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Stores boarded up their windows and shortened hours in anticipation of renewed looting, though most protests remained peaceful.

PARIS — Hunker down.

At a time when Christmas lights have started appearing in London, retailers in France and Italy boarded up their stores and curtailed opening hours on Saturday in preparation for another day of major protests, following the previous weekend’s demonstrations during which thousands of stores were damaged or looted.

Although Saturday’s marches in both countries were mostly peaceful, with isolated pockets of violence, the retail sector was left tallying the cost of lost business in the runup to the crucial holiday season — not to mention additional expenses linked to increased security measures. The lost business came on top of the costs of repairing the damages from the Oct. 17 marches.

“Compared with last Saturday, yesterday was a relief. But the precautions taken to protect shops and their staff are having an impact on business,” Judith Jiguet, executive director of the French Retail Federation, said in a statement Sunday.

“Shutting shop or erecting barricades cannot become the new normal. Retailers are essential to the life of our town centers: They must be able to rely on the public authorities to ensure their safety,” the executive added.

The federation, whose members include Galeries Lafayette Group, sporting goods retailer Decathlon and supermarket chains including Carrefour, E.Leclerc and Monoprix, said it remained “particularly vigilant” ahead of Nov. 5, when French unions have called for nationwide strikes.

Apple closed all three of its Paris stores on Saturday, but LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton said it planned business as usual. On the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, roughly half the stores were protected by metal curtains or chipboard panels.

Printemps shuttered its store in Lille and shortened opening hours elsewhere, with the Nation branch in the east of Paris closing at 3 p.m., while the Boulevard Haussmann flagship shut 30 minutes early at 7:30 p.m., a spokeswoman said. Printemps stores in Marseille, Rouen, Nancy and Lyon also closed earlier than usual.

Galeries Lafayette kept all its locations running, but with limited opening hours in Rennes, Perpignan, Caen, Toulon, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand, Nantes and Toulouse, a spokeswoman said.

Bring Back Order

Authorities were determined to avoid a repeat of the scenes of chaos that unfolded on Oct. 17, deploying 70,000 police officers and gendarmes, Sentinelle military personnel and elite commandos such as the RAID and GIGN, in addition to helicopters and armored vehicles.

Protests were banned in several cities, including Lyon and Marseille, while in Paris, the route of the main demonstration organized by the CGT union was changed at the last moment, with the police prefecture citing the need to protect retailers.

Those on the revised itinerary, which snaked from the south to the east of the French capital, were left scrambling to secure their storefronts.

Videos shot by local residents showed a flood of people stretching for miles, with the crowd estimated at 250,000 by the CGT and 110,000 by the Interior Ministry. Nationwide, the number of participants totaled 800,000 according to the union, or 410,000 according to police, slightly down from the previous week.

As the procession arrived on the Cours de Vincennes to the east of Paris in the late afternoon, a group of 500 violent “troublemakers” clashed with police, the Interior Ministry reported. They hurled projectiles including glass bottles, and police responded with tear gas and water cannons.

On Sunday morning, as joggers and families returned to the neighborhood, there were few visible signs of the clashes, except for scores of graffitied slogans on walls and tram shelters, including one that read “Macron Resign.”

Anger has mounted against President Emmanuel Macron’s administration over conditions in public schools and the soaring cost of living. Violent clashes were also recorded on Saturday in Lyon, Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, Nice and Marseille.

Nationwide, “several” stores were damaged and 24 looted, compared with the 1,522 businesses affected the previous week, the Interior Ministry said in a statement Sunday. Police made 1,314 arrests, down from 2,628 the previous week.

Trade Minister Serge Papin estimated more than 3,000 stores were damaged or looted on Oct. 17. In Paris alone, local authorities had tallied 451 vandalized retailers, including 228 stores that were stripped bare, ranging from mom-and-pop groceries to luxury boutiques.

Controversial Advice

Papin sought to reassure the sector in the runup to the second weekend of demonstrations. “To the shopkeepers listening this morning, I want to say: you can be confident that order will be restored by the 24th,” he told financial news channel BFM Business on Wednesday.

Despite this, Paris police chief Patrice Faure advised store owners to take precautionary measures, including closing or shortening their working hours, barricading windows, removing any external objects that might be used as projectiles and, if possible, hiring private security.

The latter suggestion raised the ire of politicians including David Lisnard, president of the Association of French Mayors, who called it “an unacceptable admission of powerlessness” on the part of the authorities.

“Shopkeepers pay for the repairs and pay taxes so that the state can ensure their security — yet they are now expected to pay a third time for private security,” he wrote on X.

“Unable to fulfill this basic duty, the state is asking them to pay security companies. More costs, and therefore less income, at a difficult time. And the same injustice remains: The first victims will be those on the lowest incomes, who cannot afford this protection,” he added.

Faure responded by apologizing for a “clumsy” expression of support for retailers.

“Protecting shopkeepers and their premises is the state’s responsibility. We will not shirk our responsibilities. The preventive and deterrent measures recommended to shopkeepers are intended to complement this action, not replace it,” he stated on X.

In the wake of the Oct. 17 violence, Faure ordered the creation of a task force of 200 investigators charged with bringing vandals and looters to justice.

“They are pursuing every lead available to them, including social media, CCTV footage and forensic evidence. We shall not rest,” he said.

The police boss also ordered a nightly curfew in sensitive areas, including Place de la République and the Les Halles district, home to the Westfield Forum des Halles shopping center.

Milan on Alert

Tension built up also in Italy, specifically in Milan, where last weekend student-led protests over the rising cost of living, inflation and access to education were marred by widespread unrest in downtown as several hundred hooded individuals joined and took advantage of the demonstrations to loot shops and businesses.

On Friday, many retailers in town already started to barricade their stores as threats of new protests spread on social media throughout the week. These included stores mainly located in central high-traffic shopping areas including luxury’s Golden Triangle, the Duomo and San Babila Squares, thoroughfares Corso Vittorio Emanuele II and Via Torino.

Despite Mayor Giuseppe Sala’s exhortation to stay open, some key businesses opted for an early closing on Saturday, including the Rinascente department store overlooking the Duomo cathedral that shut its doors at 3 p.m.

Others — spanning from Adidas to Levi’s — applied signs that they were open over the plywood panels protecting their windows to encourage shoppers to step in.

Law enforcement was heavily deployed to contain potential upheaval, but there were no new episodes of looting on Saturday, when about 10,000 protesters gathered in a peaceful demonstration in Milan.

Clashes with police were registered in other Italian cities, however, including Turin, Bologna and Rome, where roughly 50 students among the 4,000 protesters temporarily broke into the Colosseum. In Florence, law enforcement clashed with those trying to access the luxury shopping street Via Tornabuoni.

Marco Barbieri, general secretary of the Confcommercio Milano trade confederation, estimated that the damage to stores and commercial activities in Milan from the first weekend of clashes totaled more than 1 million euros, between structural damages and missed sales due to the early closing of businesses.

“It seems that reason has prevailed in Milan,” Barbieri said on Saturday.

“The senseless vandalism that wreaked havoc on the city center last weekend has not been repeated. As we have always said, demonstrating in a civil manner is a sacrosanct and inviolable right — one that stands in direct opposition to violence. We thank the public institutions, law enforcement, and the military for managing and keeping a difficult situation under control,” he added.

“We are especially grateful to the retailers who, despite the tensions, kept their businesses open — demonstrating the true meaning of courage, responsibility and trust. Let us never forget that, thanks to them, our cities are more vibrant, more attractive and safer,” Barbieri said.

The executive said half of the local fashion stores decided to close on Saturday, while restaurants and bars remained open. He reiterated that besides the economic implications, the city faces reputational damage.

Meanwhile, many independent retailers took to local media to voice their concerns, highlighting how they can’t afford continued early closings and lost income opportunities, especially with the holiday season around the corner.

A former Deutsche Bank executive got into business with the kingpins of Russia’s shadow fleet. It all went south.

In a rare legal fight, a former Russian energy industry insider has sued sanctioned oil traders who, according to Western officials, have become the most important middlemen enabling Moscow to sell its oil and fund its war in Ukraine.

Igor Soglayev alleges he teamed up in early 2024 with Moscow-backed traders known as the Coral network. The relationship soured after a tanker carrying tens of millions of dollars worth of diesel failed to deliver its cargo in Brazil. The two sides are now slugging it out in courts in Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, filings reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show. The U.A.E. court handling the main case hasn’t publicized the proceedings.

Soglayev, a former Deutsche Bank executive, notched a legal victory, despite receiving what he perceived as death threats over energy trades gone wrong. A U.A.E. judge issued a freezing order on more than $700 million of proceeds from the sale of Russian energy by Soglayev’s opponents.

“I realized I had been screwed,” Soglayev said in an interview. “I had been truly played.”

Chasing liquid gold

The size of the freezing order underscores the sums of money at stake in the market for Moscow’s sanctioned oil and the lengths that executives with ties to Russian energy will go to get a piece of it. Russia remains one of the world’s leading energy exporters along with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, selling more than $150 billion worth of crude and fuel each year.

To avoid Western sanctions, Russian oil exports have for the most part fallen under the control of a handful of middlemen from Azerbaijan and Russia. They are known in the industry and by Western officials as the Coral network, after a now-defunct trading firm where many of them used to work.

Led by little-known traders Etibar Eyyub and Tahir Garayev, Coral struck a secret deal with state-backed Rosneft to export much of Russia’s oil in the chaotic early months of the Ukraine war, The Wall Street Journal has reported. The network has since consolidated control of the market, moving tens of billions of dollars of oil annually on a fleet of tankers that form most of Russia’s shadow fleet.

The U.K. and European Union have sanctioned Eyyub, Garayev and several of their associates, plus dozens of trading and shipping firms they used to deflect attention from their activities. Eyyub said last year he considered the sanctions to be baseless, and that he had done nothing unlawful. A lawyer for Garayev has said the Azeri businessman hasn’t been involved in petroleum operations since 2022.

The Coral network sells crude that once headed to Europe, India and China. Russian diesel, meanwhile, flowed to Brazil, where the fuel powers haulage trucks. The Latin American country devours the fuel to power haulage trucks. Soglayev tried to get a piece of the action.

Leveraging state ties

Soglayev’s career traces the recent economic arc of Russia. He commanded a military intelligence unit before leaving the army after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As private enterprise flourished in the 1990s, he joined with a Dutch businessman to import electronic goods.

After a stint in the U.S. working on Wall Street, he returned to Russia and got to know the petrochemicals industry from his perch at Deutsche Bank. That led to a job as chief executive of chemicals producer Sanors.

Rosneft bought Sanors in 2015. Soglayev became Rosneft’s top chemicals executive and an adviser to Rosneft boss Igor Sechin—now the patron of the Coral traders. Soglayev left two years later, and dabbled in various energy ventures.

When Russia’s export machine broke down after President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Sechin tapped Eyyub and Garayev to replace the Swiss and U.K. traders that used to handle Rosneft’s oil, the Journal has reported.

The lawyer for Garayev said he wasn’t aware of any legal proceedings with Soglayev. Eyyub couldn’t be reached for comment.

Soglayev says in filings he set up a firm called DIA33 in Dubai to flip Russian oil to foreign buyers. He set his sights on Brazil, where Russian diesel was displacing more expensive American fuel.

His goal was to make Russian fuel palatable to importers who worried that buying directly from Moscow could complicate their dealings with banks wary of violating sanctions. He booked storage space at Brazilian ports and planned to buy diesel from Russian exporters, then sell at a markup to fuel distributors.

Web of transactions

The trading arrangements Soglayev entered into show the convoluted mechanisms that have kept Russian oil flowing beyond the gaze of Western officials. Soglayev alleges he bought Russian diesel from a small firm in Dubai called Serene Resources in late 2023.

He says its CEO, Andrey Romanovskiy, moved to a different company that was controlled by Eyyub and Garayev. Soglayev alleges Romanovskiy told him the Coral network operated through different shell companies to avoid international attention. Soglayev says they discussed the possibility that DIA might later merge with Coral to become its Brazilian trading arm.

A lawyer for Romanovskiy didn’t respond to questions. But in an affidavit reviewed by the Journal, Romanovskiy told a Dubai court his firm was independent, denied that it was controlled by Coral and disputed other details of Soglayev’s case.

Things went south after terminal operators in a Brazilian port rejected an aging tanker full of Russian diesel that Soglayev was supposed to sell, according to filings by Soglayev and some of his opponents. The ship dawdled for weeks, racking up bills, until a different harbor admitted it, according to the filings.

The alleged Coral traders who sold the diesel, frustrated that Soglayev hadn’t paid them, pursued him before an arbitration tribunal in Dubai, accusing him of having oversold his capabilities and effectively stealing the fuel. The tribunal earlier this year ordered Soglayev to pay one of the firms involved in the trade $42 million.

Soglayev responded with his own suits in Dubai and Brazil, alleging Coral ruined his business by approaching his clients and selling to them at discounted prices. The partnership, he claims, was a ruse for Coral to access DIA’s internal information. He claims he is owed more than $500 million in lost business.

Soglayev alleges he received what he perceived to be death threats, including a call from Eyyub to say he had discussed the dispute with a Chechen warlord.

In June, a judge in Dubai banned Eyyub, Garayev and 13 other firms and people from disposing of assets valued up to $704 million as the case moved forward. But he later said his court didn’t have jurisdiction, raising the possibility of the suit being tossed.

Soglayev has appealed to keep the case in the Dubai International Financial Centre, said his lawyer in the U.A.E., David McCoy of ADG Legal.

The freezing order remains in place pending a decision on the appeal. A related lawsuit in Brazil is ongoing.

As confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella wanes, 10 European nations start working with Paris on deterrence

PARIS—France, working with European allies, is strengthening and expanding its role as a nuclear-weapons power in an effort to bolster deterrence against Russian attacks as Europe’s confidence in American security guarantees wavers.

Dubbed “forward deterrence” by President Emmanuel Macron, the plan envisions deployments of French nuclear-enabled Rafale jet fighters across Europe and the creation of new infrastructure, communications, early-warning and intelligence-sharing links with these allies.

The ultimate aim is to create more strategic uncertainty for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who controls one of the world’s largest atomic arsenals and has repeatedly raised the specter of nuclear war since his armies invaded Ukraine in 2022.

“What it brings is a new complication for the adversary, because it brings another layer that the Russians will have to read,” Macron’s strategic-affairs adviser, Xavier Chatel, said at a recent security conference in Warsaw. The project also gives France “new options for dissemination of our nuclear forces in case of a nuclear escalation.”

Ten European countries—including the U.K., Germany, Poland and the Nordic nations—have joined the French initiative, with varying degrees of involvement, since Macron first announced the plan in March. The new architecture of secure communications, early warning and intelligence sharing, European officials say, could also contribute to conventional defense should the U.S. fail to protect its NATO allies.

“It’s a more geopolitically tense time and France has this strategic capacity,” said Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide. He said the French plan “doesn’t replace anything. It supplements the nuclear guarantees that were already there” from the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

French nuclear doctrine foresees the use of nuclear weapons when the nation’s “vital interests” are at stake. In the March speech announcing the new policy, Macron reiterated that these vital interests don’t stop at France’s borders and have a European dimension.

“Could we consider that the survival of our closest partners may be put at risk without it affecting our vital interests?” Macron said.

Macron also said France, which is believed to possess around 290 operational nuclear warheads—a fraction of the U.S. or Russian arsenals—would resume making nuclear devices for the first time in decades and would no longer disclose the size of its stockpile.

Paris has left the exact geography of its “vital interests” deliberately vague and never offered an explicit guarantee to allies. But the countries it has invited into its nuclear club offer some clues.

As of now, the 10 are the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Greece, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The three Baltic states, which are most vulnerable to Russia, aren’t included. Italy has declined to join.

“We don’t have any plans to put nuclear weapons on Finnish soil in peacetime. But we do have plans for creating a strategic dilemma for Russia,” said Finnish President Alexander Stubb. “We felt it would be useful for our security to get information, to be involved in it. We don’t know where this is going to end, it’s probably a 10- to 15-years process.”

France developed its own fully sovereign nuclear forces, outside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, under President Charles de Gaulle in the 1960s. It doesn’t participate in the NATO nuclear planning group that unites the U.S., Europe’s other nuclear power, the U.K., and the remaining alliance members.

The U.S. operates a separate nuclear-sharing program with several European nations that involves deploying tactical nuclear weapons on allied aircraft, with any use requiring dual permission from the allied nation and Washington. The British nuclear deterrent, unlike the French, relies on American-made platforms and is under NATO command.

Doubts that the U.S. would risk nuclear war on behalf of an ally aren’t new. They were a key reason why de Gaulle—who received no reply after asking President John F. Kennedy in 1961 whether he would sacrifice New York to save Paris—sought an independent deterrent in the first place. But these doubts have intensified now that President Trump has embraced Putin’s Russia, striking energy deals and putting pressure on Ukraine.

French officials argue that the French deterrent is more credible because the security of European allies is of far more direct importance to them than to Washington.

“There is one difference between France and the U.S.—we share the same geography, we are part and parcel of the same continent, we have economic and sociological continuity with our neighbors writ large,” Chatel, Macron’s adviser, said at the Warsaw Security Conference.

That doesn’t mean France’s neighbors will be part of the decision-making. “The French will let us participate in their nuclear deterrence as much as the Americans,” quipped a government minister in another European nation involved in the project.

The retention of full French control over the nuclear force is part of a deliberate effort to make the “forward deterrence” strategy acceptable across the country’s political spectrum, including to the far-right Rassemblement National of Marine Le Pen, who, according to opinion polls, is ahead in the race for the presidency in elections next spring.

Le Pen’s party has implicitly endorsed the “forward deterrence” initiative. But a Le Pen presidency would likely undermine its appeal in Europe given her past warm relations with Putin, and the party’s overall skepticism of European commitments, some analysts warn.

“The problem is that an RN president would mean a loss of credibility on both branches—deterrence of Russia and reassurance of allies,” said French nuclear-policy expert Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris.

A senior European defense official in a partner nation agreed, saying that the intent, the focus and the scope of the partnership with France will come under renewed scrutiny—in Paris and among allies—should Le Pen come to power.

For now, France has created 10 separate steering groups with “forward deterrence” partners, and is holding talks in a hub-and-spokes bilateral fashion rather than gathering them all together in a nuclear club.

In practice, this means that defense officials in European partner nations keep calling each other to compare notes on what they had been told by France, senior defense officials say.

“Is it better than nothing? Probably. But it is not, and should not be viewed, as a substitute to U.S. extended deterrence. And the French are very clear about that, too,” said Vipin Narang, professor of nuclear security and political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who oversaw nuclear policy in the Pentagon under the Biden administration. “The fact that it is necessary pains me as a former American official. But the French have come a long way.”

While the U.S. has a much larger strategic nuclear arsenal, the belief in Paris and many other European capitals is that American strategic capabilities are reserved for protecting the American homeland, and that the real nuclear umbrella for Europe consists—at best—only of the bombs in the NATO nuclear-sharing program. The U.S. deliberately retains ambiguity on how it would respond.

These B-61 gravity nuclear bombs, designed in the 1960s to stop Soviet tank divisions sprinting from East Germany, have become increasingly obsolete in a modern war—and pose a limited threat to the Russian homeland given advances in Russian air defenses.

France’s ASMP-A nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on Rafales, by contrast, are designed to strike Russia’s main cities and have a high chance of reaching their targets, creating an entirely different level of deterrence, military officials and analysts say.

“It’s unclear if it is convincing to the Russians that the French would risk retaliation against Paris for Warsaw, for example. But the Russians are definitely paying attention,” said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on Russia and nuclear affairs at Sciences Po university in Paris.

The very nature of French nuclear doctrine and its nuclear arsenal makes it in some ways more threatening to Russia than the NATO extended deterrence led by the U.S., Grajewski added. “The B-61 bombs are not instruments for war fighting, they’re pretty much instruments of political assurance,” she said. “The French nuclear arsenal, by contrast, can reach Russia.”

Roche said its drug lowered the risk of death by 44% compared with available treatments from Amgen and Bristol-Myers Squibb

MADRID—Roche Holding ROP -0.31%decrease; down pointing triangle said it expects a pill it is developing to become the new standard treatment for an advanced form of lung cancer, and the company’s first shot at an emerging field within the oncology market.

The Swiss drugmaker is working on several drugs that target a driver of cancers that long eluded the industry. A breakthrough in pancreatic cancer from U.S. biotech Revolution Medicines put the field on investors’ radar, and Roche aims to venture into it with lung-cancer medicine divarasib.

In study results presented Sunday at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Madrid, Roche said its drug lowered the risk of death by 44% compared with available treatments from Amgen and Bristol-Myers Squibb. The late-stage clinical trial compared the effects of the drugs on patients with a specific type of lung cancer who had been previously treated.

Fewer participants who took divarasib dropped out of the trial due to side effects than those who received the existing drugs, Roche said.

“The data are practice-changing,” Roche’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Stefan Frings, said in an interview.

Divarasib is an oral drug designed to bind to a protein called KRAS G12C to turn off its tumor-driving signaling function. The so-called KRAS mutations are a subset of a driver of the proliferation of tumors known as RAS, and G12C is one of the most common forms.

Competition is heating up in the space, with Eli Lilly, Merck and Revolution Medicines all developing KRAS drugs, analysts at RBC Capital Markets said in a recent research note.

Frings said Roche is doubling down on the RAS pathway to treat cancer. The company’s portfolio includes an experimental medicine that aims to block the different forms of RAS mutations and another one targeting KRAS G12C, both in early-stage studies.

For divarasib, Roche is conducting other late-stage clinical trials to test whether it works in earlier phases of the disease, either as a stand-alone treatment or in combination with Merck’s Keytruda.

Frings said the results of the divarasib study, along with data from earlier trials presented at the congress of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in June, make Roche reasonably confident that divarasib could work as a first-line treatment.

The company last month raised its estimate for divarasib’s annual peak sales to between 2 billion and 3 billion Swiss francs ($2.44 billion-$3.66 billion), up from between 1 billion and 2 billion francs earlier.

“We certainly are more hopeful now that it will be a good blockbuster,” Frings said. “Treatment duration matters as well on peak sales and the treatment duration was certainly a lot longer than we had initially forecast.”

The U.K. drugmaker is developing an in-house lineup of targeted cancer drugs

MADRID—AstraZeneca AZN -1.20%decrease; down pointing triangle is readying to file the first of a new portfolio of targeted cancer drugs for regulatory approval, moving to cement its position in one of the fastest-growing corners of the oncology market.

Through its alliance with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo, AstraZeneca has been at the forefront of the latest generation of a class of medicines known as antibody-drug conjugates, or ADCs, which aim to replace standard chemotherapy by striking tumors directly with a toxic agent. But the U.K. drugmaker is now developing an in-house lineup.

AstraZeneca on Sunday released results from the first late-stage trial of a fully owned ADC, showing it reduced the risk of death by 42% in patients with advanced gastric cancer who had been previously treated. The data were presented at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology in Madrid.

“It demonstrates that we can continue to bring antibody-drug conjugates into areas where classic chemotherapy has historically been the standard of care,” the head of AstraZeneca’s oncology business, David Fredrickson, said in an interview. “It really paves the way for the multiple other antibody drug conjugates that we have in our portfolio.”

ADCs have been around for more than two decades. But it took drugmakers years to refine the technology behind their three-part design—an antibody that identifies a target protein on the surface of tumor cells, an anticancer agent that kills them, and a chemical “linker” that holds both together.

While AstraZeneca had been working on the field for a while, its 2019 partnership with Daiichi for cancer drug Enhertu boosted its efforts. The companies teamed up again for another ADC, Datroway, a year later.

Learning to develop its own ADCs was a key reason for AstraZeneca entering into the partnership with Daiichi, analysts at Bernstein wrote in a recent research note.

“We saw something that was different from the previous data that had been around,” AstraZeneca’s oncology research-and-development head, Susan Galbraith, told journalists on the sidelines of the ESMO congress.

Many of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are investing in ADCs. The drug class has been among the fastest-growing by dealmaking volumes since 2019, according to IQVIA, a provider of healthcare data.

Just this year, Gilead Sciences snapped up German ADC specialist Tubulis for up to $5 billion, Novartis bought Britain’s Myricx Bio for up to $1.5 billion and Roche Holding secured rights to several ADCs through a series of licensing deals in China.

“There’s a huge opportunity there for multiple companies to have different programs,” Galbraith said.

AstraZeneca’s first fully owned ADC, sonesitatug vedotin or sone-ve, could face competition. Takeda Pharmaceuticals presented at ESCO data for a rival ADC, arcotatug tavatecan.

Galbraith said the sone-ve data set is robust enough to take it to regulators, even as the company continues to investigate the medicine in earlier stages of gastric cancer and other types of tumors, as well as in combinations with other drugs.

AstraZeneca licensed sone-ve from China’s KYM Biosciences in 2023. Two other ADCs that came from AstraZeneca’s own labs, puxi-sam and torvu-sam, are being tested in late-stage trials and the company has more in early-stage development. Along the way, there were stumbles. The company disclosed in its second-quarter results that it had dropped a couple of ADCs.

Back in 2024, AstraZeneca estimated its portfolio of wholly owned ADCs could generate annual peak revenue of more than $5 billion. It has recently broken out peak revenue estimates for sone-ve of $3 billion to $5 billion, while maintaining its peak-sales guidance of more than $5 billion for the rest of the portfolio.

“The confidence level in the [sone-ve] profile that we’ve got and the value that is bringing is obviously larger,” Galbraith said. “As we see the same thing with puxi-sam and torvu-sam, I think we’ll also be able to think about what their ultimate value will be.”

The 80-year-old president defeats Flávio Bolsonaro to extend one of Latin America’s longest political careers

SÃO PAULO—President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva clung to power in Sunday’s presidential election by orchestrating a surprise victory over Flávio Bolsonaro, winning an unprecedented fourth term and cementing his place as one of the world’s longest-serving democratically elected leaders.

The leftist leader, just two days away from turning 81, won 51.8% of the vote against 48.2% for Bolsonaro, electoral authorities said with over 99% of the votes counted. The victory came after da Silva’s Workers’ Party requested that voting be extended Sunday, after reports that some local governments had reduced the number of buses serving poorer voters, who tend to support the president.

That request was granted by Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin—a decision that came a minute after voting was supposed to end, prompting chaos at some polling stations. While Bolsonaro’s camp also requested an extension to voting in some parts of the country because of flooding, the move by Zanin, who served as da Silva’s personal defense lawyer during the so-called Car Wash corruption scandal that entangled the leftist, drew criticism of bias.

Da Silva became the first presidential candidate in Brazil’s modern democratic history to lose the first round of voting but win the runoff. His adversary was the eldest son of Jair Bolsonaro, a bitter rival who served as president and was convicted of trying to overturn da Silva’s 2022 victory.

Cheers erupted from apartment windows and car horns blared across São Paulo after a frantic last-minute push by musicians, celebrities and campaigners to mobilize first-round abstainers and secure da Silva’s victory. Despite widespread apathy at the start of the campaign, Sunday’s 19% abstention rate was one of the lowest on record—and essential in delivering victory to the president.

For many Brazilians, the election was more than about keeping da Silva in power. They saw a vote for him as a vote to keep the Bolsonaros out and preserve the country’s hard-won democracy.

“We must do what we can to protect Brazil’s democracy,” said Karina da Silva Pereira, a 50-year-old lawyer in São Paulo, who braved torrential rains to vote for da Silva. Following Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to seize power by force four years ago, she said she felt compelled to vote to keep the family out of power. “It was a risk we couldn’t take.”

Da Silva had trailed 45% to Bolsonaro’s 47% in the first round on Oct. 4, but the race tightened sharply in the final weeks. Even on the eve of the runoff, major polls showed Bolsonaro with a narrow lead within the margin of error, with Datafolha and Quaest both putting him at 51% to da Silva’s 49%.

A quarter of a century after first winning the presidency, da Silva is now the last remaining stalwart of South America’s left, which has suffered a string of defeats as the region takes a rightward turn driven by economic and crime concerns. New leaders from Honduras to Colombia to Chile and beyond have allied themselves with the Trump administration.

Da Silva’s surprise victory Sunday came after he persuaded millions of Brazilians who had skipped the first round of voting to cast ballots for him in the second round, despite heavy rains that pounded much of the country.

Starting as a factory worker and trade union leader during what was then a dictatorship, da Silva has weathered throat and skin cancers, a corruption scandal that put him behind bars in 2018, and a plot by Jair Bolsonaro’s allies to assassinate him.

Da Silva’s victory puts him on course to complete 16 nonconsecutive years in office, matching Angela Merkel’s tenure as German chancellor and exceeding that of any U.S. president, placing him among a small group of modern democracy’s longest-serving elected leaders.

The victory marks another chapter in da Silva’s bitter struggle with the Bolsonaro family, whose right-wing movement has proved remarkably resilient. Da Silva narrowly defeated Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, winning 50.9% of the vote to his rival’s 49.1%.

The former president was subsequently convicted and imprisoned for plotting a coup to prevent da Silva from taking office. But rather than fade away, the movement rallied behind his eldest son, turning this year’s election into a rematch by proxy and forcing da Silva into another bruising battle to keep the family out of power.

But da Silva now faces an uphill struggle to govern after the right swept congressional elections held alongside the first round of voting this month. The Bolsonaro family’s Liberal Party emerged as the largest in both chambers, winning 121 of 513 seats in the lower house and securing a 28-strong bloc in the 81-seat Senate, leaving da Silva increasingly dependent on deals with conservative and centrist lawmakers to advance his agenda.

Born to illiterate farmworkers in Brazil’s impoverished northeast, da Silva lost a finger in a metalworking plant before rising through the labor movement to become president in 2003. Even among poorer Brazilians who associate him with corruption, many still see him as their strongest advocate in a deeply unequal nation, where the poorest half of the population—more than 100 million people—owns less than 3% of household wealth.

After his first-round setback, da Silva shifted his campaign away from warnings about U.S. interference in Brazil’s election and toward the economic frustrations of ordinary voters. He promised to increase payments under the Bolsa Família welfare program, championed a shorter working week without a cut in pay and proposed sweeping debt relief for struggling households. He also floated free public transportation on weekends, seeking to reconnect with poorer voters who had long formed the backbone of his support.

Da Silva also toughened his message on crime, breaking with his party’s traditional position to support prosecuting 16-year-olds as adults for particularly serious crimes. His campaign intensified efforts to mobilize voters who had stayed home in the first round, while portraying Bolsonaro’s proposed spending cuts as a threat to public services and social benefits.

Da Silva’s victory sets the stage for renewed tensions with Washington. Following a string of victories by conservative candidates from Argentina and Chile to Colombia and Peru in recent years, Brazil’s decision to stick with the left denies President Trump a powerful ally in Latin America, one that is a major source of critical minerals needed for everything from electric vehicles to weapons systems.

Trump has praised Bolsonaro and clashed repeatedly with da Silva over trade, Brazil’s prosecution of the former president and what the Brazilian leader has called U.S. interference in the election. The dispute escalated into tariffs and a diplomatic row over visas, although the two governments have continued negotiating a trade agreement.

US hospital chain is the latest not-for-profit healthcare provider to seek a large deal

One of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the US is nearing a takeover of Bain-backed surgical care provider Surgery Partners, in a deal which would value the group at roughly $6bn including debt.

Bon Secours Mercy Health is in late-stage talks to buy a majority stake in Surgery Partners, valuing the group at about $20 a share, according to people familiar with the matter.

Private equity group Bain Capital, which has been a minority shareholder since 2017, will retain its almost 40 per cent shareholding in Surgery Partners as part of the take-private deal.

The potential deal, which could be announced as soon as Monday, will give Surgery Partners an enterprise value of roughly $6bn including its $3.5bn debt pile, the people added.

The sale would draw to a close more than a year of stop-start efforts to get Surgery Partners sold, after the company walked away from a go-private deal led by Bain at a higher valuation last year.

Bon Secours is the latest not-for-profit healthcare provider to strike a large deal. Ascension, another Catholic non-profit, earlier this year struck a $3.9bn deal to buy surgery care provider Amsurg, a similar business to Surgery Partners.

An acquisition of Surgery Partners would significantly accelerate Bon Secours’ expansion into outpatient care. Surgery Partners operates 176 surgery centres and hospitals across 30 US states.

Shares in Surgery Partners are down 31 per cent over the past year to just under $16 a share, or an equity value of nearly $2.1bn.

Bon Secours has made a significant return on its investment in healthcare payment software specialist Ensemble Partners dating back to 2016. Earlier this year, the software group struck a deal to sell a majority stake to Thoreau Group at an $11.75bn valuation, as part of which Bon Secours retained a minority shareholding.

Last year, Bain tried to buy the whole of Surgery Partners, valuing the group at a $6.7bn enterprise value, but the talks collapsed.

Bon Secours runs 47 hospitals across the US and Ireland, generating approximately $14bn in revenues last year.

Bon Secours and Surgery Partners did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Bain declined to comment.

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This spring, Mike Mathews, who leads the global digital infrastructure practice at insurance broker Marsh, raced to design a policy to protect a data center developer from a $1 million-a-day late fee. The developer’s tenant was demanding damages if electricity and facilities weren’t available on time during the first phase of a new gigawatt-scale facility.

Mathews’ team arranged the novel coverage, a bespoke form of “delay-in-delivery” coverage just for data centers, only to see penalties escalate sharply in a matter of months: Tenants in new deals began asking for upwards of $5 million for each day of delay, citing even higher estimates of lost revenue.

Welcome to the wild, and no longer boring, world of insurance whisperers trying to keep data center developers alive. Marsh, one of the two leading insurance brokers alongside Aon, is designing policies for AI infrastructure risks where data can be scant and financial exposures are growing to a scale never contemplated.

Bankers and bondholders are asking for more of this insurance to get comfortable underwriting record amounts of spending by first-time developers and money-losing AI startups. The recent quintupling of this type of late-delivery fee, and escalation of others, “sent a shockwave,” says Mathews. “I’m not saying investors were hands off on insurance, but they’re all hands on now.”

Swiss Re estimates that data center insurance premiums could approach $24 billion by 2030. S&P Global estimates premiums are already running around $10 billion 2026, which is twice the size of the global aviation insurance market. Data center construction growth has been so rapid —now roughly $2 trillion in insurable value and growing $300 billion a year—that S&P warned in a recent report, “We expect capacity constraints to limit the industry’s ability to fully insure these hyperscale data center projects, as total insurable values reach $20 billion-$30 billion per location.”

When every party in a buildout relies on borrowed money, a delay can create cascading problems. “My bet is late penalties will bankrupt more developers than interest rates ever will,” KKR’s global head of digital infrastructure, Waldemar Szlezak, wrote this month in a recap of a J.P. Morgan infrastructure investment forum.

Mathews compares insurance to a clock: “Over the past 100 years, insurance has maybe changed five minutes. But if you look at digital and data centers, it spins like a stopwatch.”

GPU Insurance

Mathews has hired mostly data center development and operations veterans like himself, rather than career insurance brokers, to staff his team in recent years, and just brought on a former risk manager from Meta. They are helping insurers design coverage for emerging risks, including service interruptions caused by new types of equipment, potential declines in the value of Nvidia graphics processing units, and financial guarantees for multibillion-dollar utility upgrades, even when developers may not use the full power capacity. Efforts to insure the residual value of GPUs are still nascent, Mathews said. Older chips are holding their value or even rising in a scarce market, so pricing such protection is tricky.

Meta said Marsh is its insurance broker on a data center project in El Paso, Texas. Marsh has cited its own role in arranging insurance solutions for Meta’s large AI campus in Monroe, Louisiana. Marsh recently said it found insurance providers for more than $5 billion in multiple forms of credit protection for a data center developer making long-term commitments to pay for utility infrastructure. Oracle has had to satisfy such commitments in Wisconsin, but Marsh did not identify its client.

The AI risks that need insurance today do not fit neatly into the categories that builders and cloud providers have traditionally been able to insure. Conventional policies cover construction delays or business interruptions caused by physical events, such as fires or storm-related water damage. They did not cover the risk that a utility cannot provide power on a promised timeline or that an on-site power plant is delayed.

Mathews offers an analogy: Imagine building or renovating a house that the developer promises will be ready by Christmas, only to find you must wait until February for appliances or a power hookup. That aggravating delay is usually tough luck—not an insurable event. If, after you move in, a leak or air-conditioning failure forces you out during repairs, it might be on you to spring for a few nights in a hotel. Annoying, but it won’t bankrupt you.

Now imagine a data center firm that promises to hand over as much as a 1 GW powered data center shell to an AI developer or cloud provider, only to postpone delivery from Christmas to the end of February. Late fees of up to $5 million a day could consume the entire daily rental income that the facility’s landlord was expecting, says Christian Okoye of Occam Edge, which quantifies delay costs for investors, lenders and developers. Over those two months, the data center firm could owe $300 million in penalties while also forgoing rent—a damaging combination for loan repayments.

And an AI lab could forgo multiples of that $300 million in monthly revenue if it can’t get its chips energized, as we recently reported, or if the data center goes down.

Even for risks that are insurable, like storms, owners may make a business decision to only insure part of a gigawatt scale campus given that the facilities plus the pricey chips and servers cost around $50 to $60 billion per gigawatt. Mathews says he hasn’t found any project to be uninsurable and points out that reinsurers have excess capital they want to put to work in this market.

Or, to satisfy bondholders, some developers may go above and beyond. The relatively young bitcoin-miner-turned-AI-infrastructure developer Hut 8 is building a data center in Corpus Christi, on the Gulf Coast of Texas where hurricanes are a regular risk. Sean Glennan, CFO of Hut 8, said “we went well above maximum and probable foreseeable loss on these policies…We said, ‘Let’s get very robust insurance policies to give bondholders peace of mind.’”

Hut 8 also bought 19 months of “delay in startup” insurance to provide some revenue protection if insured damage causes a delay. And Glennan says he negotiated a lease that can’t be terminated if the Texas campus experiences certain delays. Hut 8 used the insurer FM and the broker Aon.

Pooling Risk

Marsh and Aon have both been arranging multibillion-dollar insurance facilities, which are arrangements where insurers pool risks across multiple projects. Pooled risks are necessary because no single insurer is set up to absorb tens of billions of dollars of risk on a single campus. Because portions of sites must be “self-insured or only partially insured,” S&P said in an April report that it expects growth in alternative arrangements like insurance-linked securities.

Tim Walker, Marsh’s digital infrastructure construction leader, points out that some challenges just aren’t insurable. “What happens when you don’t have enough people to build all these things? To me that’s one of the biggest risks.”

The demand just keeps getting bigger as penalties rise: RBC Capital Markets recently reported that a data center where temperatures deviated from safe targets for one month risked a $150 million penalty. A report by Gallagher Re found that a single 45-minute outage could wipe out 40% of a data center’s annual cash flow in penalties, if it is held to the traditional industry promise of 99.999% uptime, or about five minutes of downtime a year.

An old risk, that rats could eat through data center-related cables, has re-surfaced as an even bigger worry. A certain fiber maker used to make a cable in a shade of orange that rats loved, leading to new insurance add-ons for “vermin.” Vermin could cost providers a whole lot more as they rush back into cities to serve up AI inferencing. “You can build a $10 billion, state-of-the-art facility, and Chuck E. Cheese comes and eats your fiber and you’re out.”