Scotch whisky sales are falling, but what’s really behind the decline? July 22, 2026 Whisky Business, City AM’s whisky supplement. The Scotch whisky sector and indeed the wider spirits market have faced a challenging six months, marked by a wave of negative headlines that have painted a bleak picture of the industry’s health. At the beginning of the year, data from restructuring firm BTG warned nearly one in five of [...]
Regulator flags BDO’s ‘unacceptable’ audit issues for fifth year in a row July 22, 2026 Accountancy giant BDO has been flagged for an “unacceptable” standard of audit quality by the watchdog for a fifth year in a row. The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) said in its yearly audit quality report that BDO’s overall audit quality fell below expected standards and “has received unsatisfactory results from regulatory inspections” consistently for five [...]
Sovereign AI is no longer a nice to have, and with open source, more achievable than ever July 22, 2026 Driven by rising costs and concerns over data sovereignty, enterprises are increasingly pursuing “AI sovereignty” by diversifying their AI supply chains with open-source alternatives, says Lewis Liu “Every single enterprise in this country… these people are livid. They’re saying: ‘I am paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and [...]
Bad news: Reach share price sinks amid digital headache and falling print sales July 22, 2026 London listed publisher Reach continued to feel the impact of declining online views and lower print circulation, as the company continues to navigate the changing media landscape. The group’s share price sank 19.5 per cent in early trading to 47.4p, bringing the stock down 13.6 per cent since January after the company suffered a sharp [...]
Wetherspoon shares dive as pub chain warns on profit again July 22, 2026 JD Wetherspoon shares slumped after it issued its fourth profit warning this year, as the pub chain grapples with surging food and energy costs and a rising business rates bill. Tim Martin, founder and chairman of the UK’s best-known pub chain, said: “Profits for the year are likely to be below market expectations, with marginally [...]
What every dealmaker should know about the limits of general-purpose AI tools July 22, 2026 Connecting AI to deal documents is only the first step. The real advantage comes from building intelligence across the deal life cycle. As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption accelerates across mergers and acquisitions (M&A), many firms are mistaking connectivity for intelligence. Connecting a large language model (LLM) to a traditional virtual data room (VDR) through model [...]
As it happened: Stocks rise but oil tops $95; inflation eases July 22, 2026 Welcome back to the City AM FTSE 100 liveblog. It’s Wednesday and new Chancellor John Healey secured an early boost after the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that inflation slowed in June. Headline CPI inflation dipped from 2.8 per cent in May to 2.6 per cent in June. Grant Fitzner, chief economist at the [...]
Layoffs and an executive exit: What’s going on at London’s first listed law firm? July 22, 2026 Gateley, the City’s first listed law firm, is set to lose its chief executive and axe dozens of jobs as it grapples with a swelling cost base and fears of a slowdown in client spending. The group, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market (AIM), informed shareholders on Tuesday that chief [...]
Stop peer pressuring young people into the student debt swindle July 22, 2026 One in four graduates will end up worse off than they would have been had they not gone to university, but that’s not just down to imperfect information, it’s down to expectations that need to change, says Paul Ormerod The holiday season is now in full swing. Relaxation for most, but in many households tensions [...]
Let the machines do the grunt work, so that we can do the great work July 22, 2026 AI is spectacular at the boring, mundane, repetitive grunt work, data entry, first-pass research, formatting, scheduling and summarising. It can execute those tasks faster and, frankly, better than most of us. Good. Let it. Because the moment you free a talented person from grunt work, they do what machines cannot: build relationships, exercise judgment, tell [...]