Friday newspaper round-up: Income tax, Amazon, Petrofac
By Michele Maatouk
Date: Friday 24 Oct 2025
(Sharecast News) - Rachel Reeves is considering raising income tax at next month's budget to help reduce a multibillion pound shortfall, sources have told the Guardian. The chancellor is in active discussions over breaking one of her party's main manifesto pledges as she looks for ways to clear an estimated shortfall of more than £30bn, according to three sources close to the budget process. Some advisers in the Treasury and No 10 believe that raising income tax may be the only way to make sure she raises enough money never to have to come back for tax rises again in this parliament. - Guardian
Amazon has revealed the cause of this week's hours-long AWS outage, which took everything from Signal to smart beds offline, was a bug in automation software that had widespread consequences. In a lengthy outline of the cause of the outage published on Thursday, AWS revealed a cascading set of events brought down thousands of sites and applications that host their services with the company. - Guardian
Partners at London's "Magic Circle" law firms face paying at least £250m more in tax under Rachel Reeves's plot to raid accountants and lawyers. Plans to place a new 15pc tax on profits made by Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs) would see the tax bill for partners at London's top corporate law firms increase from £1.78bn to £2.04bn, according to analysis using tools created by Tax Policy Associates. - Telegraph
The Mayor of London has blamed Brexit for failing to meet his housebuilding targets as he was handed an emergency £300m Government lifeline to salvage his plans. On Wednesday, Sir Sadiq Khan agreed to adopt a string of emergency measures to meet his pledge to build 88,000 homes a year in the capital after a slump in construction left him significantly short of the target. - Telegraph
Petrofac is teetering on the brink of collapse after its biggest client cancelled a multibillion-pound contract, scuppering a hard-fought restructuring plan. The heavily indebted oil and energy services group said that TenneT, the electricity grid operator for the Netherlands and much of Germany, had terminated its multi-year contract to build offshore platforms and onshore converter stations for six offshore wind farms. - The Times
A British artificial intelligence video start-up known for making a fake multi-lingual "David Beckham" has rejected a $3 billion takeover proposal from the US tech company Adobe. London-based Synthesia, which makes hyper-realistic AI generated video, was in talks with the US giant earlier this year but chose to remain independent. The takeover discussions, first reported by the Information tech site, followed a £10 million investment Adobe made in Synthesia in April. - The Times
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