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The Government has announced that cryptocurrency adverts will have to meet the same standards as other financial promotions. In an effort to help protect people from potentially misleading claims, crypto promotions will be brought into line with other financial advertising, such as that for stocks, shares, and insurance products. Under the plans, the promotion of cryptoassets will come under Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) rules. The changes will be brought in by amending the Financial Promotion Order. Chancellor Rishi Sunak said that while cryptoassets “can provide exciting new opportunities … it’s important that consumers are not being sold products with misleading claims.” He added: “We are ensuring consumers are protected, while also supporting innovation of the cryptoasset market.” Welcoming the plans, Laura Suter, head of personal finance at AJ Bell, said: “The Advertising Standards Agency has already been banning individual crypto adverts that it deems misleading or understating the risk involved in the market, but this new move by the Government will lead to a wholesale tightening of the rules governing adverts.” Ed Cooper, head of crypto at financial app Revolut, said: “Clear guidance in how companies describe their crypto offering will benefit consumers and help improve trust in the sector.”

 

The Times

Evening Standard

The EU has climbed down from a deadline to pull European finance firms’ access to London clearing houses. Brussels is now planning on extending temporary permits allowing banks, brokers and fund managers on the continent to use UK clearing houses until June 2025. Mairead McGuinness, the European commissioner for financial services, said the extension of the deadline will prevent any “short-term cliff-edge effects” stemming from financial market volatility. Conor Lawlor, managing director for capital markets at UK Finance, said: “Given the interconnected nature of financial markets and the important role that UK clearing houses play, this decision provides needed certainty for EU and global customers and clients accessing the UK’s clearing infrastructure.”

 

Financial Times

The Daily Telegraph

City A.M.

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) has published a settlement with KPMG and former audit director Stuart Smith over claims he was responsible for misleading the watchdog during an inspection centred on an audit of data services company Regenersis. Claims against Mr Smith were due to be part of a tribunal which started last week but he has now settled with the FRC, having admitted to misleading the accounting watchdog. Mr Smith will pay a fine of £150,000 and is barred from accountancy for three years. KPMG’s sanction will be determined after the tribunal.

 

Financial Times

Reuters

The Daily Telegraph

The Times

While KPMG has admitted misleading the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) during routine checks on the quality of Carillion's audits, former staff members accused of misconduct by the watchdog continue to disagree over who was to blame. Peter Meehan, a former partner at KPMG who was suspended in 2019 and left in 2021, has told a tribunal that he was not involved in the alleged falsification of documents. His lawyers argue that he was a “patsy” for actions carried out by members of his team. However, Fionn Pilbrow, acting for one of the KPMG team, told Mr Meehan: “Your evidence now is untrue and like all the evidence you’ve given, trying to distance yourself from your team.” He added that Mr Meehan sought to portray himself as negligent as it was the “lesser of two evils.”

 

City A.M.

The Guardian

The Financial Conduct Authority is looking into competition between benchmarks used by asset managers and other financial services firms, including how they are priced, their contractual terms, and barriers to switching.

 

Financial Times

The long-awaited ruling on a $5bn fraud claim brought by US technology giant Hewlett-Packard against the former executives of UK start-up Autonomy is expected “imminently,” the High Court has heard. Mr Justice Hildyard is due to distribute his draft judgment to the parties “by Monday at the latest” after a nine-month Commercial Court trial which began in March 2019. However, the ruling, which is expected to be “well in excess of 1,500 pages,” is likely to be subject to an extended embargo period of between two and three weeks, the court was told. The case is Britain’s biggest ever civil fraud trial.

 

Law Gazette

The Environment Agency (EA) believes large corporate polluters should face heavy fines and bosses should be liable to prosecution in severe cases. Setting out his vision for post-Brexit regulation, EA chief executive Sir James Bevan argued for higher standards, tougher punishment for rule-breakers, and industries covering more of the cost burden of regulation. Suggesting “much tougher punishment for the biggest and worst polluters,” Sir James said cases of “extremely harmful and reckless pollution” should trigger “fines so large they would put a major dent in companies’ bottom lines and sentences that would put their bosses in jail.” He also called for regulated industries to pay “the full cost of their regulation.”

 

Daily Mail

Evening Standard

A lawyer who says "intolerable" workloads caused her to have a mental "meltdown" is suing a City firm for £200,000. Joanna Torode has claimed that working conditions at the London office of Ropes & Gray led to a nervous breakdown that caused her to burst into tears at work and ultimately ended her career. Ms Torode has said in written submissions to the High Court that she has been unable to work since being admitted to hospital in 2018. She is suing the firm, based in the US, for at least £200,000 in damages for the premature end to her legal career. The figure could rise as she is also claiming for the loss of her "substantial" salary.

 

The Times

Statistics from the Insolvency Service (IS) show that the number of registered company insolvencies in England and Wales in December was 33% higher than the number registered two years ago, just before the pandemic. The data show that there were 1,486 registered company insolvencies in December - 20% higher than a year earlier. The IS report notes a 73% two-year increase in creditors' voluntary liquidations, where bosses elect to place their company into liquidation in order to pay its debts. Christina Fitzgerald, president of restructuring trade body R3, said the figures suggest "the economic situation is pushing many company directors to voluntarily close their businesses before that decision is made for them." December, she added, “marked a tough end to a torrid year for many businesses." Martin McTague from the Federation of Small Businesses said: "Thousands of small businesses are on a knife edge following a difficult and disappointing festive season, with surging inflation now eroding margins,” adding a warning that tax rises in April could be the "final straw" for many small firms.

 

City A.M.

The Daily Telegraph

The I

Lloyd's of London is reassessing its office space in a move that could see the world's oldest insurance market leave its iconic City of London headquarters. The suggestion comes amid a shift toward remote and hybrid working driven by the pandemic and the acceleration of a trend towards automation that has seen business increasingly move away from its underwriting floor. The lease on the building, home of the insurance market since 1986, expires in 2031 but Lloyd's could leave in 2026 when there is a break clause.

 

Financial Times

City A.M.

Daily Mail

Reuters reports that the resignation of Credit Suisse chairman Antonio Horta-Osorio following an internal probe which found that he broke the UK's Covid-19 quarantine rules comes amid a climate of "antipathy" towards him within the bank. Horta-Osorio suspected details of his transgressions were leaked by members of an increasingly hostile group of Credit Suisse senior executives, many of whom resented the chairman's efforts to reform. One source said many senior staff were unhappy with Horta-Osorio's attempts to make the board of directors more powerful at the expense of executives.

 

Reuters

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned that the recovery from the pandemic in the global job market is set to slow this year. The UN agency has forecast that the number of hours worked globally in 2022 would be 1.8% lower than in the fourth quarter of 2019, just before the onset of the pandemic, and there would be an even bigger deficit in working hours in 2022 than it had previously estimated. The ILO’s 2022 World Employment and Social Outlook trends report projects that the decline in global working hours this year would now be the equivalent of losing 52 million full-time jobs, nearly double the 26 million it previously forecast in May 2021. Guy Ryder, ILO director-general, described this “downside readjustment [as] quite considerable.” He said the spread of new Covid variants, such as Delta and Omicron, was among reasons behind the expected slowdown in the labour market recovery, and the ILO expected the recovery to remain weak through 2023.

 

CNBC	Wall Street Journal

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has defended so-called ‘stakeholder capitalism’ in his annual letter to CEOs. The head of the world’s largest asset manager rejected suggestions that an investor focus on the interests of wider society rather than profit is “woke,” writing in his missive, entitled The Power of Capitalism, “It is not a social or ideological agenda . . . It is capitalism, driven by mutually beneficial relationships between you and the employees, customers, suppliers and communities your company relies on to prosper.” He urged his fellow CEOs to find a purpose and to take into account issues like climate change as part of stakeholder capitalism. Meanwhile, Fink said that companies can no longer expect employees to come to the office five days a week, neglect workers' mental health and keep wages low for those at the lower end of the income scale. "No relationship has been changed more by the pandemic than the one between employers and employees. CEOs face a profoundly different paradigm than we are used to," he wrote in his closely watched annual communication.

 

Axios

CNBC

Reuters

Punit Renjen, the global CEO of Deloitte, believes there is a “disconnect between ambition and action” when it comes to businesses operating sustainably, saying that while firms are aware of the impacts of climate change, they are struggling to embed climate considerations into their company culture. Writing in Deloitte's latest sustainability report that “substantive change can only come with bold, collective action,” he adds: “No action is insignificant, but certain activities and decisions move the needle more than others. Those bolder actions from business leaders are needed now—while there's still time to limit the damage.”

 

City A.M.

The world's 20 top-performing hedge funds earned a record  $65.4bn for clients in 2021, according to data from fund of funds firm LCH Investments.  As a group, the most successful managers earned more than one-third of the $176bn that all hedge funds made last year, LCH said.  The top 20, which includes brand-name investment firms TCI Fund Management and Citadel, returned an average 10.5% and jointly managed nearly one-fifth of the industry's $3.6 trillion in assets, the data show. Their returns were nevertheless behind the broader stock market S&P 500 index’s 27% gain in 2021. They "generally did not fully capture the spectacular returns available in equity markets," said Rick Sopher, LCH's chairman, adding "their low net exposure and a difficult environment for short selling limited their returns."

 

Reuters

French clothing brand Lacoste, which provides kit for tennis star Novak Djokovic, says it wants to "review" the events that sparked a nearly two-week legal battle and prevented the unvaccinated Serbian from defending his Australian Open title. Australia requires international visitors to be vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they have a medical exemption. "As soon as possible, we will be in touch with Novak Djokovic to review the events that have accompanied his presence in Australia", the company said in a statement. "We wish everyone an excellent tournament and thank the organizers for all their efforts to ensure that the tournament is held in good conditions for players, staff and spectators", it added.

 

CNN	Financial Times