Insights

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“Nothing and no one is off the table”: a new UK approach to individual sanctions and dirty money?

Financial Services

Felix Cazalet
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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…

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General Policy icon

What we can learn from the rush to repay the business rates relief

General Policy

Felix Cazalet
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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…

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General Policy icon

ESG in private equity: will integration tools be matched by pressure to use them?

General Policy

Felix Cazalet
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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…

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