revealed in the Epstein files, as the bank deals with the fallout of its ex-boss Jes Staley’s ties to the convicted child sex offender.
In his first public comments on the matter since the US Department of Justice began publishing documents related to Jeffrey Epstein in December, CS Venkatakrishnan said his thoughts went out to the victims of Epstein, who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting child sex trafficking charges.
“I’m very, very deeply dismayed and shocked by the moral depravity and the corruption that you’re reading about in the latest set of instalments. You know, my heart really goes out to victims of this scandal and these crimes,” he said.
BP has halted share buybacks after reporting weaker annual profits as it prepares to continue a plan to resuscitate its fortunes under a new chief executive.
The company became the first large oil company to suspend its buybacks after its underlying earnings fell to just below $7.5bn (£5.5bn) for 2025, down from almost $9bn for 2024.
Japan’s stock market has hit a record high after Sanae Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic party (LDP) secured a comprehensive victory in Sunday’s election.
The boss of Britain’s biggest pharmaceutical company has said the government’s recent drug pricing deal is a “very positive step” but is unlikely to unfreeze a paused £200m investment in Cambridge.
AstraZeneca’s chief executive, Pascal Soriot, suggested that a UK-US deal on NHS pricing agreed in December would not be “sufficient” to restart the project to build a research site in the east of England, which was paused in September.
Thank you for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow. Take care – JK
Steel executive: Government has just 8 weeks to save industry
Here’s more on steel, from the Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll.
The head of the UK’s biggest steel outfit, Tata, has said the British steel industry is “teetering on the brink” of extinction with just “two months” to be saved.
Russell Codling, director of markets business development at Tata Steel UK, told MPs on the trade select committee that he was not exaggerating when he said the government had eight weeks to go before the industry could be drowned by cheap Chinese imports.
He urged the government to urgently act to safeguard the sector with measures following the footsteps of the EU and the US.
“If the UK doesn’t act we won’t have a steel industry not many months from now,” he warned.
Safeguards which impose a 25% tariff on specific imported steel products expires at the end of June but the government has yet to announce any replacement system, which in turn must be agreed internationally. Codling told MPs:
We need action, we need action now, that needs to be in position by 1 July. We only have 8 weeks in which to act.
I know it sounds radical statement to make but we are really there. If we need to act by 1 July, the market needs to understand what is happening and it doesn’t there have been no announcements yet.
He pointed out that China exported a record 119m tonnes of steel last year, dwarfing the 90m tonnes the US consumed and close to the 140m the whole of Europe including the UK used in 2025.
It is an inordinate amount of material, massively distorting the global steel industry. The US has chosen to act, the EU has proposed to act… they are choosing to put 50% tariff in place and halve their quota system.
Many many other countries in the world are doing the same and in the UK we are still processing it and we haven’t made an announcement yet.
We risk over analysing, over assessing and ending up with something that either doesn’t dl against the goal of protecting the industry, the last bit of the industry, there is not a steel company in the UK that is making any form of a profit, they are all just about teetering on the edge and just about to maintain their position.“
