Category: 3. Business

SHANGHAI — Visitors were welcomed by a giant Lego man over 26 meters (85 feet) tall named Dada as they arrived at the new Legoland resort in Shanghai.

The Legoland resort, which opened Saturday, is the first in China. It is the largest Legoland in the world and was built with 85 million Lego bricks.

The resort was developed in conjunction with the Shanghai government by Merlin Entertainments and the LEGO Group.

Among the main attractions in the resort is Miniland, which replicates well-known sights from across the world using Lego bricks. It features sights from across China like Beijing’s Temple of Heaven and Shanghai’s the Bund waterfront. There’s also a boat tour through a historical Chinese water town built with Lego bricks.

Visitors were greeted by performances featuring Legoland characters. Tickets range from $44 (319 yuan) to $84 (599 yuan).

It was a Monday afternoon in June 2023 when Rita Meier, 45, joined us for a video call. Meier told us about the last time she said goodbye to her husband, Stefan, five years earlier. He had been leaving their home near Lake Constance, Germany, heading for a trade fair in Milan.

Meier recalled how he hesitated between taking his Tesla Model S or her BMW. He had never driven the Tesla that far before. He checked the route for charging stations along the way and ultimately decided to try it. Rita had a bad feeling. She stayed home with their three children, the youngest less than a year old.

At 3.18pm on 10 May 2018, Stefan Meier lost control of his Model S on the A2 highway near the Monte Ceneri tunnel. Travelling at about 100kmh (62mph), he ploughed through several warning markers and traffic signs before crashing into a slanted guardrail. “The collision with the guardrail launches the vehicle into the air, where it flips several times before landing,” investigators would write later.

The car came to rest more than 70 metres away, on the opposite side of the road, leaving a trail of wreckage. According to witnesses, the Model S burst into flames while still airborne. Several passersby tried to open the doors and rescue the driver, but they couldn’t unlock the car. When they heard explosions and saw flames through the windows, they retreated. Even the firefighters, who arrived 20 minutes later, could do nothing but watch the Tesla burn.

At that moment, Rita Meier was unaware of the crash. She tried calling her husband, but he didn’t pick up. When he still hadn’t returned her call hours later – highly unusual for this devoted father – she attempted to track his car using Tesla’s app. It no longer worked. By the time police officers rang her doorbell late that night, Meier was already bracing for the worst.

The crash made headlines the next morning as one of the first fatal Tesla accidents in Europe. Tesla released a statement to the press saying the company was “deeply saddened” by the incident, adding, “We are working to gather all the facts in this case and are fully cooperating with local authorities.”

To this day, Meier still doesn’t know why her husband died. She has kept everything the police gave her after their inconclusive investigation. The charred wreck of the Model S sits in a garage Meier rents specifically for that purpose. The scorched phone – which she had forensically analysed at her own expense, to no avail – sits in a drawer at home. Maybe someday all this will be needed again, she says. She hasn’t given up hope of uncovering the truth.

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Rita Meier was one of many people who reached out to us after we began reporting on the Tesla Files – a cache of 23,000 leaked documents and 100 gigabytes of confidential data shared by an anonymous whistleblower. The first report we published looked at problems with Tesla’s autopilot system, which allows the cars to temporarily drive on their own, taking over steering, braking and acceleration. Though touted by the company as “Full Self-Driving” (FSD), it is designed to assist, not replace, the driver, who should keep their eyes on the road and be ready to intervene at any time.

Autonomous driving is the core promise around which Elon Musk has built his company. Tesla has never delivered a truly self-driving vehicle, yet the richest person in the world keeps repeating the claim that his cars will soon drive entirely without human help. Is Tesla’s autopilot really as advanced as he says?

The Tesla Files suggest otherwise. They contain more than 2,400 customer complaints about unintended acceleration and more than 1,500 braking issues – 139 involving emergency braking without cause, and 383 phantom braking events triggered by false collision warnings. More than 1,000 crashes are documented. A separate spreadsheet on driver-assistance incidents where customers raised safety concerns lists more than 3,000 entries. The oldest date from 2015, the most recent from March 2022. In that time, Tesla delivered roughly 2.6m vehicles with autopilot software. Most incidents occurred in the US, but there have also been complaints from Europe and Asia. Customers described their cars suddenly accelerating or braking hard. Some escaped with a scare; others ended up in ditches, crashing into walls or colliding with oncoming vehicles. “After dropping my son off in his school parking lot, as I go to make a right-hand exit it lurches forward suddenly,” one complaint read. Another said, “My autopilot failed/malfunctioned this morning (car didn’t brake) and I almost rear-ended somebody at 65mph.” A third reported, “Today, while my wife was driving with our baby in the car, it suddenly accelerated out of nowhere.”

Braking for no reason caused just as much distress. “Our car just stopped on the highway. That was terrifying,” a Tesla driver wrote. Another complained, “Frequent phantom braking on two-lane highways. Makes the autopilot almost unusable.” Some report their car “jumped lanes unexpectedly”, causing them to hit a concrete barrier, or veered into oncoming traffic.

Musk has given the world many reasons to criticise him since he teamed up with Donald Trump. Many people do – mostly by boycotting his products. But while it is one thing to disagree with the political views of a business leader, it is another to be mortally afraid of his products. In the Tesla Files, we found thousands of examples of why such fear may be justified.

We set out to match some of these incidents of autopilot errors with customers’ names. Like hundreds of other Tesla customers, Rita Meier entered the vehicle identification number of her husband’s Model S into the response form we published on the website of the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, for which we carried out our investigation. She quickly discovered that the Tesla Files contained data related to the car. In her first email to us, she wrote, “You can probably imagine what it felt like to read that.”

There isn’t much information – just an Excel spreadsheet titled “Incident Review”. A Tesla employee noted that the mileage counter on Stefan Meier’s car stood at 4,765 miles at the time of the crash. The entry was catalogued just one day after the fatal accident. In the comment field was written, “Vehicle involved in an accident.” The cause of the crash remains unknown to this day. In Tesla’s internal system, a company employee had marked the case as “resolved”, but for five years, Rita Meier had been searching for answers. After Stefan’s death, she took over the family business – a timber company with 200 employees based in Tettnang, Baden-Württemberg. As journalists, we are used to tough interviews, but this one was different. We had to strike a careful balance – between empathy and the persistent questioning good reporting demands. “Why are you convinced the Tesla was responsible for your husband’s death?” we asked her. “Isn’t it possible he was distracted – maybe looking at his phone?”

No one knows for sure. But Meier was well aware that Musk has previously claimed Tesla “releases critical crash data affecting public safety immediately and always will”; that he has bragged many times about how its superior handling of data sets the company apart from its competitors. In the case of her husband, why was she expected to believe there was no data?

Meier’s account was structured and precise. Only once did the toll become visible – when she described how her husband’s body burned in full view of the firefighters. Her eyes filled with tears and her voice cracked. She apologised, turning away. After she collected herself, she told us she has nothing left to gain – but also nothing to lose. That was why she had reached out to us. We promised to look into the case.

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Rita Meier wasn’t the only widow to approach us. Disappointed customers, current and former employees, analysts and lawyers were sharing links to our reporting. Many of them contacted us. More than once, someone wrote that it was about time someone stood up to Tesla – and to Elon Musk.

Meier, too, shared our articles and the callout form with others in her network – including people who, like her, lost loved ones in Tesla crashes. One of them was Anke Schuster. Like Meier, she had lost her husband in a Tesla crash that defies explanation and had spent years chasing answers. And, like Meier, she had found her husband’s Model X listed in the Tesla Files. Once again, the incident was marked as resolved – with no indication of what that actually meant.

“My husband died in an unexplained and inexplicable accident,” Schuster wrote in her first email. Her dealings with police, prosecutors and insurance companies, she said, had been “hell”. No one seemed to understand how a Tesla works. “I lost my husband. His four daughters lost their father. And no one ever cared.”

Her husband, Oliver, was a tech enthusiast, fascinated by Musk. A hotelier by trade, he owned no fewer than four Teslas. He loved the cars. She hated them – especially the autopilot. The way the software seemed to make decisions on its own never sat right with her. Now, she felt as if her instincts had been confirmed in the worst way.

Oliver Schuster was returning from a business meeting on 13 April 2021 when his black Model X veered off highway B194 between Loitz and Schönbeck in north-east Germany. It was 12.50pm when the car left the road and crashed into a tree. Schuster started to worry when her husband missed a scheduled bank appointment. She tried to track the vehicle but found no way to locate it. Even calling Tesla led nowhere. That evening, the police broke the news: after the crash her husband’s car had burst into flames. He had burned to death – with the fire brigade watching helplessly.

The crashes that killed Meier’s and Schuster’s husbands were almost three years apart but the parallels were chilling. We examined accident reports, eyewitness accounts, crash-site photos and correspondence with Tesla. In both cases, investigators had requested vehicle data from Tesla, and the company hadn’t provided it. In Meier’s case, Tesla staff claimed no data was available. In Schuster’s, they said there was no relevant data.

Over the next two years, we spoke with crash victims, grieving families and experts around the world. What we uncovered was an ominous black box – a system designed not only to collect and control every byte of customer data, but to safeguard Musk’s vision of autonomous driving. Critical information was sealed off from public scrutiny.

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Elon Musk is a perfectionist with a tendency towards micromanagement. At Tesla, his whims seem to override every argument – even in matters of life and death. During our reporting, we came across the issue of door handles. On Teslas, they retract into the doors while the cars are being driven. The system depends on battery power. If an airbag deploys, the doors are supposed to unlock automatically and the handles extend – at least, that’s what the Model S manual says.

The idea for the sleek, futuristic design stems from Musk himself. He insisted on retractable handles, despite repeated warnings from engineers. Since 2018, they have been linked to at least four fatal accidents in Europe and the US, in which five people died.

In February 2024, we reported on a particularly tragic case: a fatal crash on a country road near Dobbrikow, in Brandenburg, Germany. Two 18-year-olds were killed when the Tesla they were in slammed into a tree and caught fire. First responders couldn’t open the doors because the handles were retracted. The teenagers burned to death in the back seat.

A court-appointed expert from Dekra, one of Germany’s leading testing authorities, later concluded that, given the retracted handles, the incident “qualifies as a malfunction”. According to the report, “the failure of the rear door handles to extend automatically must be considered a decisive factor” in the deaths. Had the system worked as intended, “it is assumed that rescuers might have been able to extract the two backseat passengers before the fire developed further”. Without what the report calls a “failure of this safety function”, the teens might have survived.

Our investigation made waves. The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, Germany’s federal motor transport authority, got involved and announced plans to coordinate with other regulatory bodies to revise international safety standards. Germany’s largest automobile club, ADAC, issued a public recommendation that Tesla drivers should carry emergency window hammers. In a statement, ADAC warned that retractable door handles could seriously hinder rescue efforts. Even trained emergency responders, it said, may struggle to reach trapped passengers. Tesla shows no intention of changing the design.

That’s Musk. He prefers the sleek look of Teslas without handles, so he accepts the risk to his customers. His thinking, it seems, goes something like this: at some point, the engineers will figure out a technical fix. The same logic applies to his grander vision of autonomous driving: because Musk wants to be first, he lets customers test his unfinished Autopilot system on public roads. It’s a principle borrowed from the software world, where releasing apps in beta has long been standard practice. The more users, the more feedback and, over time – often years – something stable emerges. Revenue and market share arrive much earlier. The motto: if you wait, you lose.

Musk has taken that mindset to the road. The world is his lab. Everyone else is part of the experiment.

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By the end of 2023, we knew a lot about how Musk’s cars worked – but the way they handle data still felt like a black box. How is that data stored? At what moment does the onboard computer send it to Tesla’s servers? We talked to independent experts at the Technical University Berlin. Three PhD candidates – Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel and Hans Niklas Jacob – made headlines for hacking Tesla’s autopilot hardware. A brief voltage drop on a circuit board turned out to be just enough to trick the system into opening up.

The security researchers uncovered what they called “Elon Mode” – a hidden setting in which the car drives fully autonomously, without requiring the driver to keep his hands on the wheel. They also managed to recover deleted data, including video footage recorded by a Tesla driver. And they traced exactly what data Tesla sends to its servers – and what it doesn’t.

The hackers explained that Tesla stores data in three places. First, on a memory card inside the onboard computer – essentially a running log of the vehicle’s digital brain. Second, on the event data recorder – a black box that captures a few seconds before and after a crash. And third, on Tesla’s servers, assuming the vehicle uploads them.

The researchers told us they had found an internal database embedded in the system – one built around so-called trigger events. If, for example, the airbag deploys or the car hits an obstacle, the system is designed to save a defined set of data to the black box – and transmit it to Tesla’s servers. Unless the vehicles were in a complete network dead zone, in both the Meier and Schuster cases, the cars should have recorded and transmitted that data.

Who in the company actually works with that data? We examined testimony from Tesla employees in court cases related to fatal crashes. They described how their departments operate. We cross-referenced their statements with entries in the Tesla Files. A pattern took shape: one team screens all crashes at a high level, forwarding them to specialists – some focused on autopilot, others on vehicle dynamics or road grip. There’s also a group that steps in whenever authorities request crash data.

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We compiled a list of employees relevant to our reporting. Some we tried to reach by email or phone. For others, we showed up at their homes. If they weren’t there, we left handwritten notes. No one wanted to talk.

We searched for other crashes. One involved Hans von Ohain, a 33-year-old Tesla employee from Evergreen, Colorado. On 16 May 2022, he crashed into a tree on his way home from a golf outing and the car burst into flames. Von Ohain died at the scene. His passenger survived and told police that von Ohain, who had been drinking, had activated Full Self-Driving. Tesla, however, said it couldn’t confirm whether the system was engaged – because no vehicle data was transmitted for the incident.

Then, in February 2024, Musk himself stepped in. The Tesla CEO claimed von Ohain had never downloaded the latest version of the software – so it couldn’t have caused the crash. Friends of von Ohain, however, told US media he had shown them the system. His passenger that day, who barely escaped with his life, told reporters that hours earlier the car had already driven erratically by itself. “The first time it happened, I was like, ‘Is that normal?’” he recalled asking von Ohain. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, that happens every now and then.’”

His account was bolstered by von Ohain’s widow, who explained to the media how overjoyed her husband had been at working for Tesla. Reportedly, von Ohain received the Full Self-Driving system as a perk. His widow explained how he would use the system almost every time he got behind the wheel: “It was jerky, but we were like, that comes with the territory of new technology. We knew the technology had to learn, and we were willing to be part of that.”

The Colorado State Patrol investigated but closed the case without blaming Tesla. It reported that no usable data was recovered.

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For a company that markets its cars as computers on wheels, Tesla’s claim that it had no data available in all these cases is surprising. Musk has long described Tesla vehicles as part of a collective neural network – machines that continuously learn from one another. Think of the Borg aliens from the Star Trek franchise. Musk envisions his cars, like the Borg, as a collective – operating as a hive mind, each vehicle linked to a unified consciousness.

When a journalist asked him in October 2015 what made Tesla’s driver-assistance system different, he replied, “The whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, they all learn it. That is beyond what other car companies are doing.” Every Tesla driver, he explained, becomes a kind of “expert trainer for how the autopilot should work”.

According to Musk, the eight cameras in every Tesla transmit more than 160bn video frames a day to the company’s servers. In its owner’s manual, Tesla states that its cars may collect even more: “analytics, road segment, diagnostic and vehicle usage data”, all sent to headquarters to improve product quality and features such as autopilot. The company claims it learns “from the experience of billions of miles that Tesla vehicles have driven”.

It is a powerful promise: a fleet of millions of cars, constantly feeding raw information into a gargantuan processing centre. Billions – trillions – of data points, all in service of one goal: making cars drive better and keeping drivers safe. At the start of this year, Musk got a chance to show the world what he meant.

On 1 January 2025, at 8.39am, a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. The man behind the incident – US special forces veteran Matthew Livelsberger – had rented the vehicle, packed it with fireworks, gas canisters and grenades, and parked it in front of the building. Just before the explosion, he shot himself in the head with a .50 calibre Desert Eagle pistol. “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wakeup call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” Livelsberger wrote in a letter later found by authorities. “What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives.”

The soldier miscalculated. Seven bystanders suffered minor injuries. The Cybertruck was destroyed, but not even the windows of the hotel shattered. Instead, with his final act, Livelsberger revealed something else entirely: just how far the arm of Tesla’s data machinery can reach. “The whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now,” Musk wrote on X just hours after the blast. “Will post more information as soon as we learn anything. We’ve never seen anything like this.”

Later that day, Musk posted again. Tesla had already analysed all relevant data – and was ready to offer conclusions. “We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,” he wrote. “All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.”

Suddenly, Musk wasn’t just a CEO; he was an investigator. He instructed Tesla technicians to remotely unlock the scorched vehicle. He handed over internal footage captured up to the moment of detonation.The Tesla CEO had turned a suicide attack into a showcase of his superior technology.

Yet there were critics even in the moment of glory. “It reveals the kind of sweeping surveillance going on,” warned David Choffnes, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, when contacted by a reporter. “When something bad happens, it’s helpful, but it’s a double-edged sword. Companies that collect this data can abuse it.”

There are other examples of what Tesla’s data collection makes possible. We found the case of David and Sheila Brown, who died in August 2020 when their Model 3 ran a red light at 114mph in Saratoga, California. Investigators managed to reconstruct every detail, thanks to Tesla’s vehicle data. It shows exactly when the Browns opened a door, unfastened a seatbelt, and how hard the driver pressed the accelerator – down to the millisecond, right up to the moment of impact. Over time, we found more cases, more detailed accident reports. The data definitely is there – until it isn’t.

In many crashes when Teslas inexplicably veered off the road or hit stationary objects, investigators didn’t actually request data from the company. When we asked authorities why, there was often silence. Our impression was that many prosecutors and police officers weren’t even aware that asking was an option. In other cases, they acted only when pushed by victims’ families.

In the Meier case, Tesla told authorities, in a letter dated 25 June 2018, that the last complete set of vehicle data was transmitted nearly two weeks before the crash. The only data from the day of the accident was a “limited snapshot of vehicle parameters” – taken “approximately 50 minutes before the incident”. However, this snapshot “doesn’t show anything in relation to the incident”. As for the black box, Tesla warned that the storage modules were likely destroyed, given the condition of the burned-out vehicle. Data transmission after a crash is possible, the company said – but in this case, it didn’t happen. In the end, investigators couldn’t even determine whether driver-assist systems were active at the time of the crash.

The Schuster case played out similarly. Prosecutors in Stralsund, Germany, were baffled. The road where the crash happened is straight, the asphalt was dry and the weather at the time of the accident was clear. Anke Schuster kept urging the authorities to examine Tesla’s telemetry data.

When prosecutors did formally request the data recorded by Schuster’s car on the day of the crash, it took Tesla more than two weeks to respond – and when it did, the answer was both brief and bold. The company didn’t say there was no data. It said that there was “no relevant data”. The authorities’ reaction left us stunned. We expected prosecutors to push back – to tell Tesla that deciding what’s relevant is their job, not the company’s. But they didn’t. Instead, they closed the case.

The hackers from TU Berlin pointed us to a study by the Netherlands Forensic Institute, an independent division of the ministry of justice and security. In October 2021, the NFI published findings showing it had successfully accessed the onboard memories of all major Tesla models. The researchers compared their results with accident cases in which police had requested data from Tesla. Their conclusion was that while Tesla formally complied with those requests, it omitted large volumes of data that might have proved useful.

Tesla’s credibility took a further hit in a report released by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in April 2024. The agency concluded that Tesla failed to adequately monitor whether drivers remain alert and ready to intervene while using its driver-assist systems. It reviewed 956 crashes, field data and customer communications, and pointed to “gaps in Tesla’s telematic data” that made it impossible to determine how often autopilot was active during crashes. If a vehicle’s antenna was damaged or it crashed in an area without network coverage, even serious accidents sometimes went unreported. Tesla’s internal statistics include only those crashes in which an airbag or other pyrotechnic system deployed – something that occurs in just 18% of police-reported cases. This means that the actual accident rate is significantly higher than Tesla discloses to customers and investors.

There’s more. Two years prior, the NHTSA had flagged something strange – something suspicious. In a separate report, it documented 16 cases in which Tesla vehicles crashed into stationary emergency vehicles. In each, autopilot disengaged “less than one second before impact” – far too little time for the driver to react. Critics warn that this behaviour could allow Tesla to argue in court that autopilot was not active at the moment of impact, potentially dodging responsibility.

The YouTuber Mark Rober, a former engineer at Nasa, replicated this behaviour in an experiment on 15 March 2025. He simulated a range of hazardous situations, in which the Model Y performed significantly worse than a competing vehicle. The Tesla repeatedly ran over a crash-test dummy without braking. The video went viral, amassing more than 14m views within a few days.

The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.

And so the doubts about Tesla’s integrity pile up. In the Tesla Files, we found emails and reports from a UK-based engineer who led Tesla’s Safety Incident Investigation programme, overseeing the company’s most sensitive crash cases. His internal memos reveal that Tesla deliberately limited documentation of particular issues to avoid the risk of this information being requested under subpoena. Although he pushed for clearer protocols and better internal processes, US leadership resisted – explicitly driven by fears of legal exposure.

We contacted Tesla multiple times with questions about the company’s data practices. We asked about the Meier and Schuster cases – and what it means when fatal crashes are marked “resolved” in Tesla’s internal system. We asked the company to respond to criticism from the US traffic authority and to the findings of Dutch forensic investigators. We also asked why Tesla doesn’t simply publish crash data, as Musk once promised to do, and whether the company considers it appropriate to withhold information from potential US court orders. Tesla has not responded to any of our questions.

Elon Musk boasts about the vast amount of data his cars generate – data that, he claims, will not only improve Tesla’s entire fleet but also revolutionise road traffic. But, as we have witnessed again and again in the most critical of cases, Tesla refuses to share it.

Tesla’s handling of crash data affects even those who never wanted anything to do with the company. Every road user trusts the car in front, behind or beside them not to be a threat. Does that trust still stand when the car is driving itself?

Internally, we called our investigation into Tesla’s crash data Black Box. At first, because it dealt with the physical data units built into the vehicles – so-called black boxes. But the devices Tesla installs hardly deserve the name. Unlike the flight recorders used in aviation, they’re not fireproof – and in many of the cases we examined, they proved useless.

Over time, we came to see that the name held a second meaning. A black box, in common parlance, is something closed to the outside. Something opaque. Unknowable. And while we’ve gained some insight into Tesla as a company, its handling of crash data remains just that: a black box. Only Tesla knows how Elon Musk’s vehicles truly work. Yet today, more than 5m of them share our roads.

Some names have been changed.

German retailers noticed a gaping hole of missing merchandise worth €4.95bn when they completed their inventories in 2024. That’s according to a new publication by the country’s EHI Retail Institute, based on a survey they carry out each year.

And while the overall loss is 3% more than in the previous year and a new record, the nearly €5bn is not entirely due to crime. The report estimates that approximately €4.2bn of losses are linked to theft, and the rest can be blamed on companies’ own mistakes, such as incorrect price labelling, and recording and valuation errors.

The survey collected responses from 98 companies, operating more than 17,000 shops in Germany.

The report suggests that shoplifting, including organised crime, cost approximately €2.95bn to the sector last year, an increase from €2.82bn in 2023.

Companies’ own employees were also behind losses of €890mn, and a loss of €370mn was attributed to theft by suppliers and service companies. 

According to EHI’s report, shoplifting, theft committed by customers, has been on the rise since the COVID-19 pandemic, despite police reports showing a 5% decline in reported cases in 2024.

“A total of 98% of all thefts go undetected in Germany, meaning that counting losses requires checking inventories for missing items,” the report said.

Shoplifting is increasingly controlled by organised crime

Professional theft rings have become a significant retail threat. The study estimates that, compared to last year, shoplifting linked to organised criminal activity increased by 5%. 

In 2024, organised activity accounted for around one-third of all the customers’ theft, or almost €1bn.

“Many retailers are certain that organised theft is becoming increasingly professional and will continue to increase,” the report said. 

It added: “Larger groups enter stores and mercilessly pack products. Security and staff usually have no chance. The unmanageable development of gang crime, its connection to large online sales platforms, and the lack of action against it are problems.”

Poverty could also fuel shoplifting

“Another challenge remains ‘ordinary’ customer theft, which is partly attributed to rising living costs and higher unemployment,” the report said.

Germany, the biggest economy in the EU, has been struggling with inflated energy prices and lower productivity, partly linked to the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The country’s manufacturing sector is now facing major uncertainties in global trade, coupled with elevated energy prices and supply chain issues. 

The ailing economy has contracted every other quarter since the end of 2022.

Housing costs rose to the extent that 12% of the population spent more than 40% of their income on it last year, according to the country’s statistics office. The EU average is 8.2%.

One-fifth of the people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, and though inflation has eased to around 2%, unemployment is at the highest level since late 2020, sitting at 6.2%, according to the Federal Employment Agency. The agency also said in its latest report that the number of unemployed people is nearing the 3 million mark for the first time in a decade.

Where does shoplifting occur the most?

Nearly €2bn worth of stolen goods were missing from food stores, and smaller supermarkets were the most targeted. Drugstores and hardware stores also saw significantly increased losses in some cases.

Meanwhile, official police records, which don’t cover each case, show a 5% decline in shoplifting cases for 2024, according to Police Crime Statistics data (Polizeiliche Kriminalstatistik).

This follows two dramatic increases in 2022 and 2023 when the reported cases showed a double-digit jump each year, rising by 34.3% and 23.6% respectively. However, the survey by EHI Retail Institute said that an estimated 98% of shoplifting cases go undetected.

In 2024, retailers’ damage, worth €4.2bn, also translated into losses for the federal budget.

“The economic damage resulting from theft due to lost sales tax amounts to approximately €570mn per year,” the report said, assuming that three-quarters of the stolen items are subject to a VAT rate of 19% and the remaining quarter to 7%.

Increased security budgets

Retail companies spend around 0.33% of their turnover on security measures, including staff training, camera surveillance, targeted use of store detectives, and anti-theft display units. The total cost of all related investments was around €3.1bn, bringing the total cost of theft and prevention to €7.3bn last year. 

This comes down to around 1.5% of the sales prices of the average purchase, meaning that customers had to shoulder the costs, too, the study concluded.

India’s aviation watchdog, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), in March had called out Air India Express for failing to replace engine parts on an Airbus A320, as mandated by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).

This revelation comes amid increased scrutiny in the country’s aviation sector following the deadly
Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad.

According to a Reuters report citing official records, the airline also submitted falsified documents to fake compliance.

Air India Express is a low-cost arm of Air India under the Tata Group and runs a fleet of over 115 planes, flying to more than 50 destinations with about 500 daily flights.

What issues were flagged by DGCA?

On March 18, the DGCA flagged issues with one of its Airbus planes, specifically aircraft VT-ATD, which flies domestic routes and international ones like Dubai and Muscat, per AirNav Radar.

The regulator warned parent company Air India for operating three Airbus planes with overdue escape slide checks and, in June, slammed the airline for serious pilot duty hour violations.

The DGCA in its notice said: “This condition, if not corrected, could lead to failure of affected parts, possibly resulting in high energy debris release, with consequent damage to, and reduced control of, the aeroplane.”

Back in 2023, EASA raised alarms about manufacturing flaws in CFM International’s LEAP-1A engines, ordering airlines to replace certain parts like seals and rotating components.

CFM International is the joint venture between GE Aerospace (formerly GE Aviation) and Safran Aircraft Engines, specialising in the design, manufacture, and support of commercial aircraft engines

A confidential March government memo, reviewed by Reuters, showed Air India Express didn’t make the required engine fixes on time for the A320.

Worse, it allegedly tampered with AMOS—the software airlines use to track maintenance—to falsely show the work was done.

Air India Express admitted the slip-up and said it’s put corrective measures in place, according to Reuters.

Investors wondering what to do with their pensions, investments and savings face an uncertain environment on various fronts as the unpredictability of Donald Trump, the US president, shakes up the markets.

Equities have been volatile and the dollar has had its worst start to the year since the 1970s due to uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs and geopolitical events. Fixed income is not playing its usual “stabilising” role in a portfolio to counter inflation concerns, with some wealth managers saying they no longer believe in the traditional 60-40 model of equities versus bonds.

Gold is still seen as a haven but is at a record high price. Cash doesn’t yield as much as it used to, while some investors are pondering the end of US exceptionalism that has helped drive American stocks to record highs.

This has led wealth managers to stress diversification as a way to hedge against the uncertainty and volatility gripping the markets this year.

“You have to think about going into the world more diversified. Is your portfolio really resilient to the increased risk of fat tails [extreme price movements]?” says Justin Onuekwusi, chief investment officer at St James’s Place, the wealth manager.

FT Money looks at various hot topics and speaks to chief investment officers at UK wealth managers to get their views on what investors need to consider when investing for the long term. 

Foreign exchange risk

The dollar index has fallen by more than 10 per cent since January, its worst start to the year since the end of the gold-backed Bretton Woods system in 1973. It is currently at its weakest level against rival currencies in more than three years. That poses a threat to investors’ portfolios, many of which have been overweight US equities or using US Treasuries as a safe haven.

Investors have cautioned that Trump’s stop-start tariff war, the US’s huge borrowing needs and concerns about the independence of the Federal Reserve have eroded the appeal of the greenback as a haven. Some have even argued that there is a significant threat to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, with demand for other assets such as gold on the rise.

Guy Foster, chief strategist at RBC Brewin Dolphin, says that some clients are, as a result, requesting more hedging in their portfolios against currency swings.

“Some investors who find hedging more difficult may choose to be underweight US equities in case of further dollar weakness, if their reference currency is not in dollars,” adds Caroline Simmons, chief investment officer at Quilter Cheviot, pointing out that while the S&P 500 has a positive return this year in dollar terms, it is negative for sterling investors.

Onuekwusi says currency risk is often overlooked, pointing out that holding non-sterling currencies is the second-biggest driver of risk for sterling-based investors after equities in portfolios.

However, hedging has downsides as well — it is an extra cost, and also means that when currency moves are in your favour you don’t benefit from them as much.

Overall, the outlook for the dollar affects the position wealth managers take in other areas of portfolios, including US and European equities, gold and other safe havens. Onuekwusi argues that US equities are more shielded from the risk of Trumponomics than the dollar and US bonds, as companies have global earnings that aren’t necessarily dictated by US politics.

Is the US still exceptional?

US equities have been a good bet for investors, with the S&P 500 returning more than 100 per cent in the past five years — provided they managed to hold their nerve during the dips. Sharp downward swings occurred during the bear market of 2022 and a period of uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs in April, for example.

The argument for US exceptionalism in financial markets is that US stocks and the economy are more likely to outperform than others. Yet there has been an argument for some time that the US market is both too concentrated on the so-called “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks and overvalued. While wealth managers think the US market will continue to perform well, many are now underweight US equities due in part to concerns over valuation.

Edward Park, chief asset management officer at Evelyn Partners, says the US is still one of the strongest drivers of earnings growth. “I would caution any view that the US equity market dominance is over. It’s a sectoral conversation and a relative conservation and the UK and Europe were undervalued so where we are now is probably fairly priced.”

Ed Smith, co-chief investment officer of Rathbones Investment Management, says that if it were a more typical market environment it would be overweight US equities, but given uncertainty over tariffs and fiscal spending, they are slightly underweight.

Simmons at Quilter Cheviot points out that the US market is still forecast to have higher earnings growth than Europe this year. But she thinks that the extreme outperformance of the US in recent years won’t continue as European economic growth plays catch up. Uncertainties this year, including whether Trump will impose more tariffs on trading partners and his “One Big Beautiful” tax bill, that is expected to increase the deficit, mean Quilter Cheviot is slightly underweight on the US. 

Foster says RBC Brewin Dolphin is also slightly underweight US equities, pointing to concerns that Trumponomics will weigh on US returns and certain stocks may be overvalued. However, he argues the bigger force is AI and that the US is the leader in that field, so strategic stock selection is called for. He thinks the companies that will benefit most will be the enablers, such as semiconductor and interconnect companies that help to build AI networks. 

Does the 60-40 rule for fixed income still apply?

The role of fixed income in a portfolio is changing, say wealth managers. Traditional portfolio construction theory calls for 60 per cent equities, 40 per cent bonds, as a rough rule of thumb.

Following this theory, bonds are meant to pay a stable income — due to their yields, which move inversely to prices — and they should have a negative correlation with equities, meaning at least one part of your portfolio is doing well at any one time. However, this theory received a knock in 2022, when equity markets performed poorly and inflation also rose, meaning both asset classes suffered at the same time.

Now, managers are not convinced it is the best model for the future. “We think that the golden age of the 60-40 portfolio that lasted from the late 1990s to 2022 is over,” says Smith. With more geopolitical uncertainty ahead, Rathbones has significantly shortened the duration of bonds it buys to just 2.5 years on average. Those shorter-dated bonds, Smith says, still offer a level of negative correlation with equities, so will have a stabilising effect on the portfolio.

Kate Morrissey, head of asset allocation at Evelyn Partners, describes the new normal as more “60 per cent equities and 40 per cent non-equities, rather than fixed income”. That could include hedge funds or gold.

“We’re entering quite a complicated growth-inflation policy rate mix,” she adds. As a result, Evelyn is also limiting its exposure to shorter-dated bonds.

Foster at RBC Brewin Dolphin describes the current environment as more of a “return to normal” after the financial crisis ushered in an unusual period where investors weren’t prioritising fighting inflation. Now, he says, “You’re less confident your bond element will perform well when equities perform badly.”

SJP’s Onuekwusi argues that bonds are attractive compared to equities on a risk-adjusted basis, but he recommends spreading rate risk across different regions, to avoid the impact of one country having a wobble. 

Simmons argues that fixed income still has a “risk off” and diversification role, but since 2022 it no longer works as an inflation hedge. It’s also relatively cheap, she argues. “The valuation of fixed income is really attractive at the moment, so if the shocks don’t happen you still get a decent return, which you weren’t getting pre-2022.”

Many wealth managers say they are underweight corporate bonds, however, as they remain expensive relative to government and index-linked bonds, with the compensation for taking credit risk not as high as it should be given economic uncertainty.

Is it a good time to buy UK equities?

UK equities have not fared nearly as well as the US market since the pandemic, returning just over 40 per cent. Pension funds have been reducing their exposure to the UK, leading to efforts by the government to encourage more domestic investment. Global investors shunned UK assets after Brexit, though there is starting to be a reallocation — and wealth managers say the UK looks cheap after its unloved period.

“UK equities are really quite attractive relative to other markets,” notes Onuekwusi, pointing to political stability as one point in their favour. “It’s unlikely we’ll have five prime ministers in the next five years.”

“UK stocks look pretty good value,” agrees Foster.

While asset owners who sold UK equities after Brexit are starting to come back and investors look at where to reallocate their overweight in the US, Onuekwusi says the UK stock market is still underowned. But given that three-quarters of FTSE 100 revenue comes from overseas, he adds: “We do like UK equities, which is different from saying we like the UK economy.”

Simmons has a similar caveat: “It’s cheap for a reason, because it’s got lower growth.”

Some wealth managers caution against thinking about country specific allocations. Morrissey argues that the rotation from the US to Europe and the UK is not about the relative macro outlook for the regions, but about the composition of the markets and a move from growth to value stocks. 

Yet wealth managers are divided over how much of an overweight, if any, UK investors should have in their home market.

UK wealth managers are on average overexposed to domestic equities, holding between 20-30 per cent in UK stocks, compared to just under 4 per cent on the MSCI World. 

Smith at Rathbones thinks this is about right, arguing that sterling-based clients should have about 20-25 per cent of overall equity exposure in the UK.

Others are not so sure. Evelyn Partners has been reducing its UK exposure over recent years. It now stands at about a fifth, less than its peers. But in the coming years Park says he expects they will move more towards the MSCI World weighting.

“Time has shown that a global approach is best for clients,” says Morrissey. 

Is gold the best safe haven asset?

Central banks have been buying gold in record levels due to concerns over dollar strength and geopolitical instability, leading to the metal overtaking the euro as the second-largest reserve holding behind the US currency.

The theory that gold protects against inflation and outperforms when other markets are going south has helped the price hit record highs.

RBC Brewin Dolphin is positive on gold, though it has reduced its overweight this year. “Gold has been a beneficiary of de-dollarisation and other precious metals don’t offer the same dynamics,” says Foster.  

Morrissey says gold remains “an excellent diversifier” in a portfolio. The diversification in reserves away from the dollar supports the price, she argues, while it also takes tail risk away from big global market events such as wars.

Evelyn Partners is overweight gold, holding 4.5 per cent across its portfolios, compared to what it believes is 2 per cent across the wider wealth management industry. 

Yet wealth managers are divided over whether the gold price is a sign of overvalue or of a structural shift in demand. Smith at Rathbones thinks increased demand from sovereign wealth funds and other institutions is likely to stay.

But Simmons at Quilter Cheviot argues that a lot of gold buyers come from the retail space, which can be “fickle”. While the precious metal feels like a safe haven to retail investors, she says, “the problem is it is very hard to forecast as it’s not adhering to normal drivers”.

Onuekwusi agrees that gold is hard to value. “It’s really hard to make a case for gold as a new investment today, given how much it’s moved and how quickly.”

What other assets might protect my portfolio?

Some wealth managers are using hedge funds as a diversifier in the face of inflation risk. Relative value or event-driven hedge funds look to benefit from corporate activity or mismatches in valuation between assets, so they can make returns even when the macro outlook worsens.

Macro or CTA hedge funds, which follow a big trend such as the dollar weakening, can generate performance even if it causes other assets to suffer. Quilter Cheviot buys both types of hedge fund for this reason.  

Along with macro hedge funds, Evelyn uses gold as one of its main portfolio stabilisers in place of fixed income. Meanwhile with the dollar proving more volatile, others such as SJP are using the Japanese yen as a haven when equity markets fall.

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Brussels has said it will build up emergency stockpiles of critical minerals and cable repair kits, as concerns grow over the EU’s vulnerability to attack.

“The EU faces an increasingly complex and deteriorating risk landscape marked by rising geopolitical tensions, including conflict, the mounting impacts of climate change, environmental degradation, and hybrid and cyber threats,’’ the European Commission said in a draft document setting out a stockpiling strategy, seen by the Financial Times.

Member states should co-ordinate backup supplies of food, medicines and even nuclear fuel, the EU executive said. It would also accelerate work on EU-level stockpiles of items such as cable repair modules “to ensure prompt recovery from energy or optical cable disruptions” and commodities such as rare earths and permanent magnets, which are crucial for energy and defence systems.

Several instances of potential sabotage to underwater communication cables and gas pipelines in recent years have caused concern about the vulnerability of critical infrastructure.

The strategy is part of a wider push by the EU to improve the security and resilience of the 27-country bloc. Last month, General Carsten Breuer, the German chief of defence, warned that Russia could attack an EU member state within the next four years.

The higher-risk environment was driven by ‘‘increased activity from hacktivists, cybercriminals and state-sponsored groups”, the document said.

The EU is also more susceptible than many other regions to the effects of climate change as it is warming twice as fast as the global average. Wildfires in Crete forced 5,000 people to evacuate the island this week.

In a report commissioned by the EU in October, former Finnish president Sauli Niinistö said that security should be considered a “public good” and called for a preparedness mindset.

On stockpiling, he said that Brussels should “define targets to ensure minimum levels of preparedness in different crisis scenarios, including in the event of an armed aggression or the large-scale disruption of global supply chains”.

The EU in March also advised households to stockpile essential supplies to survive at least 72 hours of crisis.

The bloc already maintains a fleet of firefighting planes and helicopters, a medical evacuation plane, and items such as field hospitals and critical medical supplies across 22 EU countries as part of its emergency response effort for natural disasters.

But the commission said it would establish a “stockpiling network” to improve co-ordination between EU countries. There was “limited common understanding of which essential goods are needed for crisis preparedness against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving risk landscape”, it said in the document.

It would also start compiling regularly updated lists of essential supplies tailored to each region and crisis type. Member states should better incentivise the private sector to help with stockpiling, such as through tax credits, it said.

The bloc should also work with allies on “shared warehousing” and co-ordinate better on managing resources and dual-use infrastructure with Nato.

The need for investment in critical stockpiling would also be considered in proposals for its new multiannual budget, which are due to be put forward later this month.

The draft document is due to be published next week and could change ahead of its presentation.