Tactics described as a "shake down" are raising an estimated £70m for taxpayers from a private-equity fund that was originally owned by the government. Andrew Mitchell, the International Development Secretary, will announce later today that he is selling the government's residual 40% stake in Actis, the world's leading emerging-markets private-equity fund, for $10m (£6.2m) in cash plus a large future share of what is known as carried interest in...

National Australia Bank has been reviewing what to do with its substantial UK operation, Clydesdale - which also owns Yorkshire Bank and operates mainly in Scotland and the north of England - since January. Because of an economic downturn in the UK described by NAB's chief executive Cameron Clyne as "longer and slower to recover than experienced in the 1930s following the Great Depression", the bank has decided to cut 1,400 UK jobs, pull out of...

In spite of widespread public anger about the millions of pounds paid to top bankers and executives of other companies, ministers have chosen not to intervene directly. Instead they have called on shareholders to take a closer interest in executive pay - and to protest when executive rewards are deemed to be excessive. Well, that happened at Barclays: a majority of Barclays' mainstream big British shareholders -...

Last week Ofcom requested of News International that it hand over information on hacking. It wants the documents that News Int has been ordered by Lord Justice Moss to give to alleged hacking victims who are suing the UK newspaper group owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The media regulator wants the information as part of its enquiry into whether BSkyB is fit and proper to hold a broadcasting licence....

In a very unusual move, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, David Brennan, and the chairman, Louis Schweitzer, are both retiring earlier than expected. Sources tell me they were encouraged to go by the other non-executives, against the background of concerns from shareholders that the performance of the huge drug company has been disappointing. "The board took the view we needed change, because of the urgency...

Jeremy Hunt's defence, against charges that he did not act as an impartial judge when exercising his powers to decide on whether News Corp should have been allowed to buy all of BSkyB, rests on a particular plank. His colleagues say that he decided nothing without getting the thumbs-up from the media regulator, Ofcom. So although the Enterprise Act gives him discretionary powers to adjudicate on whether a media...

The interrogation of Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry, for more than a day, is a historic event. Never has the 81-year-old, still regarded as among the most powerful media moguls in the world, been questioned so extensively, in public and under oath. If yesterday's session with his son, James Murdoch, is anything to go by, there will be at least three broad areas of examination....

The emails from Fred Michel, News Corporation's director of public affairs, to James Murdoch are deeply embarrassing for the government. They appear to be evidence that Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, wanted News Corp to succeed with its controversial bid for BSkyB and that he did not act with the impartiality he was supposed to show in his quasi judicial role in respect of media deals. Email after email...

James Murdoch's evidence to Leveson started off slowly and not very revealingly about phone hacking. But it is becoming explosive over how News Corp pursued its ambition to buy the 61% of British Sky Broadasting it does not own. What we have seen is emails from Fred Michel, News Corp's public affairs director, showing how he was garnering remarkable amounts of highly valuable information from government advisers...

Although Francois Hollande began his campaign to be president of France by declaring that his true enemy is "the world of finance", the socialist victor in the first-round of voting is also - to an extent - a prisoner of that world. The point is that the French government and French economy is disproportionately dependent on the goodwill of overseas investors and banks. Here are the statistics....