Valentina Pop

This is an audio transcript of Power for Sale: Episode 1 — Bags full of money Valentina Pop I remember where I was when I heard the news. It was a Friday in Brussels and I was in my apartment surrounded by boxes. I was packing up 10 years of my life. After reporting on the European Union for over a decade, I had been promoted and my new job was in London. I should have probably been out with friends watching the World Cup quarterfinals, but I’d been procrastinating. In the background, Brazil an…

The European parliament is at the centre of a spreading corruption scandal after Belgian police seized €600,000 in cash and detained an MEP as part of an international investigation into claims that football World Cup host Qatar sought to buy influence. A Belgian judge charged four unnamed people on Sunday with “participation in a criminal organisation, money laundering and corruption” following multiple arrests and house searches over the weekend, including the homes of two MEPs and a former M…

COP27 climate conference has pitted low- and high-income countries against each other

US president Joe Biden warned the risk of nuclear “Armageddon” was at its highest since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and said he was trying to decipher Vladimir Putin’s “off-ramp” to avoid further escalation. Speaking at a fundraiser in New York on Thursday night, Biden said Russia’s president was “not joking” about the “potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is you might say significantly underperforming”. “We have not faced the pr…

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication

Europe’s protests against Covid-19 curbs spread to Brussels on Sunday when tens of thousands of demonstrators marched through the city centre in protests that later turned violent. Protests also broke out in Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Croatia over the weekend as European governments stepped up their efforts to curb a steep rise in infections that is putting pressure on healthcare systems across the continent and last week prompted the World Health Organization to express c…

Finance ministers look at how to alleviate price surge ahead of ‘gruelling winter’

News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication