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Sajid Javid, the former chancellor of the exchequer, has been approached about taking a role at Shein, the online fashion giant which is progressing plans for London’s biggest stock market float for years.

Sky News has learnt that Mr Javid is among a number of senior City figures who have held talks with Donald Tang, Shein’s executive chairman, in recent weeks.

City sources said that if the appointment of Mr Javid proceeded, it could see him either join Shein’s board or become an adviser to the Chinese-founded company.

They added that Baroness Fairhead, the former BBC Trust chair, was also on a list of candidates drawn up by headhunters advising Shein.

One person close to the company said the identities of those being approached reflected both the seriousness with which Shein was taking the issue of corporate governance and the extent of its focus on a London listing.

Since leaving the government, Mr Javid has taken a role with Centricus, an investment firm which tried unsuccessfully to structure an offer for Chelsea Football Club in 2022.

A spokesman for him, who had insisted that Mr Javid would stand for re-election in his Bromsgrove seat a week before publicly announcing the opposite, did not respond to a request for comment from Sky News.

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In recent weeks, several reports have repeated Sky News’ revelation that Shein has turned its attention to a London flotation amid difficulties in securing approval from US regulators.

An initial public offering would be likely to value Shein at around £50bn or more.

Paris is also understood to have been considered by the company as a possible listing venue.

Earlier this year, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, held talks with Donald Tang, Shein’s executive chairman, to persuade the company to commit to what would be one of London’s biggest-ever corporate flotations.

The meeting between Mr Hunt and Mr Tang underlined the importance that British officials are attaching to the idea of trumping the US in an effort to land the Shein IPO.

If it proceeded, Shein could become the London Stock Exchange’s second-largest IPO in history, behind the 2011 stock market debut of Glencore International, the commodities trading and mining group.

Mr Tang has also met executives from the LSE as well as more junior ministers as part of its IPO preparations.

Shein filed documents for a New York listing last year, but has grown concerned that its application may be rejected by the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley are advising on the deal.

Based in Singapore, Shein has become one of the world’s largest online fashion retailers, although its growth has not been untroubled amid mounting concerns about labour standards.

Last year, Sky News revealed that Shein was in talks to buy the British fashion brand Missguided from Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group.

While the transaction itself was worth only a modest sum, retail analysts said that it could pave the way for Shein to build a more meaningful profile in the UK, potentially through a broader collaboration with Frasers.

Founded in China in 2012, Shein was valued at over $100bn last year, at which point it was worth more than H&M and Zara’s parent company, Inditex, combined.

The company’s valuation was slashed to $66bn as part of a share sale last year.

Shein operates in more than 150 countries.

It has also struck an agreement with SPARC Group, a joint venture between the Ted Baker-owner ABG and Simon Property Group, a US shopping mall operator.

Under that deal, SPARC’s Forever 21 fashion brand gained distribution on the Shein platform, which boasts 150m users globally.

Shein acquired a one-third stake in SPARC Group, while SPARC Group also took an undisclosed minority interest in Shein.

The LSE’s efforts to court Shein come during a challenging period for the City as a listing venue for large multinationals, with ARM Holdings, the UK-based chip designer, opting to float in New York rather than London.

Other companies, such as the gambling operator Flutter Entertainment and drug company Indivior, are planning to shift their primary listings to the US, citing higher valuations and more liquid markets.

In recent weeks, however, London has landed the prospective IPOs of Raspberry Pi, the personal computer maker, and AOTI, a medical technology provider.

Mr Hunt last week hosted a summit at Dorneywood attended by technology companies looking at listing in the UK.

Shein declined to comment.

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Chair candidates battle to check in at Premier Inn-owner Whitbread

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Chair candidates battle to check in at Premier Inn-owner Whitbread

Two chairs of FTSE-100 companies are vying to succeed Adam Crozier at the top of Whitbread, the London-listed group behind the Premier Inn hotel chain.

Sky News has learnt that Christine Hodgson, who chairs water company Severn Trent, and Andrew Martin, chair of the testing and inspection group Intertek, are the leading contenders for the Whitbread job.

Mr Crozier, who has chaired the leisure group since 2018, is expected to step down later this year.

The search, which has been taking place for several months, is expected to conclude in the coming weeks, according to one City source.

Ms Hodgson has some experience of the leisure industry, having served on the board of Ladbrokes Coral Group until 2017, while Mr Martin was a senior executive at the contract caterer Compass Group and finance chief at the travel agent First Choice Holidays.

Under Mr Crozier’s stewardship, Whitbread has been radically reshaped, selling its Costa Coffee subsidiary to The Coca-Cola Company in 2019 for nearly £4bn.

The company has also seen off an activist campaign spearheaded by Elliott Advisers, while Mr Crozier orchestrated the appointment of Dominic Paul, its chief executive, following Alison Brittain’s retirement.

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It said last year that it sees potential to grow the network from 86,000 UK bedrooms to 125,000 over the next decade or so.

Mr Crozier is one of Britain’s most seasoned boardroom figures, and now chairs BT Group and Kantar, the market research and data business backed by Bain Capital and WPP Group.

He previously ran the Football Association, ITV and – in between – Royal Mail Group.

On Friday, shares in Whitbread closed at £25.41, giving the company a market capitalisation of about £4.5bn.

Whitbread declined to comment this weekend.

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Bank chiefs to Reeves: Ditch ring-fencing to boost UK economy

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Bank chiefs to Reeves: Ditch ring-fencing to boost UK economy

The bosses of four of Britain’s biggest banks are secretly urging the chancellor to ditch the most significant regulatory change imposed after the 2008 financial crisis, warning her its continued imposition is inhibiting UK economic growth.

Sky News has obtained an explosive letter sent this week by the chief executives of HSBC Holdings, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group and Santander UK in which they argue that bank ring-fencing “is not only a drag on banks’ ability to support business and the economy, but is now redundant”.

The CEOs’ letter represents an unprecedented intervention by most of the UK’s major lenders to abolish a reform which cost them billions of pounds to implement and which was designed to make the banking system safer by separating groups’ high street retail operations from their riskier wholesale and investment banking activities.

Their request to Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, to abandon ring-fencing 15 years after it was conceived will be seen as a direct challenge to the government to take drastic action to support the economy during a period when it is forcing economic regulators to scrap red tape.

It will, however, ignite controversy among those who believe that ditching the UK’s most radical post-crisis reform risks exacerbating the consequences of any future banking industry meltdown.

In their letter to the chancellor, the quartet of bank chiefs told Ms Reeves that: “With global economic headwinds, it is crucial that, in support of its Industrial Strategy, the government’s Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy removes unnecessary constraints on the ability of UK banks to support businesses across the economy and sends the clearest possible signal to investors in the UK of your commitment to reform.

“While we welcomed the recent technical adjustments to the ring-fencing regime, we believe it is now imperative to go further.

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“Removing the ring-fencing regime is, we believe, among the most significant steps the government could take to ensure the prudential framework maximises the banking sector’s ability to support UK businesses and promote economic growth.”

Work on the letter is said to have been led by HSBC, whose new chief executive, Georges Elhedery, is among the signatories.

His counterparts at Lloyds, Charlie Nunn; NatWest’s Paul Thwaite; and Mike Regnier, who runs Santander UK, also signed it.

While Mr Thwaite in particular has been public in questioning the continued need for ring-fencing, the letter – sent on Tuesday – is the first time that such a collective argument has been put so forcefully.

The only notable absentee from the signatories is CS Venkatakrishnan, the Barclays chief executive, although he has publicly said in the past that ring-fencing is not a major financial headache for his bank.

Other industry executives have expressed scepticism about that stance given that ring-fencing’s origination was largely viewed as being an attempt to solve the conundrum posed by Barclays’ vast investment banking operations.

The introduction of ring-fencing forced UK-based lenders with a deposit base of at least £25bn to segregate their retail and investment banking arms, supposedly making them easier to manage in the event that one part of the business faced insolvency.

Banks spent billions of pounds designing and setting up their ring-fenced entities, with separate boards of directors appointed to each division.

More recently, the Treasury has moved to increase the deposit threshold from £25bn to £35bn, amid pressure from a number of faster-growing banks.

Sam Woods, the current chief executive of the main banking regulator, the Prudential Regulation Authority, was involved in formulating proposals published by the Sir John Vickers-led Independent Commission on Banking in 2011.

Legislation to establish ring-fencing was passed in the Financial Services Reform (Banking) Act 2013, and the regime came into effect in 2019.

In addition to ring-fencing, banks were forced to substantially increase the amount and quality of capital they held as a risk buffer, while they were also instructed to create so-called ‘living wills’ in the event that they ran into financial trouble.

The chancellor has repeatedly spoken of the need to regulate for growth rather than risk – a phrase the four banks hope will now persuade her to abandon ring-fencing.

Britain is the only major economy to have adopted such an approach to regulating its banking industry – a fact which the four bank chiefs say is now undermining UK competitiveness.

“Ring-fencing imposes significant and often overlooked costs on businesses, including SMEs, by exposing them to banking constraints not experienced by their international competitors, making it harder for them to scale and compete,” the letter said.

“Lending decisions and pricing are distorted as the considerable liquidity trapped inside the ring-fence can only be used for limited purposes.

“Corporate customers whose financial needs become more complex as they grow larger, more sophisticated, or engage in international trade, are adversely affected given the limits on services ring-fenced banks can provide.

“Removing ring-fencing would eliminate these cliff-edge effects and allow firms to obtain the full suite of products and services from a single bank, reducing administrative costs”.

In recent months, doubts have resurfaced about the commitment of Spanish banking giant Santander to its UK operations amid complaints about the costs of regulation and supervision.

The UK’s fifth-largest high street lender held tentative conversations about a sale to either Barclays or NatWest, although they did not progress to a formal stage.

HSBC, meanwhile, is particularly restless about the impact of ring-fencing on its business, given its sprawling international footprint.

“There has been a material decline in UK wholesale banking since ring-fencing was introduced, to the detriment of British businesses and the perception of the UK as an internationally orientated economy with a global financial centre,” the letter said.

“The regime causes capital inefficiencies and traps liquidity, preventing it from being deployed efficiently across Group entities.”

The four bosses called on Ms Reeves to use this summer’s Mansion House dinner – the City’s annual set-piece event – to deliver “a clear statement of intent…to abolish ring-fencing during this Parliament”.

Doing so, they argued, would “demonstrate the government’s determination to do what it takes to promote growth and send the strongest possible signal to investors of your commitment to the City and to strengthen the UK’s position as a leading international financial centre”.

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Post Office to unveil £1.75bn banking deal with big British lenders

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Post Office to unveil £1.75bn banking deal with big British lenders

The Post Office will next week unveil a £1.75bn deal with dozens of banks which will allow their customers to continue using Britain’s biggest retail network.

Sky News has learnt the next Post Office banking framework will be launched next Wednesday, with an agreement that will deliver an additional £500m to the government-owned company.

Banking industry sources said on Friday the deal would be worth roughly £350m annually to the Post Office – an uplift from the existing £250m-a-year deal, which expires at the end of the year.

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The sources added that in return for the additional payments, the Post Office would make a range of commitments to improving the service it provides to banks’ customers who use its branches.

Banks which participate in the arrangements include Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group and Santander UK.

Under the Banking Framework Agreement, the 30 banks and mutuals’ customers can access the Post Office’s 11,500 branches for a range of services, including depositing and withdrawing cash.

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The service is particularly valuable to those who still rely on physical cash after a decade in which well over 6,000 bank branches have been closed across Britain.

In 2023, more than £10bn worth of cash was withdrawn over the counter and £29bn in cash was deposited over the counter, the Post Office said last year.

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A new, longer-term deal with the banks comes at a critical time for the Post Office, which is trying to secure government funding to bolster the pay of thousands of sub-postmasters.

Reliant on an annual government subsidy, the reputation of the network’s previous management team was left in tatters by the Horizon IT scandal and the wrongful conviction of hundreds of sub-postmasters.

A Post Office spokesperson declined to comment ahead of next week’s announcement.

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