Finance

Compensation payouts are due on around 12.1 million unfair motor finance deals, at an average of £829 each, the financial watchdog has said as it unveiled the final plans for its redress scheme.

MPs and benefit claimants are to receive bumper payments this week to help cushion them from the cost-of-living crisis.

Mastercard is exploring the sale of the real-time payments business it acquired from Denmark’s Nets Group in 2019 for approximately $3.2 billion, effectively unwinding one of its largest acquisitions to date.

Lloyds Banking Group is gearing up for a lawsuit from more than 30,000 consumers who claim to have been mis-sold car loans, in a sign that they believe that the regulator’s long-awaited redress scheme will favour large banks.

Next week, filling up an average-sized family car is likely to cost £100, writes Giles Sheldrick.

The boss of National Savings and Investments has been dismissed over a series of errors regarding payouts and its bereavement services.

The government has been accused of ‘blowing their money’ on ‘lifestyle perks’ after they spent more than £550,000 on meditation apps for civil servants since Covid.

Banking group Close Brothers will slash roughly 600 jobs in the UK and Ireland over the next 18 months to cut down on annual costs by £85 million.

Welsh Water is set to pay a proposed £44.7 million after the industry regulator found “serious and unacceptable” breaches in the supplier’s sewage and network services.

Europe’s largest automaker, Volkswagen, is set to shed 50,000 jobs by the end of the decade, as it faces declining sales in China and North America and punitive US tariffs imposed by Donald Trump.

It comes after Daily Mail and General Trust had previously agreed to buy the Telegraph last year.

Oil prices have risen further as the Middle East war rages - with Iranian officials saying the country would "set fire to anyone who tries to pass through" the Strait of Hormuz, a key crude oil shipping route.

UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves is set to respond to the latest economic outlook as a sharp surge in global energy prices threatens to undermine expectations of easing inflation.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton reportedly told the Prime Minister that the MoD faces a £28 billion shortfall between now and 2030.

Octopus Energy has agreed to sell a minority stake in its Kraken Technologies division, valuing the software business at 8.65 billion dollars (£6.4 billion) and paving the way for a potential stock market flotation.

The UK is set to receive an influx of cheap Chinese imports that could lower inflation amid the effects of Donald Trump’s global trade war, leading economists have said.

Gambling companies have spent nearly £5m to advertise on the London transport network since Sadiq Khan pledged to stop them from doing so, amid a prolonged impasse between the mayor’s office and the government.

A group of MPs and peers have urged the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury to prevent the Church of England from spending £100 million on slavery reparations.

A version of the Valuation Office Agency (VOA)’s “automated valuation model" will be used in the assessment.

BP has agreed to sell a majority stake in its $10bn (£7.4bn) lubricants business Castrol to the US investment company Stonepeak, as the new chair, Albert Manifold, rapidly reshapes the under-pressure oil and gas company.