Author: Lily Harper

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.This week, Nationwide building society reported that the average UK house price was £271,619 in June, as it dropped by an unexpected 0.8 per cent compared with May — the biggest monthly fall in two years. But how useful is this, given that, in the words of my late friend Charles Fairhurst, “all residential is local”? What he meant was that the price or rent of a home — and whether it is bought, let, or even built — is determined as…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is co-head of private equity at KKRThe private equity naysayers are out in force in 2025. Underlying the latest predictions of the industry’s demise is a notable mis-step many firms made by over-deploying capital during 2021 and the first half of 2022, a period characterised by high valuations.Many of those investments will probably be underperformers. Consequently, private equity funds overexposed to these vintages may struggle to raise more capital. But is it the beginning of the industry’s downfall as some claim?While…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.There are few industries with a more “old world” feel than European insurers. The average age among the continent’s 10 largest listed players is almost 170. Yet quietly, these old-timers have been racking up the sort of market gains that would make many tech start-ups jealous.The Stoxx 600 insurance sub-index, which tracks 30 large European insurance groups, climbed 15 per cent in the first half of 2025 for its best half-year since 2019. And the performance is no flash in the pan:…

Trillions of pounds worth of assets are managed by London’s listed investment houses. Their purpose is to deliver financial security for clients by growing and preserving the value of their capital. Larger managers, such as Legal & General, Aberdeen, M&G and Schroders, offer access to a wide range of asset classes and geographies, can handle the largest mandates and tend to focus on mainstream markets. Smaller players offer distinctive investment approaches and niche and specialist options for diversification, often catering to wealthy individuals with an appetite for impact investing or risk, or who carry tax burdens that are suitable for…

When the Covid-19 pandemic forced the UK into lockdown in 2020, people up and down the country turned to baking sourdough bread and yoga. For Redinel and Oerta Korfuzi, the restrictions gave cover for a different pursuit: insider trading.As a result, the Albanian siblings are now facing a new form of lockdown. On Friday, a London judge sentenced former Janus Henderson research analyst Redinel Korfuzi, 38, to six years in prison and his sister Oerta Korfuzi, 36, to five years.“This case has elements akin to a Greek tragedy where an individual of some standing is brought crashing down by a…

Happy Friday! We’re going to try to shift this Q&A feature a bit earlier in the week in the future, but here’s an interview with Rob Gardner, a veteran of the UK investment industry with lots of interesting jobs under his belt.Gardner co-founded the investment consultancy Redington in 2006, before he left to become investment director of St James’s Place in 2019, and chair of the investment manager Rowan Dartington in 2021. Gardner then left those roles to found Rebalance Earth — a natural capital firm — where he is currently CEO. He also co-founded RedSTART, a financial education charity…

This article is an on-site version of our Moral Money newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered three times a week. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newsletters.Visit our Moral Money hub for all the latest ESG news, opinion and analysis from around the FT Welcome back.Delegates at this week’s UN Financing for Development conference in Seville, as I discussed in the last newsletter, have been focused on how to “do more with less” following cuts to foreign aid budgets. That might sound like a desperate attempt to put on…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Singapore has hit banks and wealth managers including UBS, Citi and Julius Baer with its second-largest collective penalty ever in relation to a money-laundering case that hit the city-state’s clean reputation and cast a pall over its wealth management sector.Nine financial institutions received a collective penalty of S$27.45mn (US$21.5mn), the largest figure since penalties in the 1MDB case, over what Singapore’s regulator called “poor and inconsistent implementation” of controls in a US$2bn money-laundering scandal.The case, which was linked to online gambling in…

In Paris, “nobody is content to be a spectator”, wrote Jean Cocteau. The great avant-garde dramatist and poet might have thought differently if he’d stood on the spacious terrace of a particular apartment on the city’s Rive Gauche.From this rooftop eyrie in the exclusive 7th arrondissement, a single gaze takes in some of the city’s best-known landmarks. There’s the gilded dome of Hôtel des Invalides, final resting place of Napoleon Bonaparte; the ornate allegorical “Fames” on Pont Alexandre III; the shimmering glass roof of the Grand Palais — and the Eiffel Tower. The terrace itself is planted with lavender, sculpted boxwood and an avenue…

One scoop to start: Christopher Hohn’s activist hedge fund has risen 21 per cent this year as bets on jet engine manufacturer GE Aerospace, Visa and Microsoft came good.Welcome to Due Diligence, your briefing on dealmaking, private equity and corporate finance. This article is an on-site version of the newsletter. Premium subscribers can sign up here to get the newsletter delivered every Tuesday to Friday. Standard subscribers can upgrade to Premium here, or explore all FT newsletters. Get in touch with us anytime: Due.Diligence@ft.comIn today’s newsletter:Ireland’s ‘Cooler’ tries to pull off one last scoreWhy would bondholders offer to pay hundreds…