1 Two high street lenders have announced cuts to their fixed-rate mortgage deals. TSB said it would cut its five-year fixed rates for purchase mortgages and remortgages from Monday by up to 1.3 percentage points, which would lower its new rate for remortgaging up to 60 per cent of a property’s value to 4.99 per cent. Nationwide announced a cut of up to 0.6 percentage points across its range of fixed products.
2 The average price of a summer holiday to Turkey has risen by 52 per cent since 2019, research by The Times shows, with prices for holidays to Italy up by 48 per cent and to Greece up by 38 per cent.
3 Shell has paid tax in the UK North Sea for the first time in five years after being hit by the windfall energy profits levy. The oil giant said it had incurred an undisclosed tax bill under the levy in respect of its profits for last year and that some of this had been paid to the exchequer.
4 London’s FTSE 100 index rose 66.04 points to 7,699.49 to close at its highest level in more than four years after slowing wage growth in the United States boosted market hopes that efforts to bring down rampant inflation are starting to bear fruit.
5 Britain risks losing great technology companies if it cannot raise capital for fast-growing businesses, two big investors have said. Hermann Hauser, who founded Acorn Computers and its spin-off, Arm, the semiconductor giant, and Anne Glover have backed more than 190 technology companies in the 25-year history of Amadeus Capital, their investment firm.
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6 A small Manchester-based technology company is in line for a nine-figure windfall after Samsung agreed to settle a long-running court case. A trial between the South Korean electronics giant and Nanoco had been due to start in a Texas court yesterday.
7 The likelihood of a soft landing for the housing market “looks increasingly like wishful thinking”, economists have said, after prices fell for the fourth month in a row in December. The average price of a home in the UK fell by 1.5 per cent to £281,272, the latest data from Halifax, the mortgage lender, shows.
8 Topps Tiles has stepped up its defence of its chairman, Darren Shapland, accusing MS Galleon, a supplier and shareholder seeking to oust him from the board, of serious conflicts of interest.
9 The founder of Purplebricks is nursing a £4.1 million loss after his venture Boomin collapsed. Michael Bruce, who co-founded Purplebricks with Kenny Bruce, his brother, launched the firm, a property search website, as a rival to Rightmove, the FTSE 100-listed property portal.
10 Company formation agents, a sector that the government has linked with organised crime, are to be given a critical role in cleaning up Companies House.