United Kingdom

Britain's economy recorded a second quarter of strong growth as it recovered from last year's shallow recession but it lost momentum as it entered the second half of 2024, suggesting the Bank of England remains on course to cut interest rates again, Reuters reported. Gross domestic product grew 0.6% in the second quarter of 2024 after a 0.7% expansion in the first quarter which was the fastest in more than two years, the Office for National Statistics said.

A former investment firm director has been handed stringent bankruptcy restrictions extended to the maximum of 15 years “to prevent him causing further harm to the public,” the U.K.’s Insolvency Service said in a statement on 12 August, the International Adviser reported. Derby-based Andrew Paul Bird defrauded 13 different parties in an investment scam between 2011 and 2016. The Official Receiver discovered he had knowingly misled investors and exposed them to the risk of losing money for his personal gain, the statement said.

British consumer price inflation increased for the first time this year in July, official figures showed on Wednesday, but the rise was smaller than expected as services prices — closely watched by the Bank of England — rose less rapidly, Reuters reported. The annual rate of consumer price inflation increased to 2.2% after two months at the Bank of England's 2% target, the Office for National Statistics said, coming in slightly below the median 2.3% forecast in a Reuters poll of economists. Sterling fell sharply against the U.S.

The owner of the beauty brand Avon in the U.K., Europe and Latin America has filed for bankruptcy as it tries to off-load more than $1bn of debt, including millions of dollars in liabilities linked to lawsuits alleging that talc in its products caused cancer, The Guardian reported. Avon Products Inc., a subsidiary of Brazil’s Natura, which bought Avon’s non-North American trading businesses in 2020, has filed for chapter 11, the American version of administration. API said that the process would allow it to address its debt obligations in an “orderly manner”.

As Sir Keir Starmer seeks to deliver economic growth, the worklessness crisis he inherited from Rishi Sunak is getting markedly worse, The Telegraph reported. Around 9.5m people of working age are neither in work nor looking for work – they are economically inactive, in the parlance of the Office for National Statistics. That is terrible news for the Prime Minister, who will struggle to drive up GDP if so many of the nation’s adults are not even interested in working. The figures also show the causes of another crisis: migration levels.

Bharti Global has agreed to buy a major stake in BT Group Plc, a deal that will bolster the Indian company’s international expansion while giving the British carrier more investor stability, Bloomberg reported. Bharti, an affiliate of conglomerate Bharti Enterprises, is buying the 24.5% stake from shareholder Altice UK, part of Patrick Drahi’s troubled telecommunications empire. Drahi has been selling off assets to pay down debt and the BT stake is among his most valuable.