Dim Sum

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

Building society Nationwide wants to hike its chief executive’s pay by 43% to £7m, and will only let members have an "advisory" vote on it (meaning they can legally ignore the result).

Nationwide insists it needs to compete with banks for talent, but critics remind them they’re "supposed to be the good guys" who keep costs down.

I'll look forward to offering my wife an "advisory" vote on whether I should go to the pub for 8 beers this weekend.

HOSPITALITY
Who killed Ping Pong?

Because the owners of the popular dim sum Chinese restaurant chain haven’t given a reason. Journalists are casting lazy aspersions, mainly at COVID, which is only half right. The truth is: 

Ping Pong was already dying

The result of a few silly business decisions. 

As far back as 2016, Ping Pong was losing money. It got so bad that by 2018, they had lost £755,000 in a single year. 

The owners didn’t know how to capitalise on their growth. They opened new restaurants in weird places like shopping centres, which failed to attract their target market of young professionals. 

Then the pandemic sounded the death knell

Because customers couldn’t eat dim sum in-house during the series of government-mandated lockdowns. 

So Ping Pong was paying rent, but not making money. 

And lo! it lost £1.48 million in 2021 alone.

It owed money all over town

Like some wanton trophy wife. 

Ping Pong owed upwards of £1 million in rent. To put that in terms you savages can relate to, that’s roughly 136,000 feet pics to sell. 

Some angry landlords said they’d force the business to close entirely if they didn’t cough up. 

So they sold the business

In 2022. 

The new owners started cutting costs. They closed down half the restaurants. They even increased the service charge to 15%. 

But it was fruitless because: 

Britain is a “difficult” place to do business

If you believe the former founder, Kurt Zdesar. 

Ping Pong was operating in Keir Starmer’s Britain, with its sky-high energy prices and prohibitive taxation system, paying an extra £2,500 per employee in increased minimum wage and NI contributions. 

Poor fools didn’t stand a chance. 

MARKETS
Dealmakers aren’t taking bets on businesses

According to data from the London Stock Exchange. The number of deals announced in the second quarter of 2025 has fallen to its lowest level since 2015. 

Blame global instability

A global trade war. Bloody conflicts in the Middle East. You know the drill. 

It’s a high-risk environment, and big investors are reluctant to put their cards on the table when WWIII is only a tweet away (thanks, Donald). 

This is causing market volatility 

Particularly the dollar’s declining value - down 11% already this year - which is making it extremely hard for private equity firms to value assets. 

Hence, the falling number of private equity deals. 

But deals are getting bigger

Because dealmakers still want to buy stuff - they just don’t want to take a bet. 

This is why deals worth more than $10 billion have increased by 75% this year. 

Private equity firms are carving up tried-and-tested companies instead of buying exciting new ones, selling off the underperforming parts and making the profitable ones leaner.

ENERGY
Octopus Energy is selling Kraken

In a deal worth £10 billion, apparently. And it’ll make the CEO a very rich man indeed. This will also kill two birds with one stone because: 

Kraken is valuable

Its software connects everything within an energy system from customer billing to heat pumps and EV batteries. 

And it’s licensed to everyone and their nan. It’s used in Japan, Australia, France, and even the US national grid. 

But it’s also used by Octopus Energy’s rivals

Like EDF and EON.

You might say it’s a conflict of interest. This has deterred potential buyers from using the amazing tech, insiders say.

Now Kraken will go public

Because it’s growing fast, particularly in the US, with some big fat licensing deals lined up in the coming months.  

And now everyone’s a tad concerned that the company will follow the likes of Wise, Unilever, Shein, JustEat and Invidior, and list in New York instead of ol’ Blighty.

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 💷 😡 HMRC is fining poor people who don’t actually owe them money. In the last 5 years, 600,000 low-income people have been fined by Britain’s favourite tax collector. A report found that it disproportionately fines poor people who don’t owe them money. Heartwarming to know they’ve got their moral compasses aimed true. 

• 🗣️ 🤖 UK-based AI unicorn ElevenLabs wants an IPO in the next 5 years. The £2 billion-valued startup, which uses deep learning to create synthetic voices, wants to expand in either Singapore, Paris, Brazil or Mexico. The little flirts say they won’t list in London if the business environment isn’t sound. 

• 🇬🇷 💡 Violence at a British jail plummeted after inmates were taught ancient Greek philosophy, specifically, Stoicism, which teaches that we cannot control events, only our reaction to them. The classes have become exceedingly popular - they’re now fully booked up - and HMP Wayland in Norfolk is one of the country’s least violent prisons. 

• 🦄 😢 Britain’s most famous failed AI unicorn still hasn’t paid its laid-off employees. Since April, in fact. Employees in Builder AI’s UK branch haven’t received a penny because while the startup filed for bankruptcy in the US, they hadn’t bothered to do so in Britain. FYI: This is the company with the brilliant AI tool that turned out not to be AI, but just hundreds of industrious Indian developers working in secret. 

• 🚗 📈 We’re buying Teslas again. There was a 14% increase in British Tesla sales this June after Tesla-owner Elon Musk parted ways with his former chum (and now sworn enemy), President Donald Trump. Perhaps Brits feel he’s been punished enough. 

• 🦭 💭 British scientists now know why seals don’t drown. Researchers at the University of St Andrews discovered that seal brains don’t monitor CO2 levels - they monitor oxygen levels. When the human brain notices a spike in CO2, the body panics due to the increased acidity. Seals just monitor oxygen, which means they swim to the surface for air with all the ease of a country gentleman.