Business

Reports of “ghost broking”, scammers selling fake car insurance, have risen by 30% over the last five years, exclusive data obtained by Sky News reveals. Ghost brokers sell false policies to drivers, manipulate information given to genuine insurance companies, or take out insurance and cancel it straight away. This leaves people without valid car insurance,

Legal & General (L&G), the FTSE-100 insurance and asset management group, is preparing to kick off a search for a successor to chairman Sir John Kingman. Sky News has learnt that the company, which this week announced a major corporate deal in the US, is close to appointing headhunters to oversee the appointment process. City

Apple has reportedly been ordered by the UK government to allow it access to encrypted data stored by the company’s users worldwide in its cloud service. At the moment, only the Apple account holder can access such data – not even the US technology giant can see it. Apple, which makes iPhones, iPads and iMacs,

The government is spending £22bn on “unproven” technologies which will have a “very significant effect” on energy bills, according to an influential committee of MPs. There has been no assessment of whether the programme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is affordable for billpayers, said a report from the Public Accounts Committee (PAC)

The head of the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) has effectively been forced out of the role after losing the confidence of its board amid growing government pressure on economic watchdogs. Sky News understands that Abby Thomas, whose departure was announced earlier on Thursday, was at the centre of several disputes with fellow directors over issues

The Bank of England has cut interest rates by another quarter percentage point, bringing down the cost of borrowing to 4.5%. And in a sign that households can expect more cuts in the months to come, two members of the Bank‘s Monetary Policy Committee said they would have preferred to reduce rates even more, by

Tesco has expressed interest in acquiring more than 100 Crown Post Offices whose future has been placed under review as the state-owned company explores shifting them to a franchise model. Sky News has learnt that Nigel Railton, the Post Office chairman, told a group of MPs this week that Britain’s biggest retailer had informed it

An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI. Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris

Britain could do a slimmed down trade deal with the United States within months, the last politician to oversee negotiations with Donald Trump’s administration over a UK-US agreement has told Sky News. Last night Sky News revealed that leading members of the Trump administration believe a trade deal with the UK could be sealed in

The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department. Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since

What if Britain has, almost entirely by accident, navigated itself into about the best possible position it could be in, as Donald Trump embarks on a trade war with nearly all his economic partners? I realise this might, at first, sound a little odd. After all, when the world is facing economically-destructive measures (blanket tariffs

Donald Trump is set to speak to the leaders of Canada and Mexico later but warned them against retaliating to his tariffs, saying: “We can play the game all they want.” The US leader has announced that he is imposing 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico. The two countries then hit back with

The boss of GB Energy has told Sky News it could take 20 years to deliver a Labour government pledge of 1,000 jobs for Aberdeen. Sir Keir Starmer promised voters his flagship green initiative, which will be headquartered in the northeast of Scotland, would cut consumer energy bills by as much as £300. It is

Barclays says an IT glitch that left some customers locked out of their accounts has been resolved after the disruption entered a third day. The bank said the “technical issue” has been fixed and delayed payments processed. In a statement on Sunday, Barclays said: “We are working on bringing balances up to date for some

Barclays has advised customers to seek help from friends and family or even contact food banks after a major IT glitch left some locked out of their accounts. Hundreds of people reportedly claim they are experiencing interrupted services and missing funds after the issue struck on what was payday for many British workers and the

NatWest Group is finalising plans to pay out close to £450m in bonuses for last year as it prepares for a return to full private ownership nearly 17 years after its bailout. Sky News has learnt that the bank’s remuneration committee is close to signing off the bonus pool ahead of its annual results announcement later this

The UK’s benchmark stock index has reached another all-time high, in a month of record breaking. The FTSE 100 index of most valuable companies on the London Stock Exchange closed at 8,666.65, breaking the record set on Thursday night after four consecutive days of rises. January has been the best month in more than two

An electric cargo bike logistics company which received backing from an arm of Barclays has crashed into administration after failing to land new funding, triggering the loss of more than 100 jobs. Sky News understands that Outspoken Logistics Limited, which trades as Zedify, has parachuted in Interpath to handle its insolvency. It comes after an

India’s richest family has clinched a landmark deal to buy a 49% stake in the Oval Invincibles in a deal that will unite the London-based team with the ownership of the Indian Premier League’s Mumbai Indians. Sky News can exclusively reveal that the Ambani family, who have a fortune estimated to be tens of billions

Shares in Microsoft have fallen sharply after investment spending came in higher than expected in its latest results, released just days after the DeepSeek market shock for tech stocks. The company, which has received reprimands from shareholders previously over AI-related bills, had already let it be known it expected to spend $80bn this year ahead