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The Post Office’s embattled chief executive has been issued with a final chance to submit the 80-page investigation into his conduct before a committee of MPs look to formally summon the report.

After a number of lapsed deadlines to provide the report, Nick Read has been told by the Business and Trade Committee chair he has a deadline of 9am on Tuesday morning.

If it is not submitted by then, the committee will discuss formally summoning the document, an infrequently used and limited power retained by MP committees when they are unsuccessful in their normal requests.

The existence of the report came as a bombshell last week.

It had been thought that the former Post Office chairman Henry Staunton, sacked earlier this year by business secretary Kemi Badenoch, had been subject to investigation.

But at the committee hearing last week, Mr Staunton said he was only mentioned in one paragraph and the report was “a big investigation into Nick”.

The report was compiled by a former human resources (HR) director and whistle-blower and said Mr Read threatened to resign because he was unhappy with his pay and made accusations of bullying. According to a Sunday Times report, Mr Read sought a £1.1m pay package.

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Mr Read has denied he made resignation threats.

Sub-postmaster victims of the Post Office’s faulty Horizon software have been seeking redress after hundreds were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud and many more lost their businesses and were in financial and personal ruin after the Fujitsu-built accounting software wrongfully documented monetary shortfalls.

The postmasters’ fight for justice had been increasingly overshadowed by corporate wrangling of the Post Office.

Read more:
Who is Henry Staunton, the City grandee who took on Kemi Badenoch?

After he was removed from his post, Mr Staunton said he had been told by the Department for Business and Trade to slow down the processing of compensation.

In documents exclusively obtained by Sky News, he called for the Post Office to be “removed completely” from the compensation process and for it to be put under the control of postmasters due to the “deep dysfunction” within the organisation.

It’s understood the chair of the Business and Trade Committee, Labour MP Liam Byrne, requested the HR investigation be sent to the committee by last Thursday, and when the deadline passed, by Monday afternoon.

A Post Office spokesperson responded: “Post Office has previously and will continue to correspond with the committee, and any requests that it may have, in a private manner.”

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Jaguar Land Rover staff home for another day as company reels from cyber attack

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Jaguar Land Rover staff home for another day as company reels from cyber attack

Staff of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) have been told to stay home for a further day, Sky News understands, as the carmaker struggles to recover from a cyber attack.

Employees of the British company have now been told to remain off work until Wednesday. Previously, workers were directed not to return until Tuesday.

A decision on whether to bring staff back or not is being taken day by day, Sky News understands.

Money blog: One thing you should never have on your CV

JLR shut down its systems when it noticed the cyber attack on Tuesday last week, saying it had been “severely disrupted”.

Its retail activities were also impacted, but there was no evidence at the time that “any customer data has been stolen”, though JLR is reported to have flagged the risk of a data breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Thousands of production staff at the UK’s largest car manufacturing sites in Halewood, Merseyside, and Solihull and Wolverhampton in the West Midlands are still being paid.

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Jaguar Land Rover is the UK’s latest major company to face a cyber incident, after Marks & Spencer had its operations disrupted for months.

After an attack over Easter, the high street chain only resumed click and collect services in August.

Attacks on the Co-op and Harrods were detected more swiftly, and had less of an impact.

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Jaguar Land Rover paused shipments to the US in April in response to President Trump’s new tariffs. A US-UK deal was subsequently agreed.

Reporting from The Sunday Times said JLR operations could be disrupted for “most of September” or worse.

On Wednesday, a group of English-speaking hackers claimed responsibility for the JLR attack via a Telegram platform called Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, an amalgamation of the names of hacking groups Scattered Spider, Lapsus$ and ShinyHunters.

Scattered Spider, a loose group of relatively young hackers, were behind the Co-Op, Harrods and M&S attacks.

JLR suppliers Evtec, WHS Plastics, SurTec and OPmobility have had to temporarily lay off staff, impacting roughly 6,000 workers.

A spokesperson for JLR said on Monday: “We continue to work around the clock to restart our global applications in a controlled and safe manner.

“We are working with third-party cybersecurity specialists and alongside law enforcement.

“We are very sorry for the disruption this incident has caused. Our retail partners remain open and we will continue to provide further updates.”

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US tech and finance giants to join Trump on second UK state visit

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US tech and finance giants to join Trump on second UK state visit

The boss of Nvidia, the chipmaker which has become the world’s most valuable public company, is among the corporate chiefs lining up to accompany President Donald Trump on next week’s state visit to the UK.

Sky News has learnt that Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive who has presided over the stratospheric rise in its valuation to more than $4trn, is expected to attend a state banquet at Windsor Castle hosted by King Charles III during the trip.

Sources said on Monday that Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI; Larry Fink, chairman and chief executive of asset management behemoth BlackRock; and Stephen Schwarzman, the boss of private equity giant Blackstone, were also expected to be among the attendees.

Money blog: One thing you should never have on your CV

Tim Cook, the Apple chief executive, has also been invited and may attend the state banquet, the sources added, while Jamie Dimon, the JP Morgan chief, is understood to be unable to make the trip to Britain because of existing diary commitments.

The attendance of figures such as Mr Huang and, potentially, Mr Altman, will fuel expectations that a wave of corporate deals and investments in the UK will be unveiled during President Trump’s unprecedented second state visit.

Closer collaboration between the two countries’ nuclear power industries is expected to be one of the main focal points of trade-related discussions during the three-day trip, as well as artificial intelligence and the broader technology industry.

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President Trump’s visit will, however, come amid tensions over his tariff regime, with continuing uncertainty about the impact on British manufacturing sectors, including steel.

There are also continuing tensions between the UK government and major drugmakers over pricing, with the US administration pressuring pharmaceutical companies to slash the price of prescription medicines in the US.

An Nvidia spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on our executives’ travel schedules.”

BlackRock, Blackstone, Apple and JP Morgan declined to comment, while OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

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Economic crisis in France goes beyond its overspending problem

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Economic crisis in France goes beyond its overspending problem

Once upon a time if folks wanted to pinpoint the most economically-vulnerable country in Europe – the one most likely to face a crisis – they would invariably point to Greece or to Italy.

They were the nations with the eye-waveringly high bond yields, signalling how reluctant financiers were to lend them money.

Today, however, all of that has changed. The country invariably highlighted as Europe’s problem child is France.

Indeed, look at the interest rates investors charge European nations and France faces even higher interest rates than Greece.

And these economic travails are central to understanding the political difficulties France is facing right now, with one prime minister after another resigning in the face of a parliamentary setback.

Read more:
French PM looks set to lose confidence vote

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It mostly comes back to the state of the public finances. France’s deficit is among the highest in the developed world right now.

Everyone spent enormous sums during the pandemic. But France has struggled, more than nearly everyone else, to bring its spending back down and, hence, to reduce its deficit. Successive budget plans have been announced and then shelved in the face of political resistance.

France’s government spends more, as a percentage of gross domestic product, than any other developed economy.

The government’s most recent budget plans called for what most people would see as relatively minor spending cuts – barely more than a couple of percentage points off spending, after which France would still be the third biggest spender in the world.

But even these cuts were too controversial for the French people, or rather their politicians.

Yet another prime minister looks likely to fall victim to an unsuccessful bill. Deja vu all over again, you might say.

A deeper issue is that the latest worsening in France’s public finances isn’t just a sign of political resistance, or indeed of a nation that can’t bear to take the unpalatable fiscal medicine others (for instance Greece or the UK) have long been ingesting.

For years, France could rely on a phenomenon many other developed economies couldn’t: strong productivity growth.

The country’s people might not work as many hours as everyone else, but they sure created a lot of economic output when they were at their desks.

However, in recent years, French productivity has disappointed. Indeed, output per hour growth in France has dropped well below other nations, which in turn means less tax revenue and, lo and behold, the deficit gets bigger and bigger.

All of which is why so many people, including Prime Minister Francois Bayrou himself, have warned that France is at risk of a market meltdown.

In a recent speech, he pointed to the example of Liz Truss and her 2022 mini-Budget. Beware the market, he said. You never know how close you are to a crisis.

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