TheChek News Flow

Storm is expected to become a Category 1 hurricane by midweek

Tropical Storm Idalia gained strength and speed Sunday as it moved toward the Florida Gulf Coast, and might reach hurricane status by midweek, the National Hurricane Center said.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Saturday declared a state of emergency for roughly 30 counties along the Panhandle and other parts of the Sunshine State.

Idalia grew from a tropical depression into a tropical storm Sunday as it moved over parts of the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and western Cuba, prompting flash flood and landslide warnings in those places.

The storm is expected to become a Category 1 hurricane and make landfall in Florida on Wednesday, according to the National Hurricane Center. It is expected to bring dangerous storm surges, pounding rain and strong winds to Florida’s Gulf Coast and Panhandle. The storm is expected to stay well west of the Florida Keys.

Heavy rainfall is also likely to hit parts of the Southeastern U.S. by midweek, the NHC said.

A Category 1 hurricane has wind speeds of 74 to 95 miles an hour. Tropical Storm Idalia had 45 mph winds as of Sunday, according to meteorologists.

Storm surge and wind watches for portions of the Florida west coast were expected by nightfall. Idalia is forecast to bring anywhere from 3 to 6 inches of rain to Cuba.

Parts of Florida and southern Georgia are also likely to experience heavy precipitation Tuesday into Wednesday, according to the forecast. The heavy rainfall will move into the Carolinas by Thursday.

Scattered flash and urban flooding is expected across portions of the west coast of Florida and the Panhandle and portions of the Southeast U.S. as the storm travels north, the NHC said.

Forecasts indicate Idalia won’t reach the destructive strength of Hurricane Ian, which slammed into Florida in late September as a powerful Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles an hour. Ian killed at least 130 people.

Shadow chancellor asserts party’s commitment to fiscal discipline, pledges to hold down public spending

Rachel Reeves, UK shadow chancellor, has vowed that an incoming Labour government would not hammer the wealthy, in the latest attempt to stress the party’s commitment to fiscal discipline.

Reeves confirmed Labour had “no plans for a wealth tax”, ruling out higher levies on capital gains and property income, as she stepped up her party’s wooing of business and wealth creators.

Rishi Sunak, prime minister, is under pressure from within his party to make tax a key dividing line with Labour at the next election, with Tory MPs clamouring for him to announce tax cuts ahead of polling day.

Reeves is determined not to allow the Conservatives to rerun previous election campaigns, which have focused on alleged “tax bombshells” that would detonate if Labour was elected with unfunded spending plans.

Speaking to the Sunday Telegraph, Reeves said Labour had no need to levy any form of wealth tax because her party would be rigorous in holding down public spending.

In 2021, Reeves criticised a plan by Sunak, then chancellor, for a £12bn hike in national insurance to fund the NHS and social care. She had previously said it would be better to tax “people who get their income through wealth”.

Reeves specified at the time that this referred to “people who get their incomes through stocks and shares and buy-to-let properties”. But Sunak’s proposed tax hike was later scrapped by Kwasi Kwarteng, former prime minister Liz Truss’s shortlived chancellor.

“The government said they needed to raise £12bn and I said, well, why do you always have to come to working people and ask them to contribute more?” Reeves said.

“I don’t have any spending plans that require us to raise £12bn worth of money. So I don’t need a wealth tax or any of those things.” She added: “We have no plans for a wealth tax.”

With taxes already at their highest level since the second world war, Labour has made relatively few pledges to raise them further; a notable exception is the removal of tax breaks for private schools and non-domiciled UK residents.

Reeves also said two years ago that she would end a loophole used by private equity executives to reduce the amount of tax they pay on their share of the profits, known as carried interest.

In an interview with the Financial Times in Washington in May, Reeves joked she would not impose “a special FT reader tax”, adding that she had “no plans” to equalise capital gains tax rates with income tax, or to cut tax breaks on pension contributions for higher earners.

Labour officials said there would be no “mansion tax” — a policy proposed by former Labour leader Ed Miliband before the 2015 election — or increase in the 45p top rate of income tax.

Conservative MPs believe that a promise of Tory tax cuts in the next parliament could be a potent issue at the next election and want chancellor Jeremy Hunt to start the process now.

Hunt has warned Tory MPs not to expect big tax cuts at his Autumn Statement — he wants to focus on cutting inflation. However, the chancellor is expected to use his Spring 2024 Budget to kick-start the election campaign.

Labour has been courting business leaders and will host 200 people at the business forum at its conference in Liverpool in October, up from 130 last year. The party said 150 were on a waiting list.

The party has also doubled the amount of sponsorship of business activities at conference this year and expects to raise £500,000 compared with £200,000 last year.

Momentum, the leftwing movement that backed former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, said: “Wealth taxes are hugely popular. This is a Labour leadership in hock to corporate interests.”

Winemakers told they must ‘adapt’ as demand falls among French drinkers and sales drop in China

Drinkers’ fading appetite for French wine has left farmers with a glut that the government is planning to spend €200mn destroying.

The French agriculture ministry has obtained approval and financial support from the EU to pay so-called crisis distillation aid, which is expected to go mostly to the regions of Bordeaux and Languedoc. Under the programme, wine is distilled into ethanol that can be sold for industrial uses, such as perfume or hydroalcoholic gel.

It is part of a wider government effort to help the country’s wine producers struggling to adapt to falling demand among French drinkers, competition on the export market and weaker sales in China.

Agriculture minister Marc Fesneau said on Friday during a visit to a distillery that the government was seeking “to stop the collapse of prices and [help] winemakers find new sources of revenue”. He added that farmers needed to “adapt to changes in consumption and adjust production to the demand of tomorrow”.

The wine industry had estimated that this year’s surplus would be as much as 3mn hectolitres, which would amount to 7 per cent of last year’s production of 42mn hectolitres. It had lobbied for €240mn in crisis distillation aid.

Another scheme compensates farmers who agree to rip out vineyards and convert the land to woods or leave it fallow. About 1,000 farmers in Bordeaux have applied for such aid to remove 9,200 hectares of vines, which represents about 8 per cent of the total growing area in the region.

The moves come as the country’s grape harvesting known as the vendange gets under way and mobilises hundreds of thousands of temporary workers for a four to six-week period. The calendar of the vendange has been creeping forward in recent years because of rising temperatures linked to climate change. In Champagne, the harvest has been moved back by three to four weeks.

The outlook for production varies by region this year with drought affecting some regions like Languedoc-Roussillon, while a mildew disease caused by alternating storms and high temperatures cut output in southwestern vineyards. But the Champagne region is expecting better yields, and overall volumes are forecast to be stable compared to last year.

French people’s consumption of red wine fell 32 per cent in the decade to 2022, according to a study from market researcher Kantar, with steep declines among young people, many of whom prefer spirits and beer or are simply drinking less alcohol.

Demand for premium wines and champagne have held up better than more affordable table wine, so some French producers have successfully moved upmarket to cope with lower demand. Rose wines have also grown more popular so big groups such as LVMH and Pernod Ricard have snapped up names like Whispering Angel and Sainte Marguerite en Provence.

Wine and spirits remain among the top products for French exports, reaching €17.2bn last year, a 10 per cent increase from a year earlier, according to the Federation of French Wine and Spirits Exporters.

When it came time to hire a new CEO, the luxury fashion house made a surprisingly bold choice in Leena Nair

For more than a century, Paramount Studios in Los Angeles has drawn Hollywood stars—Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley and Audrey Hepburn, to name a few. In May, the 65-acre lot took a star turn itself, as the backdrop for a Chanel fashion show. While models donned L.A.-inspired looks in pastels, neon and gold, Kristen Stewart, Marion Cotillard and Margot Robbie squeezed into the front row alongside Instagram princesses Paris Hilton and Sofia Richie Grainge. Snoop Dogg and family arrived trailed by a crowd of paparazzi.

Sitting upright in the fifth row was someone with a less recognizable face: Chanel’s new CEO, Leena Nair. Wearing a Chanel silk suit, her jet-black hair swept back from her shoulders, she looked like another well-heeled client.

Nair, 54, was not an obvious choice to lead Chanel. Before assuming the role in January 2022, she’d been chief human resources officer at Unilever, a $132 billion behemoth that counts Dove soap, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and Hellmann’s mayonnaise among its products. The British-based conglomerate operates more than 300 factories across 69 countries—a far cry from Chanel’s Parisian ateliers, where seamstresses might spend 200 hours or more quietly laboring over a single couture dress. And though she was a public face of Unilever at conferences like Davos and HerRising, Nair had never held a CEO role.

“If somebody told me I would have the chance to do what I’m doing today, I would not have believed them,” Nair said in one of her first interviews since joining the company. “One is about mass, mass, mass—get it out there. This is about rarity, precious, fewer. It’s a completely different world.”

Nair says she received around 7,000 emails and letters from women and girls around the world cheering her appointment. The celebratory mood masked a certain amount of skepticism, given the gap between her new responsibilities and her CV. “But,” she says, “nobody has the conversation about the strengths that I bring from Unilever, for example, scale, size, globality.”

Nair was tapped by Chanel’s board and its co-owner and chairman, Alain Wertheimer, who had been serving as global CEO for the brand his grandfather, Pierre, first backed in 1924. In the ’80s, when Chanel had atrophied into little more than a drugstore perfume purveyor, it was Alain who persuaded designer Karl Lagerfeld to join the company. The gamble worked. Last year, its ready-to-wear, leather goods, skin care, cosmetics, perfume, watches, eyewear and fine jewelry generated more than $17 billion in annual revenue.

Nair joined at a crucial moment for Chanel. Lagerfeld, whose ponytailed silhouette and over-the-top showmanship became world famous, died in 2019. His influence at Chanel was pervasive, reaching beyond the fashion to shooting its advertising and marketing campaigns, which included Pharrell Williams crooning in a Napoleon-inspired look. In 2020, Covid shutdowns in China created challenges in one of the brand’s most important territories. Chanel is a notable family-run holdout among luxury groups such as Kering and LVMH, which have pursued aggressive acquisition and marketing strategies to achieve revenue growth. The Wertheimers have never indicated any interest in selling the company or taking it public.

When, in December 2021, they announced Nair’s hiring, Chanel emphasized that her leadership would be in partnership with Alain Wertheimer. Together, they would be tasked with maintaining the brand’s dominance in a crowded upscale market—one increasingly beset by counterfeiters.

“I give Alain a huge amount of credit for identifying Leena, and she was very thoughtful about whether she can do it well,” says Nigel Higgins, the chairman of Barclays bank and one of Nair’s mentors. “She’s novel—she brings a real global perspective and fresh ideas. She can work her way around corporate structure, and she understands strategy.”

Nair’s ability to implement new ideas will be somewhat circumscribed by Chanel’s unwavering retail strategy. Unlike many of its competitors, the company does not sell products online, apart from eyewear and a fraction of its beauty and fragrance lines. Instead, it relies on a network of its own stores. Chanel has entered every category except menswear, limiting its options for expansion, though Nair says financial results are not the private company’s top priority.

Historically, Chanel has structured its internal divisions along product lines (fashion; watches and fine jewelry; fragrance and beauty), each operating under individual leadership. And until recently, it has not publicized its sustainability or philanthropic efforts (the Fondation Chanel was created in 2011 to further women’s causes around the world, and a Culture Fund was founded in 2021). Though the company has invested heavily in its historic ateliers, Nair has suggested that it needs to emphasize technological innovation, a key piece of any large-scale fashion operation.

Among its most coveted items is the classic flap handbag, which for production reasons Chanel now limits purchases of to two per year in the U.S. This has the effect of keeping demand high among clientele while also battling a rampant resale market. To outwit these quotas, some dedicated Chanel fans have taken to horse-trading within private chat groups.

“It’s probably hard for the Chanel aficionado…to not feel rejected and dismayed at this latest limitation,” fashion blogger Monica Arora wrote on her site, PurseBop. “It’s understandable to feel like the target of this new policy but we suspect something deeper is really behind this move—an attempt to stop, interfere and/or limit the growing market of resellers profiting off of the popularity of Chanel’s classic bags.”

And each year, though sales have risen, Chanel watchers decry price increases. A medium-size classic flap handbag that cost $4,400 in 2012 sells for $10,200 today.

“We are very determined to be fair to consumers everywhere,” says Nair, who adds that price increases are also partly determined by fluctuations in exchange rates as well as the rising costs of raw materials and labor. Producing a bag can involve 180 steps, she says. “We’ve got to preserve these heritage skills,” she says. “So you have to look at all of it in totality.”

Nair grew up in Kolhapur, a small town in southwest India, where her mother fretted over whether anyone would marry an ambitious daughter determined to earn a degree in electronics and telecommunications. She was one of a small minority of women among the 3,000 students at her college. Ultimately realizing that human resources was her forte, she earned an M.B.A. before setting off on her career.

“I’ve spent so much of my life hearing that I can’t do something because I’m a girl, especially, you know, the first 15, 20, 25 years of my life,” she says. “And then afterwards, you stop listening.”

Nair first came to Unilever as a summer intern and then became a management trainee in 1992. Soon she volunteered to work night shifts as a factory supervisor in India, eventually moving on to two other facilities. “[I] lived in a village for eight weeks without roads or electricity, because that was a way to know that consumer,” she remembers. “I really rolled up my sleeves and did all the roles that taught me about supply chain, that taught me about how businesses run the drivers of growth, how sales happen, how marketing happens.”

At each new post, among other workplace initiatives, one of her goals was to tackle a basic matter of plumbing: building separate women’s bathrooms. These came to be known as “Leena’s loos.”

“I’ve been the first at every job I’ve done. The first woman, the first brown person, the first Asian, the first Indian—but I don’t want to be the last, and I am going to try and make it easier for those who come after me,” she says. “Lift as you climb,” she says, is one of her mantras.

After more than two decades at Unilever, Nair took a position in London at global headquarters. She and her husband, Kumar, a financial services entrepreneur, moved to Wimbledon, southwest of the city, with their two sons, then ages 10 and 14.

“She understands how to change the system,” says Unilever’s recently retired CEO, Alan Jope, who notes that during Nair’s tenure female managers at the company increased from 38 to 50 percent.

It was Nair who convinced Jope to take the CEO role. “My initial reaction was no, thank you,” recalls Jope. “I had this stereotype of how you had to conduct yourself as a CEO, and Leena helped me break down that belief system and come to the view that I could go about it my own way.”

When the Chanel opportunity came to Nair, the two debated the idea. Nair was happy at Unilever, as she oversaw several programs she had advocated for, but Jope encouraged her to go for it. “I thought it would be transformational for her [and] transformational for Chanel. And it might even be transformational for the [fashion] industry, seeing what can be done to modernize and contemporize an organization,” he says.

“It was never the power or anything that is associated with being CEO that attracts me,” she says. “What attracts me is the influence and voice a business can have.”

When Chanel offered her the top job, she says, her younger son was leaving home to attend Johns Hopkins (her older son graduated from UC Berkeley). The empty nest gave her time to focus, she says. “It fell into place nicely,” she says.

Nair, who once ran marathons and now does gym workouts four times a week, jokes that although she’s not an early riser, she is a quick dresser. The dating advice she and her husband have offered their sons is usually rebuffed. “ ‘We don’t want…advice from two people who were basically set up by their parents,’ ” Nair says they tell her (her husband was chosen by her parents in a traditional arranged marriage).

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Nair’s mother died suddenly. At the time, her father, who suffers from dementia, was declining. She moved him from India to her home in Wimbledon and now spends any mornings and weekends she can with him.

“He doesn’t remember my name,” she says, “but he knows that I am somehow close. I believe he comprehends in his own way.” When she travels, her sister, a retired teacher, flies to London from her home in North Carolina to stay with their father.

“I’ve seen even now that he was a huge sponsor for me. He always wanted me to work and have a career,” she says. “I always talk to him about my work—I joke that Dad’s going to be a big expert on diversity.”

Nair spent her first year at Chanel schooling herself by visiting more than 100 retail locations as well as manufacturing sites and regional offices. She also got to know brand luminaries like current creative director Virginie Viard, who was Lagerfeld’s right hand.

Since taking over in 2019, Viard has put a youthful spin on house motifs such as tweed, pearls, the camellia flower and Chanel’s famed “little black jacket” while highlighting everyday denim and knitwear. Her lighter, often gamine take on Chanel chic has proven popular with shoppers. In 2021, Chanel credited Viard for a double-digit increase in fashion sales. Unlike Lagerfeld, she shuns the spotlight, though she has maintained his sense of whimsy and playfulness: For the house’s couture show in July, models swung wicker baskets of flowers and walked a furry black Lab on pink-and-purple-tinted cobblestones along the Seine.

Nair’s dominion extends beyond clothing, and she has overseen an array of launches as Chanel has invested heavily in retail. A major new boutique in Tokyo’s Ginza neighborhood, which opened last October, exemplifies the brand’s desire to focus on standalone stores selling watches and fine jewelry. An eco-focused cosmetic, beauty and fragrance line, N°1 de Chanel, was introduced globally last year. The company has also expanded its private salons designated for top clients.

Chanel’s latest flagship—a luminous, multifloor cubist structure with an inner courtyard designed by Peter Marino—opened on Rodeo Drive a week before the Los Angeles fashion show. Inside, under a hanging strand of spheres by the French artist Jean-Michel Othoniel meant to evoke a string of pearls, nearly every surface was laden with novelty bags in metal mesh, sequins and bright leather, alongside ready-to-wear, shoes and costume jewelry—a bid to mix traditionally separate categories.

Nair says she reviews product lines on a rolling basis, pointing out that jewelry, for example, is already being designed for 2024 and 2025, whereas fashion is seasonal.

“It’s never about me getting into the room and [being] top-down and ‘This is the way it has to be,’ ” she says. “I seek to understand a lot first, before I say, ‘Let’s do it this way.’… I believe in collective intelligence, collective problem-solving and the collective process of creativity.” Nair points out that 70 percent of Chanel employees work in the brand’s stores.

Early in her tenure, Nair decided to champion the Fondation Chanel by increasing its funding to $100 million annually to aid its mission of helping women and girls worldwide. “I want us to do ambition with integrity,” she says. “I want us to be exemplary in the luxury sector, [to show] what excellence looks like in commitments in the environment and social sectors.” The company aims to shift operations entirely to renewable energy by 2025 and to reduce its carbon footprint 50 percent by 2030. By that time, nearly a third of luxury consumers will be either Gen Z or Generation Alpha, whose buying habits, Nair says, are partly driven by corporate social responsibility.

Building on one of her internal initiatives, Nair has injected a business-school ethos at Chanel by taking a leadership committee of her 17 direct reports on inspirational trips—to Silicon Valley to meet with Microsoft and Google executives, for example, and to Los Angeles to meet with artists, gaming companies and Disney.

“I want to build curiosity,” says Nair, who says she is looking decades out for Chanel, “building a shared understanding of what’s going on in the world.”

Still, boosting e-commerce is not part of the plan. “I don’t want you to just go and buy a shoe because you like it off the internet. I want you to know the story of the shoe—the look, the collection,” she says. “We never rush; we take our time and do it in a Chanel way.”

A mysterious company has spent $800 million in an effort to buy thousands of acres of San Francisco Bay Area land. The people behind the deals are said to be a who’s who of the tech industry.

In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city.

The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. Mr. Moritz and others had dreams of transforming tens of thousands of acres into a bustling metropolis that, according to the pitch, could generate thousands of jobs and be as walkable as Paris or the West Village in New York.

He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Let me know if this tickles your fancy,” he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Since then, a company called Flannery Associates has been buying large plots of land in a largely agricultural region 60 miles northeast of San Francisco. The company, which has little information public about its operations, has committed more than $800 million to secure thousands of acres of farmland, court documents show. One parcel after another, Flannery made offers to every landowner for miles, paying several times the market rate, whether the land had been listed for sale or not.

The purchases by a company that no one in the area had heard of and whose business was a mystery have become the subject of heavy speculation and developing news stories, rattling landowners, local supervisors, the nearby Air Force base and members of Congress. Was Disney buying it for a new theme park? Could the purchases be linked to China? A deepwater port?

Flannery is the brainchild of Jan Sramek, 36, a former Goldman Sachs trader who has quietly courted some of the tech industry’s biggest names as investors, according to the pitch and people familiar with the matter. The company’s ambitions expand on the 2017 pitch: Take an arid patch of brown hills cut by a two-lane highway between suburbs and rural land, and convert into it into a community with tens of thousands of residents, clean energy, public transportation and dense urban life.

The company’s investors, whose identities have not been previously reported, are a who’s who of Silicon Valley, according to three people who were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.

They include Mr. Moritz; Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and Democratic donor; Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, investors at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payments company Stripe; Laurene Powell Jobs, founder of the Emerson Collective; and Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, entrepreneurs turned investors. Andreessen Horowitz is also a backer. It was unclear how much each had invested.

Brian Brokaw, a representative for the investor group, said in a statement that the group was made up of “Californians who believe that Solano County’s and California’s best days are ahead.” He said the group planned to start working with Solano County residents and elected officials, as well as with Travis Air Force Base, next week.

In California, housing has long been an intractable problem, and Silicon Valley’s moguls have long been frustrated with the Bay Area’s real estate shortage, and the difficulty of building in California generally, as their work forces have exploded. Companies like Google have clashed with cities like Palo Alto and Mountain View over expanding their headquarters, while their executives have funded pro-development politicians and the “Yes in my backyard” activists who have pushed for looser development and zoning laws in hopes of making it easier to build faster and taller.

The practical need for more space has at times morphed into lofty visions of building entire cities from scratch. Several years ago, Y Combinator, the start-up incubator, announced an initiative with dreams of turning empty land into a new economy and society. Years before that, Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and billionaire Facebook investor, invested in the Seasteading Institute, an attempt to build a new society on lily pad-like structures in the law-and-tax-free open ocean.

But while these ideas have garnered lots of attention and curiosity — lauded in some corners for vision and derided in others for hubris — they have been little more than talk.

As Flannery began seeking property, it bought so much land, so fast, that it spooked locals who had no idea who the buyer was or the plans it had in mind. Catherine Moy, the mayor of Fairfield, Calif., started posting about the project on Facebook several years ago after she got a call from a farmer about some mystery buyer making offers throughout the county. In an interview, Ms. Moy said she had gone to the county assessor’s office and found that Flannery had purchased tens of thousands of acres.

John Garamendi, a Democrat who along with Mike Thompson, another Democrat, represents the surrounding region in Congress, said he had been trying to figure out the company’s identity for four years.

“I couldn’t find out anything,” he said.

On Friday, he said that had suddenly changed. This week representatives for Flannery reached out to him and other elected officials requesting meetings about their plans. That meeting is now being scheduled, he said.

“This is their first effort, ever, to talk to any of the local representatives, myself included,” he said.

The land that Flannery has been purchasing is not zoned for residential use, and even in his 2017 pitch, Mr. Moritz acknowledged that rezoning could “clearly be challenging” — a nod to California’s notoriously difficult and litigious development process.

To pull off the project, the company will almost certainly have to use the state’s initiative system to get Solano County residents to vote on it. The hope is that voters will be enticed by promises of thousands of local jobs, increased tax revenue and investments in infrastructure like parks, a performing arts center, shopping, dining and a trade school.

The financial gains could be huge, Mr. Moritz said in the 2017 pitch. He estimated the return could be many times the initial investment just from the rezoning, and far more if and when they started building.

“If the plans materialize anywhere close to what is being contemplated, this should be a spectacular investment,” Mr. Moritz wrote.

The Bay Area is among the country’s most expensive regions, even after rent and home prices fell after the pandemic. Economists and housing experts have for decades blamed a longstanding housing shortage and California’s inability to build enough to meet demand.

Mr. Moritz nodded to this in the email to the investor, arguing that “this effort should relieve some of the Silicon Valley pressures we all feel — rising home prices, homelessness, congestion etc.” He added that his group had secured some 1,400 acres for less than $5,000 per acre. The price per acre has since escalated, and the company’s most recent purchases have neared $20,000 per acre, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.

The purchases burst into public view this spring when lawyers for Flannery filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, accusing landowners of colluding to inflate prices.

The group focused on Jepson Prairie and Montezuma Hills, an agricultural patch of eastern Solano County between the cities of Fairfield and Rio Vista, according to the lawsuit. This area is mostly unpopulated and covered with ranches, windmills and power lines.

In November 2018, the company sent offers to “most landowners in this area,” the lawsuit said, and included incentives such as allowing sellers to retain income from wind turbines, as well as stay on the properties rent-free under long-term lease-back agreements. Over the five years, the company purchased some 140 properties from 400 owners, the lawsuit said.

This month, a lawyer representing landowners jointly filed a motion to dismiss the case. In July, three landowners said they had reached a potential settlement with Flannery. Other owners could not be reached for comment this week, or had declined to do so.

As the offers continued and prices escalated, landowners in Solano County started buzzing about who was buying so much land for so much money.

“They would come with an offer of four and five times over the market at the time,” Ms. Moy said. “They were deals that they couldn’t pass up.”

Flannery’s offers were creating multimillionaires across the county, but no one seemed to know what the mysterious company intended to do with land that now amounted to a large chunk of the entire county.

That changed last week, when residents started receiving texts and emails with a poll gauging their opinions on a number of questions. One asked them to rate the favorability of several names including “Joe Biden,” “Donald Trump” and “Flannery Associates.” Another question began with a description of a possible ballot initiative for a project that “would include a new city with tens of thousands of new homes, a large solar energy farm, orchards with over a million new trees, and over 10,000 acres of new parks and open space.”

Ms. Moy cited poor infrastructure, including the two-lane highway bisecting the region that she said was already clogged by super-commuters driving to the edges of the Bay Area and beyond. The area is also prone to regular droughts and is at high risk for wildfires.

“It seems very pie in the sky,” she said.

- Measures include easing mortgage rules for home buyers and extending tax breaks, meeting global investors to try and halt outflows, urges domestic institutions to increase stock investments (Friday), scale back outbound bond flows under Bond Connect, cutting stamp duty on stocks, lowering Exchange margin requirements as well as slowing the pace of IPOs. (See below for more detail)

- However, most China analysts are not convinced that reducing friction on property and stock transactions will do much to tackle the underlying issue of a lack of demand.

- On a separate note, commentators noted how tired and lethargic Pres Xi appeared to be at last week’s BRICS Summit in South Africa – where he also inexplicably missed an important business speech he was due to give at the Summit.

- Unsubstantiated rumors on Chinese social media in recent days suggest that Xi is fighting increasingly bitter power battles within the CCP and the PLA, on top of China’s mushrooming economic problems, with Xi himself reportedly aloof and difficult to deal with.

The mutual-fund powerhouse was a bitcoin pioneer and built a deep talent pipeline for the industry

Some of the most prominent players in the digital-assets industry cut their teeth at the same place: Fidelity Investments.

A storied mutual-fund powerhouse, Fidelity is a cornerstone of the traditional financial system that the founders of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies intended to disrupt. Yet the 77-year-old company became a bitcoin pioneer in 2014, mining the token when it was trading around $400. It encouraged employees to experiment with blockchain technology and develop new products that led to the launch of its crypto business unit four years later.

Along the way, it built a deep talent pipeline for the industry.

Fidelity eventually grew wary about expanding too quickly in an unproven field, causing some of its earliest employees to depart.

That caution may ultimately prove wise. Regulators have waged a crackdown on the crypto industry after a string of high-profile company failures last year that culminated in the collapse of exchange FTX. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently sued Binance and Coinbase Global, two of the largest crypto exchanges, for offering unregistered securities, among other things.

And despite a rebound in prices in 2023, bitcoin is hovering around $26,000, well below its high from two years ago. The industry has lost tens of thousands of jobs since the beginning of last year, and skeptics question its future role in finance after the downfall of Sam Bankman-Fried and other leaders who were once considered crypto visionaries.

Fidelity’s crypto alumni group features venture-capital investors, heads of research and startup founders. They playfully call themselves the Fidelity mafia, much like the PayPal mafia of alumni who went on to launch their own technology companies.

The group includes Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at crypto financial-services firm Galaxy Digital; Juri Bulovic, head of mining at bitcoin miner Foundry; Matt Walsh, founding partner at crypto venture firm Castle Island Ventures, and more than a dozen others.

“There are a lot of us that have worked on crypto for so long because Fidelity has worked on crypto much longer than any other traditional financial firm,” said Thorn, who set up a Telegram chat group with former colleagues.

Championed by Chief Executive Abby Johnson, Fidelity’s crypto initiative began by trading and storing bitcoin for big investors such as hedge funds. Over the following years, it made crypto more accessible for small investors as well. Companies can include bitcoin in the Fidelity retirement plans they offer their employees, and Fidelity gives the majority of its 43 million customers the option to trade bitcoin and ether.

“It wasn’t like we were learning about this crazy crypto thing with kid gloves on because we were traditional,” said Thorn. “We took a huge step into it, and that made Fidelity an early magnet for talent.”

Thorn started out as an entry-level analyst in Fidelity’s legal department in 2009. An early bitcoin believer, he volunteered to help with Fidelity’s first crypto experiments, winning the nickname “Bitcoin Viking” from Johnson. He eventually co-managed a Fidelity-affiliated crypto venture firm.

Other former employees also say Johnson’s early commitment to bitcoin drew them to Fidelity.

She gave a rare vote of confidence to bitcoin at a conference in 2017 when she urged making the token more accessible for individuals and institutions, according to Walsh, who joined Fidelity out of business school in 2014.

“This was when Jamie Dimon said that bitcoin was tulip bubbles, and there was no use looking at it,” Walsh said. “Abby was taking the total opposite end of it.”

Despite her enthusiasm, Johnson, whose family owns 49% of Fidelity, faced internal and external pushback about staking too much of the company’s future on crypto.

In a public speech last year, Johnson said she put together a proposal in 2014 to spend $200,000 to buy bitcoin mining equipment from suppliers in China. The plan was rejected by Fidelity’s finance department and security staff, she recalled.

“I kind of had to walk down to people’s offices and say, ‘Look, it’s $200,000, we’re doing this,’” she said.

Even years later, some Fidelity executives continued to doubt crypto would reach a mainstream customer. Kathleen Murphy, then head of Fidelity’s sprawling personal-investments business, told the Dallas Business Journal in 2018 that the firm’s crypto offerings would be limited to sophisticated investors due to regulatory concerns.

Those comments discouraged employees interested in reaching smaller investors, some former employees said. Murphy declined to comment.

Fidelity’s crypto ambitions were criticized on a bigger stage last year when U.S. Labor Department officials said its plan to allow investors to put bitcoin in their 401(k) accounts would risk the retirement security of Americans. The company pushed back against that criticism, reiterating its commitment to digital assets as key to the future of finance.

Some former employees said Fidelity could have been more aggressive with its crypto efforts. They were frustrated about losing custody-business clients to Coinbase, which was founded in 2012, just two years before Fidelity delved into bitcoin. Others say Fidelity’s traditional money-management business prevented it from diving into a high-risk venture without regulatory clarity.

“Hindsight is 20/20. When I look back now, I think Fidelity could have become a household name for buying and selling crypto like Coinbase is today,” said Bulovic, who left Fidelity in 2021 after eight years.

Fidelity would struggle to hold on to its crypto talent during the pandemic when bitcoin prices skyrocketed, eventually rising above $60,000. Crypto-focused companies were flush with venture cash and hungry to recruit employees with subject expertise.

Thorn left in 2021 to build a research department at billionaire Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital, a crypto financial-services firm with businesses in trading, investment banking, asset management and mining. Galaxy’s asset-management arm oversees $2.4 billion of crypto.

Walsh resigned in 2018 to scratch his entrepreneurial itch. His crypto venture firm, Castle Island, is backed by Fidelity and has about $360 million in assets under management.

Today, crypto continues to be viewed as a long-term growth opportunity at Fidelity. The company stores billions of dollars in customer crypto assets, while the head count in its crypto unit has steadily risen to more than 600 from just a few dozen in 2018.

The company is also in the race to launch the first exchange-traded fund that holds actual bitcoin. If approved by regulators, it would allow investors to buy and sell the token through a brokerage account as easily as shares of stock.

“We are now working with every business unit of Fidelity on what I would call long-term digital-asset strategy,” said Tom Jessop, president of Fidelity’s crypto operations.

Remarks by Nicolas Sarkozy have raised fears that Europe’s pro-Putin chorus may grow louder as Ukraine’s plodding counteroffensive puts pressure on Western resolve.

PARIS — Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, was once known as “Sarko the American” for his love of free markets, freewheeling debate and Elvis. Of late, however, he has appeared more like “Sarko the Russian,” even as President Vladimir V. Putin’s ruthlessness appears more evident than ever.

In interviews coinciding with the publication of a memoir, Mr. Sarkozy, who was president from 2007 to 2012, said that reversing Russia’s annexation of Crimea was “illusory,” ruled out Ukraine joining the European Union or NATO because it must remain “neutral,” and insisted that Russia and France “need each other.”

“People tell me Vladimir Putin isn’t the same man that I met. I don’t find that convincing. I’ve had tens of conversations with him. He is not irrational,” he told Le Figaro. “European interests aren’t aligned with American interests this time,” he added.

His statements, to the newspaper as well as the TF1 television network, were unusual for a former president in that they are profoundly at odds with official French policy. They provoked outrage from the Ukrainian ambassador to France and condemnation from several French politicians, including President Emmanuel Macron.

The remarks also underscored the strength of the lingering pockets of pro-Putin sympathy that persist in Europe. Those voices have been muffled since Europe forged a unified stand against Russia, through successive rounds of economic sanctions against Moscow and military aid to Kyiv.

The possibility they may grow louder appears to have risen as Ukraine’s counteroffensive has proved underwhelming so far. “The fact the counteroffensive has not worked up to now means a very long war of uncertain outcome,” said Nicole Bacharan, a political scientist at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. “There is the risk of political and financial weariness among Western powers that would weaken Ukraine.”

In France, Germany, Italy and elsewhere, not even the evident atrocities of the Russian onslaught against Ukraine have stripped away the affinity for Russia traditionally found on the far right and far left. This also extends at times to establishment politicians like Mr. Sarkozy, who feel some ideological kinship with Moscow, blame NATO expansion eastward for the war, or eye monetary gain.

From Germany, where former Social Democrat Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is the most prominent Putin supporter, to Italy where a former prime minister, Giuseppe Conte of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement has spoken out against arms shipments to Ukraine, some politicians seem unswerving in their support for Mr. Putin.

France, like Germany, has always had a significant number of Russophiles and admirers of Mr. Putin, whatever his amply illustrated readiness to eliminate opponents — most recently, it seems, his sometime sidekick turned upstart rival, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, who led a brief mutiny two months ago.

The sympathizers range from Mr. Sarkozy’s Gaullist center right, with its simmering resentment of American power in Europe and admiration for strong leaders, to Marine Le Pen’s far right, enamored of Mr. Putin’s stand for family, faith and fatherland against a supposedly decadent West. The extreme left, in a hangover from Soviet times, also has a lingering sympathy for Russia that the 18-month-long war has not eradicated.

Still Mr. Sarkozy’s outspokenness was striking, as was his unequivocal pro-Russian tone and provocative timing.

“Gaullist equidistance between the United States and Russia is an old story, but what Sarkozy said was shocking,” Ms. Bacharan said. “We are at war and democracies stand with Ukraine, while the autocracies of the world are with Mr. Putin.”

The obstinacy of the French right’s emotional bond with Russia owes much to a recurrent Gallic great-power itch and to the resentment of the extent of American postwar dominance, evident in the current French-led quest for European “strategic autonomy.” Even President Macron, a centrist, said as recently as 2019 that “Russia is European, very profoundly so, and we believe in this Europe that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok.”

With Mr. Putin, Russian rapprochement has also been about money. Ms. Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party took a Russian loan; former Prime Minister François Fillon joined the boards of two Russian firms (before quitting last year in protest at the war); and Mr. Sarkozy himself has been under investigation since 2021 over a €3 million, or about $3.2 million, contract with a Russian insurance company.

This financial connection with Moscow has undermined Mr. Sarkozy’s credibility, but not made him less vocal.

He urged Mr. Macron, with whom he regularly confers, to “renew dialogue” with Mr. Putin, called for the “ratification” of Crimea’s annexation through an internationally supervised referendum, and said referendums should also be organized in the eastern Donbas region to settle how land there is divided between Ukraine and Russia.

Rather than occupied territory, the Donbas is clearly negotiable territory to Mr. Sarkozy; as for Crimea, it’s part of Russia. Dmitri Medvedev, the former Russian president and now virulent assailant of the West, hailed Mr. Sarkozy’s “good sense” in opposing those who provide missiles “to the Nazis of Kyiv.”

Commenting on Mr. Sarkozy in the daily Libération, the journalist Serge July wrote: “Realism suggests that the meager results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive have suddenly redrawn the Russia map. Supporters who had remained discreet are finding their way back to the microphones. One recalls the words of Edgar Faure, a star of the Fourth Republic: ‘It’s not the weather vane that turns but the wind.’”

If the West’s goal was to leverage major military gains through the Ukrainian counteroffensive into a favorable Ukrainian negotiating position with Moscow — as suggested earlier this year by senior officials in Washington and Europe — then that scenario looks distant for the moment.

This, in turn, may place greater pressure over time on Western unity and resolve as the U.S. presidential election looms next year.

Mr. Putin, having apparently shored up his 23-year-old rule through the killing of Mr. Prigozhin, may be playing for time. It was not for nothing that Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who clashed with Donald J. Trump over the former president’s demands that Mr. Raffensperger change the results of the 2020 election, was bizarrely included in a list of people banned from Russia that was published in May.

As nods and winks to Mr. Trump go, this was pretty conspicuous.

Mr. Macron responded to Mr. Sarkozy by saying their positions were different and that France “recognizes neither the annexation by Russian of Ukrainian territory, nor the results of parodies of elections that were organized.” Several French politicians expressed outrage at Mr. Sarkozy’s views.

Over the course of the war, Mr. Macron’s position itself has evolved from outreach to Putin, in the form of numerous phone calls with him and a statement that Russia should not be “humiliated,” toward strong support of the Ukrainian cause and of Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky.

There have been echoes of Mr. Sarkozy’s stance elsewhere in Europe, even if Western resolve in standing with Ukraine does not appear to have fundamentally shifted.

Mr. Schröder, Germany’s former chancellor and, in retirement, a Russian gas lobbyist close to Mr. Putin, attended a Victory Day celebration at the Russian embassy in Berlin in May. Tino Chrupalla, the co-chairman of the far-right Alternative for Deutschland, or AfD, as it is known in Germany, was also present.

A significant minority in Germany’s Social Democratic party retains some sympathy for Moscow. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has overseen military aid to Ukraine worth billions of dollars and views the Russian invasion a historical “turning point” that obliges German to wean itself of its post-Nazi hesitation over the use of force, faced heckles of “warmonger” as he gave a speech to the party.

This month, in a reversal, Mr. Scholz’s government retreated from making a legal commitment to spending two percent of GDP on defense annually, a NATO target it had previously embraced, Reuters reported. Disquiet over military rather than social spending is rising in Europe as the war in Ukraine grinds on.

Many people in what was formerly East Germany, part of the Soviet imperium until shortly before German unification in 1990, look favorably on Moscow. A poll conducted in May found that 73 percent of West Germans backed sanctions against Russia, compared with 56 percent of those living in the East. The AfD has successfully exploited this division by calling itself the peace party.

“I could not have imagined that German tanks would once again head in the direction of Russia,” said Karsten Hilse, one of the more voluble Russia sympathizers within the AfD, alluding to tanks provided to Ukraine.

In Italy, the most vocal supporter of Mr. Putin was Silvio Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister who died a few months ago. Giorgia Meloni, who as prime minister leads a far-right government, has held to a pro-Ukrainian line, despite the sympathies of far-right movements throughout Europe for Mr. Putin.

Mr. Conte, the former Italian prime minister, declared recently that “the military strategy is not working,” even as it takes a devastating financial toll.

In France, Ségolène Royal, a prominent former socialist candidate for the presidency who has denounced Ukrainian claims of Russian atrocities as “propaganda,” announced this week that she intended to lead a united left-wing group in European Parliament elections next year. It was another small sign of a potential resurgence of pro-Russian sentiment.

Mr. Putin has used frozen conflicts to his advantage in Georgia and elsewhere. If there is no victory for either side in Ukraine before the U.S. election in November 2024, “the outcome of the war will be decided in the United States,” Ms. Bacharan said.