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Good morning.
Today we begin with a scoop out of Brussels: The EU is preparing a back-up plan worth up to €20bn for Ukraine after the bloc’s leaders failed to agree a €50bn four-year package for the war-torn country earlier this month.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán vetoed the EU’s earlier plan, but this scheme sidesteps his objections by using a debt structure that does not require unanimous backing from all 27 member states. The arrangement is similar to that used to fund short-term work-support schemes during the height of the Covid pandemic.
A person briefed on the discussions said there is no “technical problem” to providing budget finance to Kyiv, but that politically “it is more complicated”. Here’s what EU leaders need to make the plan a success.
Related stories:
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Four more top stories
1. JPMorgan Chase captured almost a fifth of all US bank profits in the first nine months of 2023, capitalising on a year of turmoil for the country’s financial sector to emerge even more dominant. Its US banking subsidiary earned $38.9bn in profits — about 18 per cent of the industry’s total — according to FT calculations.
2. Israel’s defence minister has warned of a growing risk of a regional conflict in the Middle East as tensions with Iran increase. Yoav Gallant told a parliamentary committee yesterday that Israel was being attacked in a “multi-arena war” from seven areas, which he identified as Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran. Here are the latest developments from the region.
3. Big Tech has vastly outspent venture capital groups with investments in generative artificial intelligence start-ups this year, with Microsoft, Google and Amazon striking a series of blockbuster deals last year that amounted to two-thirds of the $27bn raised by fledgling AI companies in 2023. Here’s what this means for the much-hyped sector.
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Apple: The tech giant has been banned from selling the Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 in the US after the White House refused to grant a reprieve from a trade tribunal’s ruling over patent infringement.
4. The UK tax authority opened 23 per cent more cases on value added tax avoidance in 2022-23 than the previous year, new data from a freedom of information request has revealed. HM Revenue & Customs opened 109,413 VAT cases in the 12 months to March 31 2023, compared with 88,673 the year before. Here’s why HMRC has increased scrutiny.
We’re also reading . . .
The most-commented stories of 2023
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the pieces that most engaged the FT’s readers in debate this year was news on the war in Ukraine. One story which drew over 2,200 comments came at a critical point of the war in January, when we reported that Germany was resisting pressure from other western allies to send its Leopard 2 battle tanks to aid Kyiv in its counteroffensive against Russia (Berlin later relented).
In August, the demise of the rebellious Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had led his notorious Wagner paramilitary group in a failed mutiny against Moscow, also attracted vigorous discussion and speculation: was this an act of retribution from Vladimir Putin?
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Additional contributions from Sarah Ebner and Emily Goldberg
