Business blog

The UK accounting regulator has extended its investigation into PwC over its audits of Babcock International to include the defence company’s accounts for 2019 and 2020.

The Financial Reporting Council said the decision to investigate the audits was made last month following Babcock’s announcement of a review into contract profitability and its balance sheet.

The review resulted in about 140 adjustments totalling about £2bn that related to a combination of errors in previous accounts, changes in estimates and an updated accounting policy.

Britain’s second biggest defence contractor had announced the review last January as part of a sweeping overhaul under

Novak Djokovic is to be deported from Australia after the country’s federal court upheld a government decision to cancel his visa.

A hastily convened hearing on Sunday dismissed Djokovic’s challenge against the deportation order, with the three judge panel ruling unanimously in favour of the government’s action.

The deportation order is the second the world’s top-ranked men’s tennis player has faced in Australia in as many weeks, as he sought to stay in Melbourne to defend his Australian Open title. The tournament begins on Monday.

Apart from a short adjournment to consider any additional orders, Djokovic is expected to be

US employment lawyer Scott Cruz’s phone has been ringing off the hook in recent weeks as clients scramble to put in place obligatory “vaccine or test” policies for all workers.

He has been fielding very different calls since Thursday, when the Supreme Court blocked President Joe Biden’s federal mandate and handed control back to companies and states to decide their own Covid-19 inoculation regimes.

Small and medium-sized companies are “breathing a sigh of relief”, according to Cruz, who works for law firm Greensfelder in Chicago. While the mandate was a “great source of work” for people in his profession, “for

Terry Smith has mayo on his mind — and presumably on his sandwiches and salads. The investor is annoyed that Unilever’s management spends its time pondering the “purpose” of Hellmann’s mayonnaise instead of making more money.

You can see why Smith is upset. His Fundsmith platform has delivered stellar returns to retail investors since inception. But a long streak of outperformance was broken last year thanks to a handful of weak stocks.

Unilever, where Fundsmith is the 10th-biggest shareholder, was one of the culprits. Smith complained in his annual letter this week that the company’s management was “obsessed with publicly

Asos said it would move to the main market of the London Stock Exchange after 20 years on Aim, as the online clothes retailer reported sales growth despite supply chain challenges.

The seller of party clothes said demand had been “volatile” in the four months to December 31 as a result of Covid but sales grew by 5 per cent in line with guidance.

Asos, which listed on the Alternative Investment Market in 2001 and has been one of AIM’s largest companies, said it planned to move to the main market by the end of February 2022, as it seeks

US consumer price growth is expected to have risen at the fastest pace in nearly four decades in December, as the Federal Reserve worries about the threat of elevated inflation and its consequences for the economic recovery.

The consumer price index (CPI) is estimated to have increased at a 7 per cent annual clip last month, a step up from the 6.8 per cent rate registered in November, according to a consensus forecast compiled by Bloomberg.

However, month-over-month price gains are expected to have moderated to 0.4 per cent between November and December, down from 0.8 per cent in the