FirstFT: Today’s top stories | Financial Times

Rishi Sunak, UK chancellor, is pushing to win a carve-out for the City of London in the G7’s plans for a new global tax system to cover the world’s “largest and most profitable multinational enterprises”.

Sunak said the weekend’s “historic agreement” by G7 finance ministers would force “the largest multinational tech giants to pay their fair share of tax in the UK”.

But one official close to the talks said Britain was among the countries pushing “for an exemption on financial services”, reflecting Sunak’s fears that global banks with head offices in London could be affected.

Ireland’s second-largest opposition party, meanwhile, has backed a “small increase” in the country’s corporate tax rate, a sign that Dublin’s political consensus on multinationals is cracking following the G7 agreement.

Coronavirus digest

• The UK’s Greater Manchester and Lancashire will receive military back-up and surge testing to combat the spread of the Delta variant. Here is what we know about how effective vaccines are against it.

• An outbreak in southern China is curbing activity at some of the world’s largest ports, stoking fears of further disruption to international trade.

• Developing countries face the risk of a renewed economic downturn if vaccine supplies fail to materialise and global inflation rises, the World Bank warned.

• India’s vaccination campaign has been plagued by gender disparity: men make up 54 per cent of those who have received jabs.

• Covid-19 is threatening to delay semiconductor shipments from Taiwan’s electronics factories, according to companies and analysts. (FT, Reuters)

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In the news

France and Germany lead fight to dilute EU bank capital rules Member states are battling to thin down the bloc’s most significant changes in banking regulation in a decade, as Brussels prepares to introduce a long-awaited capital minimum that would make it harder for banks to use their own calculations to decide the size of their capital bases.

NHS delays GP data scheme The health service has pushed back plans to pool the full medical histories of 55m patients in England into a single database available to third parties for research and planning after pressure from campaigners, politicians and patients.

Met police officer admits Sarah Everard kidnap and rape A Metropolitan Police officer has admitted kidnapping and raping Sarah Everard, whose disappearance and killing in March triggered a backlash in the UK over the treatment of women. Wayne Couzens, 48, of Deal, Kent, pleaded guilty to the charges but did not enter a plea to a count of Everard’s murder.

US investigates billionaires’ tax records leak Tax authorities have launched an investigation into a leak of billionaires’ private records after ProPublica published details of Internal Revenue Service data that showed some of the wealthiest Americans, including Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Mike Bloomberg and Elon Musk, paid little tax as their wealth ballooned. (FT, ProPublica)

Hundreds arrested in Trojan Shield sting More than 800 people have been arrested globally in a sting that lured drug dealers and organised criminals to an encrypted communications platform secretly run by the FBI. The operation led to seizures of more than 32 tonnes of drugs and $48m in currencies and disrupted more than 100 murder plots.

EY top deal adviser in France sets up rival boutique Yannick de Kerhor has quit the accounting group to launch a rival, with his Paris-based boutique EKEM Partners teaming up with EOS Deal Advisory, the London firm run by two former senior partners at KPMG UK.

• SEC chair Gary Gensler must reclaim the defanged US auditing watchdog from the grip of the Big Four firms, writes Brooke Masters.

Emmanuel Macron slapped A man slapped France’s president in the face yesterday, briefly interrupting a walkabout during his tour of the provinces ahead of this month’s regional elections. The audible blow was delivered in the southern town of Tain-l’Hermitage.

‘Speculative frenzy’ pushed Ruffer out of $1.1bn bitcoin bet The UK wealth manager has exited its bet on bitcoin on fears over the rush of speculation in the market this year — including huge rallies in the price of joke-based cryptocurrencies. Separately, a senior US financial regulator has spoken out against her colleagues’ attempts to regulate cryptocurrencies more strictly, warning that doing so risks of discouraging investors.

“I am concerned that the initial reaction of a regulator is always to say ‘I want to grab hold of this and make it like the markets I already regulate’” — Hester Peirce, SEC commissioner

The days ahead

N Ireland protocol talks UK Brexit minister Lord David Frost and his EU counterpart Maros Sefcovic will attempt today to rescue a plan to calm tensions in Northern Ireland after days of recriminations.

Joe Biden in the UK The US president heads to Europe for an eight-day trip, starting with the UK and including the G7 summit as well as stops in Belgium and Switzerland. (Reuters)

What else we’re reading

The Fed risks reacting too slowly The rise in inflation might be both modest and temporary and might not affect inflationary expectations, as the Federal Reserve believes, writes Martin Wolf. But the US central bank has locked itself into responding too slowly, especially given the fiscal expansion.

The world forgets Syria Much of the world seems to have forgotten the country’s savage civil war, 10 years old and still radiating chaos across the Middle East and Europe. The complacency that set in after the defeat of Isis is misplaced. So is the idea that fragile neighbours can be bought off to act as holding pens for 6m Syrian refugees, writes our editorial board.

Nato allies need to speed up AI defence As Russia intensifies cyber hostilities and China weaponises artificial intelligence, joining forces in the field of high-tech warfare will feature high on the list of topics at next week’s summit. But the transatlantic alliance will need to move fast if it aims to make up lost ground, writes Helen Warrell.

Exporting Chinese surveillance The use of Chinese technology is one of the backdrops to the G7 summit, where leading democracies will discuss how to respond to Beijing’s global reach. To defenders, these surveillance systems offer big efficiency gains. But to some experts, they carry potential security and human rights threats.

Miners’ troubles show need for climate ‘bad banks’ Just as financial institutions turned to bad banks to manage toxic assets in the aftermath of the financial crisis, miners need a way to quarantine theirs, writes Helen Thomas. The transition to net zero may require models to isolate “stranded” assets and run them down.

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