Commercial Awareness - Weekly Roundup

All the news you need to know from this past week and how they impact law firms.

ZipLaw Team

Hi ZipLawyer! Here's all the news you need to know from this week and how they impact law firms.

Coming up:

  • 💸 Business: Rightmove bid rejected, China needs money, PwC in trouble
  • 🏠 Real Estate: Data centre boost, CGT sell off, £150m garden towns
  • 🔋 Energy: Northvolt cuts, mining goes green
  • 🤖 Tech: Apple tax drama, Amazon's big bet, Google faces more scrutiny
  • 🗳️ Politics: Trump says no, UK economy snooze, ECB drops rates

Business

  • Rightmove says no: Rupert Murdoch’s REA Group made a bold move, throwing a cheeky £5.6bn at Rightmove, sweetening the deal with a 27% premium. But Rightmove, playing hard to get, labelled the offer “opportunistic” and gave Murdoch a polite “thanks, but no thanks.” REA has until the end of September to either make a formal proposal or quietly back off. If the deal does go through, Rightmove shareholders will get a slice of the pie—18.6% of the new combined group’s capital—and can still count on their dividends rolling in.
  • China Eases Investment Restrictions: China’s opening the door to foreign investors—just not all the way. As of 1 November, international money can flow into manufacturing and health sectors, including printing factories and, yes, Chinese herbal medicine production. They’re even letting foreign-owned hospitals dabble in cutting-edge areas like stem cells and gene therapy in a few lucky cities. However, public hospitals and traditional Chinese medicine remain off-limits for foreign acquisition.
  • PwC’s Evergrande Fallout: PwC’s China division just received the corporate equivalent of a red card, slapped with a record-breaking £47m fine and a six-month ban after a not-so-stellar audit of Evergrande, the property giant that’s now in ruins. The firm missed some pretty significant financial misstatements between 2018 and 2020, and regulators didn’t mince words, calling it a breach of trust that burned investors. PwC swiftly fired six partners and confessed that their work wasn’t exactly up to snuff. Rebuilding trust in China is going to be a tall order, especially when you’ve just been benched by the government.

How does this impact Law Firms?

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