Insights

UK foreign secretary Liz Truss has declared that nothing is off-limits in terms of sanctioning individuals to put pressure on Putin and his Ukraine policy. In this week’s podcast, we ask how far this no-holds barred approach is true, not just in Russia but also more broadly. Has Russia’s invasion of Ukraine fundamentally changed the UK’s willingness to go after “the bad…

Last week, the UK supermarket chain Tesco decided to repay £585m of business rates relief received in the covid-19 pandemic. Other major UK supermarkets and retailers rapidly followed. By Friday, they had vowed to return a total of £1.8 bn. Tesco’s chairman John Allan argued that “giving this money back to the public is absolutely the right thing to do” and was widely…

Covid-19 is likely to accelerate pressures for the meaningful integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors into the private equity (PE) industry. The twin dynamics of a greater public focus on investors’ ESG credentials and an increased scrutiny of the PE industry writ large could combine to encourage greater use of existing integration tools. With…