Yasemin Craggs Mersinoglu

Companies act after reports that submarine cables were cut by an anchor from a sunken ship

Scheme is designed to support companies that work on cutting-edge projects

US private equity firm Thoma Bravo has agreed to take UK cyber security company Darktrace private in a transaction valuing the company at £4.3bn, marking the latest high-profile takeover of a London-listed group. The offer, which values the shares at 620p each, represents a 20 per cent premium to Thursday’s closing share price and sent Darktrace’s shares up 19 per cent in London on Friday. Darktrace floated in April 2021 at 250p a share. Darktrace’s board said it had previously reviewed and re…

BT’s new chief executive Allison Kirkby said “I always love to squeeze the shorts . . . and prove them wrong” as she laid out her plans to turn around the UK telecoms group, sending shares up over 17 per cent. Kirkby made the remark after the Financial Times earlier this week revealed investors had placed a record £300mn bet against the FTSE 100 company. She announced on Thursday that BT would cut another £3bn of costs and increase its dividend, and added that having a new chief executive who h…

Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has taken a 3 per cent stake in BT after new chief executive Allison Kirkby unveiled her plans to turn around the UK telecoms group at its annual results last month.The FTSE 100 company on Wednesday announced the position — worth about £400mn — which was taken by three companies controlled by the family of the tycoon. Slim’s motive is unclear, but he joins other high-profile telecoms shareholders, including billionaire Patrick Drahi’s Altice and German group Deut…

Auditors were unable to sign off the accounts of telecoms company Lycamobile UK, putting further pressure on the former Conservative party donor, which is also embroiled in a dispute with HM Revenue & Customs. PKF Littlejohn said it had “not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion” for the company’s financial statements for the year ended December 31 2022, according to filings from Companies House, including over the recoverability of a…

AT&T suffered a vast cyber security breach earlier this year, with hackers accessing the call and text message information of 110mn of the US telecoms company’s customers. Over 11 days in April, “threat actors” accessed and copied records of customer calls and texts from a period of several months in 2022 as well as on January 2 2023, AT&T said in a regulatory filing on Friday. The compromised data included files related to “nearly all” of its cellular customers, customers of mobile virtual ne…

Department for Science, Innovation and Technology wants to know where barriers ‘can be mitigated or removed’

Force used the technology 117 times from January to August, up from 32 between 2020 and 2023

Financial software provider announces plan for £400mn share buyback and raises dividend