Author: Lily Harper

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…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is chair of Société Générale and a former member of the executive board of the European Central BankStablecoins are fast emerging as a disruptive force in global finance — and central banks are rightly paying attention. The Bank for International Settlements recently warned that a loss of confidence in stablecoin issuers could lead different coins to diverge from trading at par. This would threaten monetary stability, particularly if the issuers’ reserves lose value or are insufficiently liquid to meet redemption…

Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Workplace pensions myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to announce a shake-up of UK pensions in her Mansion House speech on July 15, including plans to look at the amount companies and their staff set aside for retirement. Two executives familiar with her plans said Reeves would appoint a commission to lead the long-awaited review into pensions adequacy, looking at auto-enrolment rates alongside the state pension and retirement savings of the self-employed. The review was first announced by Reeves in July last year and was supposed to…

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.When design software company Figma revealed its plans for a stock market listing this week, it felt like a throwback to an earlier era in the tech financing markets.Chief executive Dylan Field listed the reasons why an initial public offering would be good for his company, which turned to the stock market after an acquisition by larger rival Adobe was blocked by regulators. It was the kind of paean to going public that is rarely heard these days from tech company founders,…