TheChek News Flow

So Porsche, Ferrari, Maybach, RR, Bentley, Maserati, Lamborgini, DS, will spin Off and mass market will go to china.

F1 & Competition will be even more important to reinfoce strong image;

Aston Martin, one of the only independent Luxury/Sport Brand, could become even more a real target.

This is where value is for European car makers and the only to maintain this industry in our countries.

European Commissions should change rules/tax emissions in Europe to help boost and sustain the luxury car sector.

I wont be surprised to see a big Luxury brand investing in this segment. (LVMH sponsor of F1, they also bought Paris FC)

Happy to discuss

Hedge fund’s short position is the biggest in the FTSE 100 group in more than a decade

Hedge fund Citadel has made a £305mn bet against drugmaker GSK, the biggest short position against the company in more than a decade.

Billionaire Ken Griffin’s hedge fund disclosed that it had entered the net short position on Tuesday, with the bet worth 0.51 per cent of the company’s stock, according to data from the Financial Conduct Authority compiled by provider Breakout Point. 

The last time any firm disclosed a bet against the FTSE 100 pharmaceutical group was in 2013, according to the FCA disclosures.

GSK’s shares have risen 11 per cent in the last month, as the drugmaker raised its long-term sales forecast and embarked on a rare £2bn stock buyback earlier this month. GSK reported better than expected earnings on strong sales of HIV and cancer drugs.

But the stock has lagged rival pharmaceutical companies, as the drugmaker has failed to excite investors about its pipeline of new medicines and vaccines, which it needs to replace its HIV drugs when they face a patent cliff later in the decade. In the past five years, shares in GSK have fallen 15 per cent, compared with the S&P 500 pharmaceutical index, which rose 45 per cent. 

Emma Walmsley, GSK’s chief executive, has already faced a battle against an activist investor, when hedge fund Elliott Management built a multibillion-pound stake in the company in 2021. Elliott questioned whether Walmsley was the right leader for the company, given she does not have a scientific background. It also pushed for GSK to consider takeover offers for its consumer health business Haleon, which was later spun off. 

Analysts at JPMorgan said the fourth-quarter earnings and the company’s guidance for 2025 were “positive”. But they added: “We believe the market may also question the logic of a buyback three years from the start of the HIV patent cliff, with a still fairly thin late stage pipeline”. Analysts at Barclays also said that the share buyback was “unexpected”. 

GSK’s shares collapsed in August 2022 when lawsuits over the heartburn drug Zantac emerged. But when GSK settled the vast majority of cases for $2.2bn in October last year, the shares did not return to their previous level. 

The company has also suffered from unexpected bad news for two key products. In 2022, GSK withdrew its cancer drug Blenrep from the US market, after a trial did not meet FDA requirements for medicines that had received an accelerated approval. After further studies, the company is now expecting the drug will be reapproved by the regulator by July 2023. 

Sales of Arexvy, its vaccine for the respiratory syndical virus, known as RSV, dropped in the second half of last year because a US advisory panel unexpectedly recommended limiting its use. 

Citadel is the world’s top-performing hedge fund according to data from LCH Investments, an investor in hedge funds. The firm houses hundreds of trading teams who bet on a wide variety of assets including equities. Citadel manages $65bn worth of investor capital as of the start of the year, and was up 15.1 per cent in 2024.

Citadel declined to comment as the firm does not discuss its positions. GSK did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Tech giant hit by total claim worth €3bn amid investigation over sale of goods from non-EU countries including China

Italian tax authorities have accused Amazon of evading €1.2bn in VAT payments, in the latest effort by European authorities to scrutinise the business affairs of US Big Tech groups in the continent.

The claim is linked to the sale of goods from China and other non-EU countries purchased through its platform from 2019 to 2021, according to three people familiar with the investigation.

The US-based tech giant has been hit with a total claim for €3bn — the original tax, interest and penalties — linked to the alleged tax fraud, which took place as the EU was overhauling its process for collecting VAT on imported goods sold online to European consumers.

Amazon, which is contesting the claim, declined to comment. 

The massive tax claim against Amazon comes as Donald Trump has railed against the treatment of US companies by the EU and its member states. The new US president has singled out the bloc’s widely used VAT tax system for particular ire. 

The Amazon dispute in Italy stems from the sale of imported goods — including low-value items worth less than €150 each — to consumers in the country by third-party sellers on Amazon’s marketplace, during a transition period when the EU was in the midst of changing its process for taxing online sales.

The reforms, which were approved in December 2017, aimed to simplify the ease of doing business in Europe, while reducing the then estimated €5bn lost each year due to VAT evasion on the imports of low-value goods.

Under the old system, the EU required every individual seller to register to pay VAT in each country where they sold goods. Under the revamped rules, which took full effect in 2021, tech companies became responsible for the collection and payment of VAT on all items sold on their platform.

The EU’s new rules also ended a long-standing tax exemption for the online sale of imported items worth less than €150, which had disadvantaged European businesses against foreign rivals.  

However, in 2019, before the new EU-wide system took full effect, Italy passed a national law that began to hold tech companies liable for any tax evasion by third-party sellers that used its platform — the provision that underlies its current tax claim.

Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, analysed 7bn financial transactions carried out through Amazon between the passage of the new Italian law in 2019 and the start of the new EU system in 2021 and found that VAT payments worth an estimated €1.2bn had been evaded, according to people with knowledge of its findings.

Authorities said that Chinese sellers accounted for about 70 to 80 per cent of all goods sold online in Italy.

At a meeting in Rome several months ago, numerous American companies operating in Italy complained to then US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo about Italian tax authorities’ unpredictability, and their interpretation of tax rules to target big foreign businesses for more money for the cash-strapped government.