To understand Elliott Management Corp.’s plans for AT&T Inc., it’s worth examining how it tackled a relative telecommunications minnow in Europe. The activist investor’s 2018 fight for control of Telecom Italia SpA may have provided something of a dry run. Last year, after revealing its stake in the Italian carrier, the fund run by combative billionaire Paul Singer started with ...

In the darkest days of the 2009 recession, Germany’s industrial output was collapsing at an annual rate of more than 20%. An unfathomable implosion but one that thankfully ended almost as quickly as it started. Some 10 years on, a crisis is brewing once again in the country’s industrial heartlands. The pain could prove more enduring this time. So far ...

Singapore’s property industry is coming to terms with the idea that, in about a decade, the city may no longer have a central business district. Landlords couldn’t be more chuffed. There will still be offices, but without the rigid boundary between places where people work, and where they live and shop and dine. Local developer GuocoLand Ltd. is among the ...

In 2014, when Brussels regulators began to probe Apple Inc.’s low-tax arrangements in Ireland, an unlikely figure rushed to Dublin’s defense. U2’s lead singer Bono, no stranger to attractive offshore jurisdictions, pleaded that Ireland’s multinational-friendly model had brought the only prosperity the nation had ever known. “We are a tiny little country,” he told The Observer newspaper. “We don’t have ...

In early 2017, a strange pattern began to appear. So-called soft economic numbers – surveys of business leaders and consumers — started to look much more positive than the hard numbers of investment, growth and measures of business activity. Many wondered whether the optimism that people were expressing reflected their rational expectations of an improving economy, or whether it was ...

Bloomberg United Parcel Service (UPS) Inc won US certification to fly drones under regulations similar to those for airlines, a milestone that allows the company to vastly expand airborne deliveries. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) gave the courier permission to use delivery drones at hospital, university and corporate campuses with few restrictions, for example, letting operators fly the aircraft at ...

Bloomberg Rahul Bhatia, co-founder of Indian budget airline IndiGo, has filed an arbitration request against his partner Rakesh Gangwal in a London court, involving the judiciary for the first time in a feud between the two billionaire owners over allegations of corporate governance lapses. Bhatia and his holding company filed the claim to the London Court of International Arbitration, IndiGo’s ...

Bloomberg European Union officials appeared to lose hope of dodging additional punitive US tariffs, as the bloc’s calls for a negotiated settlement over aircraft subsidies have gone unanswered by President Donald Trump’s administration. EU’s trade chief Cecilia Malmstrom told reporters in Brussels that she expects the World Trade Organization to unveil a specific figure, authorising the US to hit the ...

Bloomberg John Lewis Partnership Plc plans to cut one-third of the top jobs at its headquarters as it integrates grocer Waitrose with its department-store operations in response to tough UK retail competition. The reduction of 75 senior managers will save about 100 million pounds ($123 million) over time, the company said. Waitrose managing director Rob Collins plans to step down ...

Bloomberg After Tesco Plc said Chief Executive Officer Dave Lewis will hand the baton to drugstore executive Ken Murphy, one analyst summed up his surprise by quipping, “Ken who?” While Murphy is known inside Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc for spearheading its push into China, he’s a relative unknown in London financial circles. Next summer he’ll take over the top job ...