Tuesday newspaper round-up: Telegraph, UK offices, China

13th Aug 2024 07:21

(Sharecast News) - The Treasury has sought to defuse a bitter row with the North Sea oil and gas industry by promising to keep investment reliefs on low-carbon projects, aiming to protect jobs and soften the expansion of the energy windfall tax. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said last month that she would expand the levy on energy industry profits as part of her plan to plug a £22bn "hole" in the public finances that Labour said had been left by the previous Conservative government. - Guardian

The UK's biggest housing association has been fined after a watchdog found that its failure to carry out repairs to a child's bedroom window for four years left the home mouldy and caused serious illness in the family that lived there. Clarion housing association showed "no urgency" to fix the window, instead leaving it boarded up, despite repeated complaints from the tenant who said the mould caused his asthma to flare up and affected his son's mental health. - Guardian

Boris Johnson has held talks about a role at The Telegraph as part of former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi's takeover bid. The former prime minister had informal discussions with Mr Zahawi, who is assembling a consortium to buy The Telegraph as part of an auction process, about a possible job if he is successful. - Telegraph

Offices in the UK are selling for almost a fifth less than what their owners were hoping they would fetch, the biggest discount since the global financial crisis 15 years ago. In a sign of how tepid demand is, especially for older and less eco-friendly blocks, buyers of offices this year have on average paid 18 per cent less than the asking price, data from CoStar, the property analytics group, shows. - The Times

Investors pulled a record amount of cash out of China in the second quarter of this year amid concerns about the health of the world's second-largest economy, official data showed. In the three months to June, outflows of investor capital from China reached $15 billion, according to balance of payments figures published by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange last Friday. The numbers were first reported by Bloomberg. - The Times