Amazon workers begin Black Friday strike action, as UK consumer confidence picks up

Newsflash: Gambling group Entain has reached angreement to pay over £600m to resolve an investigation into alleged bribery related to a scandal at its former Turkish business.

Entain, which owns Ladbrokes and Coral, has reached a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) with the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), over historic corporate misconduct at its former Turkish online betting business.

Entain will pay a financial penalty plus disgorgement of profits totalling £585m – which matches the sum it set aside in August to cover the issue. It is also making a charitable donation of £20m and will pay £10m towards HMRC and the CPS’s costs.

Entain’s chairman, Barry Gibson, says:

“This legacy matter concerns a business which was sold by a former management team six years ago.

The Group has changed immeasurably since these events took place, and the DPA process has provided a reminder of the stark differences between the GVC of yesterday and the Entain of today.

We are committed to continuing our journey towards operating only in regulated markets, and are now widely recognised as a best-in-class, responsible operator with the highest levels of corporate governance across all aspects of our business.”

Entain will now seek final judicial approval from the Court on 5 December 2023. The DPA is a voluntary agreement, and Entain says it would “fully resolve the HMRC investigation into these matters insofar as they concern the Company and the Group”.

The investigation included potential breaches of section 7 of the UK’s Bribery Act, which relates to companies failing to prevent an individual taking part in bribes that benefit the business.

The owner of the Mirror and Express has been granted legal permission to implement a financial move to reassure shareholders that they will continue to be paid dividends, weeks after the newspaper group axed 450 jobs in a major cost cutting drive.

Reach, which also owns scores of regional UK titles including the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, has received approval from a specialist court to cancel the £605m credit balance of the company’s share premium account.

When Reach announced the proposed maneuvre, which was approved by shareholders at a vote held at a general meeting earlier this month, the company said it would allow it “to give reasonable assurance” that the business would be able to continue to make “distributions to shareholders”.

While the company said at the time that the financial engineering would not involve any immediate payment or return of a capital to shareholders, or a change to the dividend policy, it would result in “the creation of distributable reserves of the same amount”.

On Friday, the Insolvency and Companies Court approved the capital reduction plan with Judge Sally Barber ruling that she was satisfied that following the move there was “no real likelihood” of Reach being “unable to discharge” debt payments as they become due.

Times are tough at Big Four accountancy group KPMG.

The FT reports today that KPMG has frozen pay for around 12,000 employees in the UK, as demand for services across the firm slows. Bonuses are also be cut, as the slowdown i dealmaking this year hits revenues.

KPMG had previously frozen pay for its deal advisory staff, where 125 jobs were being cut, but it has now decided to prioritise pay rises for employees who are getting promoted. More here.

Back on Black Friday spending, lender Nationwide has reported that its customers had made 3.22 million transactions by noon today – which is 5% more than a year ago.

It’s also 14% more than a typical Friday.

Mark Nalder, director of payment strategy at Nationwide Building Society, explains:

“Many people have spent the morning looking for Black Friday discounts.

The number of purchases has been in line with what we predicted – up five per cent on last year and 14 per cent on what we see on a typical Friday. Historically the upcoming lunchtime period has been the peak time for spending as people search for bargains either online or on the high street during their break.”

Seperately, Barclays has reported that transations in the last week are higher than a year ago, as retailers continued to launch sales earlier in the month.

Barclays found that transactions in the last week were 1.4% higher than last year, and also 2.25% higher than a month ago.

Marc Pettican, head of Barclaycard Payments said:

“Over the last few years we’ve seen Black Friday sales arrive earlier and earlier, with shoppers spreading their spending over a longer period of time. Although the cost-of-living may be impacting some shoppers’ spending on non-essential items, many are still taking the opportunity to bag a Black Friday bargain. No doubt this will be welcome news to retailers who may have anticipated a slower November as shoppers’ budgets continue to be squeezed.

“It’s also encouraging to see that transaction volumes this week reflect a much busier shopping period than a regular week within the year, too. Retailers will undoubtedly hope that sales remain strong throughout today and over the weekend.”

Over on Oxford Street, classic British band Madness have shown up for the reopening of HMV’s store.

The historic Oxford Street outlet is opening again after a four year hiatus, after HMV fell into administration in 2019.

The retailer was rescued from insolvency by Canadian Doug Putman’s Sunrise Records business. Putman has said he hopes the shop can have “crowds which will shut down the street” again.

As well as Madness, other acts including the South African singer Baby Queen and the rock bands Hard-Fi and the Reytons were performing today.

Putman told the Guardian that HMV, which currently has more than 100 stores across the UK, had seen total sales rise this year, with sales of CDs up for the first time in more than a decade.

Putman said CDs had regained appeal because they were now relatively cheap and there was also a “doubling down on trying to buy everything [a band] comes out with”. Taylor Swift’s album reissues are selling across all formats, for example.

More here:

Anyone caught up in the HSBC technical problems should keep a record of any extra costs they incur, says Sam Richardson, deputy editor of Which? Money.

Richardson explains:

“This HSBC outage will cause a real headache for a lot of its customers. In the worst cases it could prevent people making essential payments such as rent and bills, but it also falls on Black Friday, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, where many people will be looking to make significant savings on big-ticket items.

“We strongly advise customers that have been left out of pocket to keep evidence of extra expenses they may have incurred as a result of the outage, so they can be claimed back from HSBC.

“People want a bank they can depend on, and if IT outages become a regular occurrence, consumers could be tempted to vote with their feet and switch to an alternative provider – particularly with a lot of tempting switching incentives on offer at the moment.

“Having a back-up bank account or credit card can help, by giving consumers a way to make essential payments during outages like these.”

Today is turning into a bleak Friday for UK computer games developer Team17.

Older readers may remember Team17 from its rather fine 1990s classic Worms (in which your small group of worms, armed with guns, missiles, and bespoke kit like a holy hand grenade or exploding sheep, fought other wriggly platoons).

Anyway, things aren’t going so well this year.

Team17 told shareholders this morning that some titles are not meeting sales expectations, while it has been “too slow” to address some project overspends.

Overall, the company insists that it is well positioned, and expects revenues this year to be modestly ahead of current market expectations.

But investors have sent its shares down by over 40% today.

That’s a blow to founder Debbie Bestwick, who still owns a fifth of the company. Her stake has fallen by almost £40m today. Bestwick announced in March she would step down by the end of the year.

The problems at HSBC UK are understood to have been caused by an “internal systems issue”, says PA Media.

Elsewhere in the UK this morning, Boots is paying £670m to offload its £4.8bn pension scheme to Legal & General.

The buy-in deal insures all 53,000 members in the Boots Pension Scheme, making it the largest single transaction of its kind ever in the UK, my colleague Sarah Butler explains.

To facilitate the deal, Boots will bring forward about £170m of already committed payments to the Scheme and has committed to pay extra contributions expected to be approximately £500 million.

The deal could help revive a process for the sale of Boots by its US owner Walgreens. An earlier sales plan was abandoned in June last year, and is thought to have been partly scotched by potential buyers’ concerns about Boots’ guarantees on the pension scheme that were thought to be worth billions of pounds.

John Ralfe, the independent pensions expert who once oversaw Boots’ pension scheme, said the buy-out deal was “good news for members” as there benefits would be unaffected and they were now supported by a “properly capitalised and regulated business.”

Credit rating agency S&P Global has weighed in on Jeremy Hunt’s autumn statement

They point out that the tax cuts announced by the chancellor will not held rebuild the UK’s diminished fiscal headroom (Hunt having spent most of a windfall from lower borrowing and expected higher tax receipts).

S&P Globl point out that the public finances will benefit if the UK economy does better than expected next year, but add:

“Stabilizing or reducing public debt levels will remain a key challenge.”

Thousands of HSBC customers have reported that they have been unable to access its online and mobile banking services on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year as consumers swoop on Black Friday retail deals, my colleague Mark Sweney writes.

More here.