Thursday newspaper round-up: Ofwat, Jes Staley, The Very Group
By Michele Maatouk
Date: Thursday 06 Mar 2025
(Sharecast News) - An environmental group is to take legal action against Ofwat, the water regulator, accusing it of unlawfully making customers pay for decades of neglect by the water industry. River Action will file the legal claim this month, arguing that bill rises for customers that have been approved by the regulator could be used to fix infrastructure failures that should have been addressed years ago. - Guardian
The Barclays chair Nigel Higgins's assurances that Jes Staley had "no particular relationship" with Jeffrey Epstein, days after the child sex offender's death in 2019, convinced the City regulator that there was no reason to investigate the bank's chief executive, a court has heard. Jonathan Davidson, a former director of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), made the comments during a hearing of Staley's legal challenge against the UK regulator on Wednesday. - Guardian
Workers could face a £10bn stealth raid on income tax this month as Rachel Reeves risks breaking her borrowing rules, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has warned. The Chancellor "has engineered a trap for herself" by leaving dangerously little room to hit the fiscal targets which she wrote in October, economists at the think tank said. - Telegraph
The Barclay family's online shopping empire is facing mounting pressure from its debt pile as sales slide, a leading credit rating agency has warned. Fitch Ratings has cut The Very Group's credit rating and put it on a negative watch, meaning it is liable for further downgrades. The retailer's CCC+ rating puts it deeper into junk bond territory, making it costlier for the group to borrow. - Telegraph
Severe cost pressures "piling up on businesses" have led the British Chambers of Commerce to downgrade forecasts for economic growth, as companies face a "long and challenging year". The lobby group's quarterly economic forecast is for the economy to grow by 0.9 per cent this year, down from a previous expectation of 1.3 per cent, with the "limited growth" driven largely by increased government spending. - The Times
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