Category: 3. Business

(Reuters) -Global equity funds attracted strong inflows in the week to July 2, as U.S. stocks hit record highs, with investors brushing off trade tensions and chasing gains in AI-linked sectors.

Investors bought global equity funds worth a net $43.15 billion during the week, registering their largest weekly net purchase since November 13, 2024, data from LSEG Lipper showed.

While markets remain buoyant, analysts said that equities could face a sharp reversal if the trade tensions potentially flare up again.

Micron Technology’s, upbeat fourth-quarter sales forecasts, alongside Nvidia’s rally to a record high reinforced investor confidence in AI-linked tech stocks during the week.

U.S. equity funds attracted a hefty $31.6 billion worth of inflows, the highest for a week since November 13, 2024. European and Asian funds pulled in $9.31 billion and $552 million worth of net investments.

Investors also added a net $3.72 billion into sectoral funds as they snapped up industrial, technology and financial sector funds worth a net $1.26 billion, $1.2 billion and $760 million, respectively.

Weekly inflows into global bond funds amounted to a net $15.84 billion, with strong demand extending into an 11th consecutive week.

Euro-denominated bond funds net inflows rose to a three-week high of $4.89 billion. Corporate and short-term bond funds also attracted significant inflows of $4.33 billion and $1.73 billion, respectively.

Money market funds, meanwhile, had approximately $57.46 billion worth of net purchases following three weeks of net sales.

Among commodity funds, gold and precious metal funds were popular for a sixth successive week, with about $564 million in net inflows. But investors ditched a net $163 million worth of energy sector funds.

In emerging markets, inflows into equity funds reached a net $2.58 billion, the largest since October 2024. In contrast, divestments from bond funds totalled a net $3.09 billion, data for a combined 29,745 funds showed.

(Reporting by Gaurav Dogra in Bengaluru. Editing by Jane Merriman)

KARACHI – The Central Directorate of National Savings, commonly known as Qaumi Bachat bank, has once again slashed the profit rate on Regular Income Certificates following the approval of the budget for new fiscal year 2025-26.

The Regular Income Certificates (RICs) were introduced by the federal government with a maturity period of five years in 1993 to cater the monthly requirements of the general public.

The certificates can be purchased in the denominations of Rs. 50,000, Rs. 100,000, Rs. 500,000, Rs. 1,000,000, Rs.5,000,000 and Rs.10,000,000.

The Qaumi Bachat Bank offers profit on the Regular Income Certificates on monthly basis starting from the date of issue of certificates.

Regular Income Certificates Profit Rate July 2025

The National Savings has decreased the profit rate for Regular Income Certificates to 11.16 percent, with effect from July 2025, as compared to previous 11.52 percent.

The investors will receive Rs930 per month in wake of profit as compared to previous Rs960 per month on each Rs100,000 investment.

Tax/Zakat Deduction

The investment made in Regular Income Certificates is exempted from Zakat Deduction. However, the investor will pay tax on the profit.

Rate of Withholding Tax shall be 15% of the yield/profit irrespective of date of investment and amount/profit for the persons appearing in Active Tax Payer List.

However, it will be 35% withholding tax for non-filers.

National Savings Division updated profit rates on several investment options aimed at providing safe and stable returns to individuals, especially retirees, senior citizens, and low-risk investors.

Among the options, the highest current rates 13.20pc are being offered on Pensioners Benefit Account, Behbood Saving Certificate, and Shuhda Family Welfare Account. These schemes are specifically designed to support pensioners, widows, and families of martyrs. Defence Savings Certificate now offer 11.76%, showing downward revision in rates.

OpenAI has reportedly ordered a week-long mandatory break for all employees in what appears to be a desperate attempt to stem internal unrest and retain talent, following an aggressive recruitment campaign by Meta. The development comes amid growing concerns over a wave of high-profile departures from the AI firm, including at least eight researchers who have recently joined Meta’s new “superintelligence” team.

The unexpected move highlights the deepening crisis at OpenAI as it battles to stay ahead in the increasingly cut-throat artificial intelligence race. According to sources cited by Wired, Meta has been actively poaching top AI talent from OpenAI, offering eye-watering incentives, including signing bonuses rumoured to be as high as $100 million.

Reportedly, the exodus has rattled OpenAI’s leadership. In an internal Slack message viewed by Wired, the company’s Chief Research Officer Mark Chen described the situation in emotional terms, saying, “I feel a visceral feeling right now, as if someone has broken into our home and stolen something.” He also assured staff that both he and CEO Sam Altman are working “around the clock” to counter Meta’s recruitment drive.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta’s recent hires from OpenAI represent a significant “recruiting coup”, sparking anxiety within OpenAI’s executive ranks. The firm, known for its cutting-edge AI models such as ChatGPT, is under mounting pressure to defend its leadership status in the sector as companies rush to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), AI systems capable of replicating human cognitive abilities.

TOI reported that the departures have created a climate of uncertainty and resentment within OpenAI. Several employees have shared frustrations over long work hours, often exceeding 80 hours a week and a perceived lack of support in the face of Meta’s offers.

In another leaked message, an OpenAI leader criticised Meta’s approach, saying, “If they pressure you, or make ridiculous exploding offers, just tell them to back off. It’s not nice to pressure people in potentially the most important decision.”

Wolfsburg. Gunnar Kilian will be leaving Volkswagen AG’s Group Board of Management with immediate effect. His current area of responsibility, Human Resources, will be taken over by Thomas Schäfer until further notice. The Group Supervisory Board adopted this resolution on Friday. This became necessary due to differing views on how holding companies should be managed.

It was mid-April and the government had just finished nationalising British Steel, to prevent thousands of job losses at the Scunthorpe steelworks, when word reached Whitehall that another national infrastructure asset was wobbling.

Prax Group, owner of the Lindsey oil refinery on the Humber estuary in northern England, was rumoured to be in financial trouble, stoking fears about jobs and disruption to critical fuel supplies.

In a hastily arranged meeting at the department for energy security and net zero (DESNZ) on 13 May, well-placed sources said, a concerned Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, took solace from Prax’s owner and sole director, Winston Soosaipillai.

Prax had suffered some setbacks, the seldom-seen oil boss is understood to have said, but it was not in any imminent danger and was even planning investment for the future. Within weeks, these assurances had crumbled to dust.

By Friday of last week, ministers had been informed that Prax could not pay its debts – including sums owed to HM Revenue and Customs that the Financial Times reported had reached up to £250m – and was headed for insolvency. The shock update put 625 jobs at risk and sent officials scrambling to keep the refinery going. By Monday, administrators had been called in.

The refinery’s main supplier, Glencore, initially agreedto provide its crude oil for free while the government began its search for a buyer, in what one person close to the situation described as a “gesture of goodwill”. A deal has since been reached that will see Glencore paid out of taxpayers’ funds.

The company’s sudden collapse blind-sided the government and even Glencore, famed for the global intelligence network that informs its trading activity. But to Prax insiders, it came as no surprise.

Multiple sources, including former staff, described a house of cards stacked on increasingly unstable foundations due its owners’ insatiable thirst for debt-fuelled growth, building an empire which included the refinery, trading in oil and petrol stations.

Prax’s recent woes, one former employee claimed, began to spiral out of control more than a year before the government got wind that anything was wrong.

“They started the process of reducing costs in March 2024,” said the source. “They sold petrol station stores and made hundreds of people redundant. The strategy was to get salaries out of the company. The mood was horrible.”

The accountancy firm Deloitte was parachuted in during 2023 to run a “performance improvement programme”, in effect taking charge of the business for about three months. One of its consultants was installed as a joint-chief executive the following year, a sharing of power that took place under the codename “Project King”.

It was an apt choice of name, for Soosaipillai was the de facto king of Prax.

Better known by his middle names, Sanjeev Kumar, Soosaipillai owned and ran the business alongside his wife, Arani, the company’s head of human resources, for 25 years.

They hold 80% of the equity directly and 20% through family trusts.

That, in itself, is unusual, in an industry dominated by global corporations such as ExxonMobil and India’s Essar, overseen by teams of seasoned executives.

Soosaipillai, in contrast, is the sole director of Lindsey and the wider Prax Group, Companies House filings show.

Former employees said that even senior staff knew little about company strategy or dealings, with information tightly controlled among a tiny, close-knit group.

This heavily top-down structure reflects the company’s extraordinary growth story.

The Soosaipillais bought their first petrol station in 1999, expanding into the importing, blending and storage of fuels.

They ran State Oil, as the business was then known, from a modest £65,000 flat in Weybridge, Surrey, building a multinational oil and gas business with billions in revenue and 1,300 staff in a little over two decades.

Contemporary reports – and former employees – suggest the business began to take off with the recruitment in 2009 of a lawyer and oil trader called Don Camillo.

By 2014, with Camillo’s help, the business was fuelling regular profits, not to mention a steady and increasing stream of dividends that helped the Soosaipillais move into a £4.5m mansion in St George’s Hill, the Surrey estate better known as the bolthole of Russian oligarchs.

The business continued to grow, via the 2015 acquisition of fuel retail business Harvest Energy and later via the surprise purchase in 2021 of the Lindsey oil refinery from French oil company Total for nearly $170m (£125m).

The deal more than tripled the group’s revenues, to nearly $10bn, but also sent debts soaring.

Annual interest payments had rocketed from $19m to $79m by 2023, surging again to $133m in 2024. Prax recorded a $75m loss. Its total liabilities had reached $2.3bn, nearly 10 times the level immediately before the Lindsey takeover.

In a letter to staff, sent shortly after administrators were appointed, Soosaipillai acknowledged that the cost of operating Prax Lindsey had become “increasingly unsustainable” and that this had spread into the rest of the group due to its divisions’ “interdependent” nature.

Yet, even as the debt pile was mounting, supply deals with global oil traders – first Trafigura and then Glencore – ensured a constant flow of crude.

The refinery is the smallest of the five that remain in the UK since Grangemouth, in Scotland, stopped processing crude earlier this year.

But, at 5.4m tonnes annually, it still accounts for nearly 10% of national capacity, supplying everything from petrol forecourts to Heathrow airport.

Owning such a strategically important asset has proved lucrative.

As the Guardian revealed earlier this week, the husband and wife owners have extracted about £11.5m in pay and dividends since the Lindsey deal alone.

Yet the couple, who are said to be extremely publicity-shy, did not flaunt their wealth.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

“He is very quiet and studious,” said a former supplier, who asked not to be named. “There is nothing flash about them. They drive a 10-year-old Land Rover to work.”

But the vaulting ambition that helped Prax grow came with a darker side, according to some accounts.

The supplier fell out with Soosaipillai when Prax, he says, inexplicably refused to pay invoices worth tens of thousands. The company only coughed up after a threat of legal action, he alleges.

Others referred to a ruthless streak in Soosaipillai, who allegedly viewed mass redundancies and severe cost-cutting as the solution to strategic missteps.

This, two sources said, sometimes led to instability as people with operational expertise left after short tenures.

Ministers got a taste of the company’s sometimes chaotic modus operandi last month, when Prax suddenly admitted that it was at risk of insolvency after all.

Officials asked for financial information to help them assess the scale of the problem. Despite repeated requests, Prax refused.

The near-term cause of the collapse remains a mystery, although one source close to the situation claimed that Prax could not pay its debts to HM Revenue and Customs.

Anyone keeping a close eye on corporate filings might have seen the warning signs.

Even before “Project King”, Prax’s annual accounts had been restated several times in the past few years to reflect a worse position than before.

In 2023, the company attempted to pay a dividend to the Soosaipillais, only to admit that it didn’t have enough cash in its distributable reserves. The payout had to be reversed and reclassified for accounting purposes.

Nevertheless, industry experts were not expecting Prax Lindsey to fail.

Long-term conditions have been tough in Europe, amid falling demand for carbon-based fuel, high electricity costs, and fierce competition from rivals in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

But Alan Gelder, a refining expert at global energy and mining consultancy Wood Mackenzie, said margins have been much better in the first half of 2025 due to tight capacity in the market.

“It surprised us,” said Gelder. “[Lindsey] was an OK asset, not brilliant but probably cash positive.”

One former employee put the failure down to a culture of relentless expansion.

As well as large takeovers of assets of questionable quality, such as Lindsey, there was an abortive venture in Nigeria and a vain attempt to buy Shell’s business in Pakistan.

And, although Prax carried itself like a global player, it didn’t behave like one, sources said.

“They were still working as they were when they started in a flat in Weybridge, doing things as if they had only one petrol station,” said one former employee.

“Every few years they’d take on a bigger acquisition and eventually I think it was too much,” said the other. “The bubble had to burst at some point.”

The government has now ordered the Insolvency Service to investigate the conduct of “directors”. In practice, that means Soosaipillai alone.

Soosaipillai wrote in his letter to staff that he was “deeply sorry”. Those employees must now wait to see if government officials can find a buyer to secure the future of his precarious realm.

As one current employee put it: “We’re just sitting around, waiting for the guillotine to fall.”

The Soosaipillais did not return requests for comment.

The Guardian approached someone believed to be Don Camillo for comment. He denied being Camillo and hung up the phone.

Deloitte declined to comment.

In Jacques Deray’s 1974 film Borsalino & Cie, Alain Delon, the epitome of French cool in his hat and double-breasted suit, takes revenge on his enemies in glamorous locales, where dapper card sharks enjoy generous pours of ruby-red Cap Corse. After decades confined to the dusty shelves of old-fashioned bars on Napoleon’s native island, this Corsican liqueur is spritzing its way back to prominence.

Cap Corse, which comes in white and red variants, is a wine-based drink infused with tree bark, citrus fruit and herbs. LN Mattei, the company that distils it, was founded in the early 1870s. The tipple reached the peak of its popularity during the early 20th century. In the decades after the Second World War, however, it steadily lost its lustre, becoming a drink that mostly appealed to older Corsicans who remembered its glory days. 

In 2016, Corsica’s Groupe Boisson Corse acquired LN Mattei and kick-started a new era of expansion. It has gone from producing 80,000 bottles, sold almost exclusively in Corsica, to making 400,000 bottles today, 15 per cent of which are exported.

“Over time, Cap Corse had evolved to emphasise the bitterness of cinchona bark,” says Patrice Gontier Ackermann, LN Mattei’s general manager. “To appeal to a broader audience, we revived the original recipe of our founder, Louis Napoléon Mattei, which balances sweetness and bitterness.” This change was informed by the tastes of the current golden age of mixology but also by the rise of the Aperol spritz, which, in less than a decade, has gone from a Venetian aperitivo to a global phenomenon. (Aperol is now the most valuable brand in the Campari group’s European portfolio.) “We recognised that offering a quirky Corsican alternative had significant potential,” says Gontier Ackermann.

The “Capo Spritz” is now served in bars across the island in large LN Mattei-branded glasses that will look familiar to Aperol fans. Expect to see these gracing a Mediterranean bar this summer. With just 350,000 or so permanent residents in Corsica and near-universal brand recognition on the island, LN Mattei needs to lean hard on exports for future growth. By 2030 it plans to double production to 800,000 bottles, with half sold outside Corsica.

Cap Corse’s resurgence mirrors the island’s rise as a destination, increasingly attracting tourists from beyond France. The number of foreign visitors was up by 6 per cent last year, hitting an all-time high. LN Mattei’s shop in Bastia’s Place Saint Nicolas is an especially strong asset. Established by the company’s founder in 1872, it’s an officially recognised historical landmark. The shop, known for its dark-red open cabinets and exposed stone walls, stocks a wide array of Corsican products alongside the booze.

An alcohol-free version of the apéritif is currently in the works. “That could become an important market for us in the years to come,” says Gontier Ackermann. After long being overlooked, Cap Corse is seeking to shake things up. “If we don’t keep moving, we could disappear.”

Glasgow City Council has found no evidence of any data being stolen in a cyber attack that took a number of services offline in June.

The local authority also says there has been no sign of any data being leaked or misused after the incident, but advised people to remain cautious.

Technology services supplier CGI discovered malicious activity on servers managed by a third-party supplier on 19 June.

A number of online services, including paying penalty charges and reporting school absences, became unavailable due to the council taking servers offline.

No financial systems were affected by the attack and no details of bank accounts or credit/debit cards processed by those systems were compromised.

A spokesperson for the council said: “As part of our investigation, experts are monitoring online activity and, to date, there has been no evidence of any data being leaked or misused.

“However, until forensic examinations of the affected servers are complete – and we can be confident whether any data has been stolen – we are advising anyone who has used any of the affected forms to be particularly cautious about contact claiming to be from Glasgow City Council.”

Some services, such as public freedom of information requests, can be accessed again while workarounds are being developed for other affected systems.

Police Scotland are involved in investigating the incident, along with the council, the Scottish Cyber Co-ordination Centre and the National Cyber Security Centre.

A number of Scottish public bodies have been hit by cyber attacks in recent months, including a ransomware group targeting NHS Dumfries and Galloway last year which saw stolen files published online.