Bodies

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Apple has coughed up £304m in UK corporation tax after profits hit £1.2bn for the first time.

This comes after they recently lost an EU case ordering them to pay €13bn to Ireland in unpaid taxes, despite insisting they "always pay all the taxes we owe wherever we operate."

Either way, the taxman successfully snagged 25% of their UK profits, with the bill boosted by 62% thanks to iPhone 16 fever.

I find myself with grudging respect for my nemesis (HMRC) and I'm not sure I like it.

FINTECH
It’s official: the King does not use Monzo

According to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), which fined Monzo £21 million for failing to notice that some customers were registering addresses at locations like Buckingham Palace.

Because Monzo didn’t check

The fintech didn’t have any verification controls in place that might notice something weird. 

Some “British” customers even had registered addresses in foreign countries.

And, of course, quite a few customers registered their addresses at the likes of Buckingham Palace, Number 10 Downing Street, and even Monzo’s own London headquarters. 

And no one blinked. 

All of this was an open goal for criminals

Because this meant Monzo was repeatedly onboarding high-risk customers who traditional banks wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. 

Between 2020 and 2022, the payments platform onboarded 34,000 high-risk customers. Which must have made the FCA rather miffed, considering they’d specifically told Monzo not to. 

The problem was:

Monzo was a bank acting like a startup

It went from having 600,000 customers in 2018 to nearly 6 million in 2022. 

Despite this, it didn’t build the sort of financial defences necessary to stop money launderers, terrorists, and downright rogues from accessing the financial system. 

It isn’t the only one

Last month, Starling Bank was fined £29 million for exactly the same reason: shoddy financial controls that onboarded 49,000 high-risk customers. 

Like Monzo, Starling had grown rapidly but failed to act like a serious bank with tough financial defences. 

When will fintechs learn? 

MARKETS
Shein is trying to make us jealous

The little tarts. The Chinese fast fashion retailer just filed for a public listing in Hong Kong, just to pressure Britain’s financial regulator into giving them the green light. The FCA doesn’t want to because:

Shein sources cotton from Xinjiang Province

Home of the Uyghurs, who the Chinese government subject to forced labour. Which just isn’t cricket. Even our American friends have banned imports from there.

The FCA wants Shein to disclose the risks of sourcing cotton from the province. Shein, meanwhile, wants the FCA to look the other way because:

China demands it

The China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) really doesn’t want Shein to be honest about the labour abuses in Xinjiang, so much so that they stopped Shein from listing in London last month. 

If Shein is to list in London, so the CSRC says, the FCA must remove any requirement to tell the truth about Xinjiang.

So Shein is teasing us

The corporate equivalent of flirting with the friends of someone you fancy. 

They know the London Stock Exchange (LSE) needs them. IPO fundraising has dropped to a thirty-year low, with the likes of Just East and Wise de-listing for richer climes.

Catching Shein would be a massive win for the LSE. But at what cost?

TECH
British publishers try to stop Google

Because its AI Overview is stealing from them, and this ragtag alliance of journalists, publishers and activists want the antitrust watchdog to stop it. 

Sites are seeing a massive drop in traffic

Like the Daily Mail, your slightly racist uncle’s favourite newspaper, which suffers from a 56% drop in click-throughs whenever Google’s AI Overview is present. 

The watchdog is already looking into it

The Competitions and Markets Authority (CMA) has already unveiled plans to let publishers opt out of AI overviews without actually removing their website from the search results. 

But these will be gradually rolled out from October, which isn’t fast enough for the publishers. 

Google considered doing this across the pond

But rejected the idea because they wanted to monetise the AI Overview. 

Let’s see what happens. 

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• ✈️ 🤑 UK airport staff get bonuses for spotting oversized bags, which will obviously make customer experience all the more enjoyable. Swissport, the company that handles passenger gates, will be paid one handsome British pound for every oversized bag they catch. This includes airports at Glasgow, Birmingham, and Newcastle. Another company does the same in Bristol, Manchester and Gatwick. What an absolute bunch of a——s.

• 🧑‍🏫 🔪 Intelligent people are less moral, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. The study of over 1,300 British residents found that higher cognitive ability leads to weaker moral foundations. This is because people who can think analytically and speak eloquently tend to disregard moral concerns, which are often rooted in emotion. In other news: they will never find the bodies.

• 💷 🏠️ Private equity firms are making a lot of money from dead parents. The latest figures find that nearly one quarter of independent fostering agencies (IFAs) are backed by private equity firms which in turn receive millions in taxpayer funding from local councils. They’re also driving up costs. The CMA found that IFAs are on average £8,400 more expensive per foster child than councils. So much for capitalist efficiency. 

• 🚜 🤫 British farmers are spreading millions of tonnes of toxic sewage on their fields every bloody year. And it’s all because of outdated regulations, which don’t require testing sewage for things like microplastics. The regions most affected are Hampshire, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire and Essex. In a separate report, it was found that British water is contaminated with everything from microplastics to hormone-damaging nonylphenols and phthalates. 

• 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 ⚡️ Scotland’s experimental tidal wave tech has been producing electricity for six years running, without needing any unplanned maintenance. Though still in its early days, the four turbines, all located 40 meters under the salty sea, produce enough electricity to power 7,000 homes annually.