Business blog

Entain, owner of Ladbrokes and Bwin, has raised the lower end of its earnings guidance even as the betting company faces tighter regulation and difficulty maintaining growth driven by a surge in online gaming during 2020 lockdowns.

The company on Thursday narrowed its guidance for full-year earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation from between £850m to £900m to a range of £875m to £885m.

The betting group benefited from “strong growth” in all its markets online during 2021, except Germany where new gambling laws require players to adhere to limits on how much they deposit and stake in online

Microsoft’s $75bn bid for Activision Blizzard propelled Sony to its biggest one-day drop since the global financial crisis, with shares in the Japanese entertainment conglomerate closing 12.8 per cent lower on Wednesday.

Overnight news of the deal also triggered a wave of buying across Japan’s gaming sector, with shares in Square Enix and Capcom rising by more than 3.5 per cent on speculation that they could become acquisition targets of Sony or as part of a broader land-grab.

Shares in Nintendo and Konami rose

Treasuries sold off on Tuesday, dragging equity markets lower and worsening an ongoing downturn for technology shares, as traders looked ahead to interest rate rises.

The yield on the 10-year US Treasury note, which rises as the price of the global government debt benchmark falls, hit a two-year high of 1.831 per cent as prospects of higher rates on cash deposits and sustained inflation made the security’s fixed-interest payments less appealing.

Meanwhile, the yield on the two-year Treasury note, which closely tracks interest rate expectations, rose 0.07 percentage points to 1.04 per cent — a level not seen since February

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