Commercial Awareness - Weekly Roundup

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?