TheChek News Flow

The 48-year-old intimates brand has been acquired by Crown Brands Group, in partnership with Rafar Group, which serves as operating partner.

Hanky Panky, the 48-year-old intimate apparel company best known for “The World’s Most Comfortable Thong” is changing ownership.

Crown Brands Group, a newly formed brand management firm, has acquired Hanky Panky in partnership with Rafar Group, the parent company of Gelmart International. The acquisition cost wasn’t revealed.

Hanky Panky founders Gale Epstein and Lida Orzeck, who had been looking to sell the business, will continue to play a pivotal role in shaping the brand’s future. Both founders will join Hanky Panky’s board of directors to ensure the brand’s signature aesthetic and commitment to quality remain in tact. Epstein will have an advisory role in design.

Under the partnership, Rafar Group will serve as the core operating partner, leveraging more than 70 years of experience in the intimate apparel industry to oversee product design, development, e-commerce operations and distribution. The partners will collaborate on marketing strategy and execution, allowing Crown to focus on brand strategy and global licensing while using Rafar’s best-in-class capabilities to drive operational and product excellence.

Rafar, which specializes in private label, has such brands as Kindly (exclusive to Walmart) and Sugarcup and licenses Motherhood Maternity. The company has been a frequent winner of Walmart Vendor of the Year, and a 2019 FEMMY Award Winner as Manufacturer of the Year.

This transaction marks a significant milestone as Crown’s first acquisition, establishing the anchor asset for a diversified portfolio of iconic consumer brands. Crown seeks to acquire and elevate heritage brands, leveraging deep retail expertise and capital backing from G72 Holdings, the family office of Raymond Gindi, whose family cofounded Century 21 stores.

“Hanky Panky is the definitive example of the type of brand we are building our platform around — one with authentic heritage, category leadership and incredible customer loyalty,” said Raymond Dayan, chief executive officer of Crown Brands Group. “As our inaugural acquisition, this deal sets the standard for our portfolio strategy. By combining Crown’s retail relationships and brand management focus with Rafar’s operational excellence, we are positioned to unlock significant growth for Hanky Panky while honoring the quality that millions of women trust.”

Dayan told WWD that he became aware of Hanky Panky through an investment bank, which was hired by Hanky Panky to run the process to find a buyer. “Hanky Panky has long been a category-defining force in the intimates market. When the opportunity arose to acquire the brand, we recognized it as a rare heritage asset anchored by a truly iconic hero product – ‘The World’s Most Comfortable Thong,'” said Dayan.

For nearly five decades, Hanky Panky has maintained a devoted following with one of its Signature Lace Thongs sold every 10 seconds globally. The brand is distributed in more than 2,500 top-tier boutiques, major departments stores and e-commerce platforms.

“Our priority is building the brand’s DTC and wholesale presence while protecting its premium, full-price integrity,” said Dayan.

“We are honored to partner with Crown Brands Group to carry forward the legacy of a brand that has defined comfort and quality for generations,” said Yossi Nasser, CEO of Rafar Group. “Rafar’s track record of building intimates brands like Lively demonstrates our ability to resonate with today’s consumer. We see tremendous opportunity to expand Hanky Panky’s reach and introduce the brand to new audiences while maintaining the exceptional comfort and quality the brand is known for.”

In a joint statement, Epstein and Orzeck said, “We built Hanky Panky on a foundation of comfort, quality and female empowerment, and it was vital to find partners who respect that DNA. We trust Crown Brands Group and Rafar Group to steward his legacy. Their combined vision gives us great confidence that Hanky Panky will continue to thrive and innovate in this exciting next chapter.”

In an interview Thursday, Nasser said the main reason they wanted to acquire Hanky Panky “is because we love the brand.

“We love what they did with the brand. It’s been around for a long time, and we feel that legacy brands have place right now in retail. We love the story. It’s similar to our story. We’re a family-owned business that’s a private company, and these are two incredible women who started this brand,” said Nasser.

When asked how Hanky Panky fits in with their other intimate apparel brands, Nasser said, “It doesn’t, which is why we like it so much. I think it really differentiates it. And our goal is to really take care of it.”

While Rafar Group’s brands have more mass market distribution, Hanky Panky is sold in stores such as Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s, and their own e-commerce site.

“I’m actually looking to bring it back to its roots and really solidify the story and make it front and center. I’m not looking to make any significant changes, but really bring it back toward its heritage because I feel there’s such a strong heritage, and we will enhance that,” said Nasser.

Nasser said Hanky Panky is known for the thong and its lace products. Hanky Panky’s underwear is “one size fits all,” said Caroline Levy, president of Rafar Group. Levy said more than 20 people will be joining Rafar, such as their head of sales and head of finance and they will keep Hanky Panky’s current office at 45 West 25th Street. Nasser said they also look to expand Hanky Panky’s international distribution.

Manufacturing will remain where it makes sense, said Nasser. Hanky Panky manufactures in the Dominican Republic, Colombia and the U.S. Rafar Group manufactures in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and a lot is done in the Philippines.

Nasser said Crown is looking to bring in other licensees of adjacent categories. For example, he can envision having licenses for loungewear, swim and fragrance. Hanky Panky has a long history of collaborations which they will look to continue, said Levy. Over the years, Hanky Panky has collaborated with such designers as Prabal Gurung, Monique Lhuillier, and Cynthia Rowley, as well as Stony Clover Lane, among others.

Levy added that they will also look to open stores. Hanky Panky previously had a store in New York at 370 Bleecker Street in 2022, which was a 600-square-foot “jewel box,” complete with a thong wall covered with panties in every color.

Nasser declined to reveal how much they paid for the company. He said that Rafar is basically the anchor licensee and bought the operating assets in the company. Rafar also invested in the intellectual property in a significant way. He said it’s a stock deal, and once the deal closes, it’s effective immediately. Crown is buying the IP and will lead the branding efforts and category expansion.

Dayan said his background is in investment banking and private equity. “I’ve done brand acquisitions in the past, and I thought that there was a real opening or a real white space in the market.” He said he seeks to buy brands that the consumer knows and love. “Iconic brands that we have an opportunity to help them grow, while maintaining brand equity is very important,” said Dayan.

“We saw Hanky Panky as an opportunity to do that as long as we had the right partner, and we thought Gelmart was the right partner,” said Dayan. He said Crown is very interested in apparel acquisitions, but also seeks a diversified portfolio.

Wedbush Securities served as financial adviser and Morrison Cohen and Sills Cummis & Gross acted as legal advisors to Crown Brands Group and Rafar Group. Consensus served as financial adviser and Perkins Coie acted as legal adviser to Hanky Panky.

In 2016, Rafar Group/Gelmart International cofounded and incubated Lively, a direct-to-consumer lingerie brand that was acquired by Wacoal International in 2019. Rafar Group also operates FullStrideVentures, an innovation arm focused on sustainable materials including the sugarcup, the world’s first plant-based bra cup made from sugarcane. Rafar operates three manufacturing facilities in the Philippines under Rafar Manufacturing.

The Italian Senate passed the 2026 “Budget Act” which introduces a new levy on extra-EU parcels valued at under 150 euros coming into the country.

MILAN – Italy has made its first official step to curb the impact of ultra-fast fashion, targeting platforms such as Shein and Temu.

On Tuesday, the Senate passed the “Legge di Bilancio 2026,” or “Budget Act 2026,” which introduces a measure that imposes a levy of 2 euros on all parcels valued at under 150 euros coming into Italy from extra-European Union countries. Until before the new bill, low-value goods were duty free.

The bill still needs to be approved by the Italian Parliament’s Lower House. Per Italian law, the Lower House does not have any capacity to change the bill, which must be passed by the end of the year.

The move is seen answering the ongoing requests of fashion industry associations including Confindustria Moda, Confindustria Accessori Moda and Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, among others, to take aim at the unregulated influx of low-cost, low-quality goods into the country.

Camera della Moda estimated that about 1 million parcels from extra-EU countries circulated in Italy last year. According to the most recent figures provided by the fashion association, imports of fashion goods from China jumped 11.8 percent in the eight months to Aug. 31, amounting to 4.5 billion euros.

The Italian bill anticipates the EU’s decision to move up its timeline to close the loophole that has fueled the rapid rise of ultra-fast fashion companies in recent years.

As reported, last November European finance ministers from the 27-country bloc approved a similar agreement to abolish the exemption on packages valued at less than 150 euros, to be implemented as early as the first quarter of 2026 — two years ahead of schedule.

The new rules will also see parcels subject to additional handling and import charges, which is the formal attribution provided in the Italian bill for the new levy.

Both moves echo the U.S. decision to roll back its own de minimis allowance, aimed at curbing the flow of ultra-cheap Chinese imports, which went into effect in May.

Meanwhile, France has been particularly vocal in its fight against platforms like Shein and Temu, lobbying the EU to move toward stricter regulation.

As reported, last week Shein dodged a temporary ban in France after a Paris judicial court deemed the government’s request “disproportionate” following the platform’s voluntary removal of illicit products.

The government had sought to block the website due to illegal items listed on its marketplace, following intense scrutiny after opening its first physical store in Paris in November.

In November, a dozen French retail federations, joined by leading domestic brands, initiated legal action against Shein’s Ireland-based European subsidiary, Infinite Styles Service Co. Ltd., citing unfair competition and breaches of European product safety standards.

At a broader European level, France has called for sanctions through the European Commission, which has requested information from Shein but has yet to open a formal investigation.

Gabapentin has soared in popularity as an alternative to opioids, but patients are finding it can cause harm

John Avery was just back from a guys’ golfing weekend and doing dead lifts at the gym in 2023 when he felt a pop in his lower back. A disc had slipped and was pressing on a nerve.

After months of rest, physical therapy and steroids, he was prescribed a drug called gabapentin by a pain management specialist who told Avery that it could help calm his nerve pain and that it was “nonaddictive,” Avery recalled. He took the medicine for a few days, then had surgery, and took it again for a little more than three weeks.

The 33-year-old former high-school physical education teacher in Newark, Ill., said he experienced a severe protracted withdrawal when he stopped, which led to neurological symptoms now that make his original back problem seem like “a paper cut” by comparison.

His symptoms include shaking and a burning sensation throughout his body, muscle spasms and a racing pulse. He can’t sleep for more than a half-hour at a time, and has lost so much weight that his wife said his calves are the size of her arms.

The change in his life, he said, is “beyond dramatic.”

Approved by the Food and Drug Administration decades ago for seizures and nerve pain from shingles, gabapentin is now the seventh-most widely prescribed drug in the U.S., according to the Iqvia Institute for Human Data Science. About 15.5 million people were prescribed gabapentin in 2024, according to an analysis by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers.

Studies show that most of the prescriptions are written to treat conditions that it wasn’t approved for—a practice that is legal and common, but means the FDA hasn’t vetted its risks and benefits for those purposes.

Some doctors say gabapentin can be helpful for certain types of neuropathic pain, a condition resulting from nerve damage. But doctors also give it to patients with other types of chronic pain, anxiety, migraines, insomnia, distorted sense of smell and hot flashes in menopause. Veterinarians dispense it to calm or treat pain in cats and dogs.

A growing body of research shows it isn’t as safe or effective as doctors have long thought. Gabapentin has been associated in studies with greater risk of dementia, suicidal behavior, severe breathing problems for people who have lung disease, and edema, in addition to well-known side effects like dizziness.

A study published this year found giving gabapentin to surgery patients didn’t reduce complications or get them out of the hospital any faster, and more of them reported pain four months after surgery. Doctors for years had touted gabapentin as a way to use fewer opioids.

While the medical establishment has mostly maintained that gabapentin isn’t habit-forming, some patients have reported debilitating adverse effects when they try to taper off it. They say the withdrawal symptoms make it clear to them they have developed a dependence to the drug taking it as prescribed.

Still, prescriptions have more than doubled over the past 15 years, as doctors turned away from opioids for pain and benzodiazepines like Xanax for anxiety—drugs with more well-known risks.

People sometimes take opioids and gabapentin at the same time—either prescribed by a doctor, or on their own. The CDC warns the combination is potentially deadly. At least 5,000 people have died from gabapentin-involved overdoses in each of the past five years, according to federal and state data.

Gabapentin helps many patients, and most tolerate it well, said Kirk Evoy, a clinical associate professor of pharmacotherapy and translational sciences at the University of Texas at Austin who studies gabapentin misuse. Still, he said, “we shouldn’t be thinking of gabapentin as this safe drug we can just try for anything and see if it helps.”

For Avery, neither the pain management specialist who prescribed him the medication nor a specialist he saw after surgery told him about adverse effects gabapentin might have or that he might need to taper off it, Avery and his wife, Lauren Avery, said. The pain management specialist told him that gabapentin couldn’t possibly be the cause of his symptoms, Avery said. His primary care doctor thought he had anxiety.

Several other doctors have since told him that gabapentin is likely the cause of his condition, including a neuropsychiatrist who diagnosed him with severe dysautonomia, or impairment of the autonomic nervous system.

Treatments he has tried, including other medications, have only made him worse, Lauren said. John now lies every day in a dark room on the first floor at his mother’s house. Light, screens, noise and the boisterousness of his toddler and preschool-aged children at his own home set off more symptoms.

“I thought it was harmless,” he said of the drug. Had he known the risks and that he should reduce his dose gradually when stopping it, Avery said, “I never would have taken it.”

Gabapentin quiets nerve firing in the spinal cord and brain. It works in about 12 separate chemical pathways in the body, making it a complex drug that can act differently in different people, said Dr. Marc Russo, a pain specialist and researcher in Newcastle, Australia, who wrote a 2022 research article titled “Gabapentin—Friend or foe?”

He called the drug a two-headed Janus, useful when prescribed for the right condition but harmful when it’s prescribed for other conditions, produces side effects or has no benefit. “The trouble is that this two-headed nature is appreciated by about 5% of doctors in my opinion,” he said.

The majority of patients prescribed gabapentin are over age 65. More than 90% of Medicare beneficiaries who received gabapentin within a month of a reported visit with the prescribing doctor got it for an off-label use, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicare claims data from 2020 through 2022 that matched up prescriptions with diagnoses.

One big reason for gabapentin’s popularity is simply that there are a lot of patients in pain, with pressure on medical providers to evaluate and help patients quickly, and few perfect medicines to treat them, said Dr. Christopher Goodman, clinical associate professor of internal medicine at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Columbia.

“We want to help patients in pain, and there’s not a lot of great options,” he said. He co-wrote a study finding that evidence is limited for off-label use of gabapentinoid drugs—including gabapentin and another drug in the same class, pregabalin—for most pain-related conditions.

Reviews of studies in recent years have shown that only one in seven patients treated with a moderate dose felt a major reduction in shingles-related nerve pain.

Gabapentin is the top prescribed central nervous system drug—and among those, it’s also one of the most often reported to the FDA for adverse events. Healthcare professionals, patients and manufacturers reported more than 5,300 adverse events involving gabapentin in 2025, including a 21% jump in life-threatening complications compared with 2024. Hospitalizations have also risen.

Dr. Betsy Grunch, a neurosurgeon in Gainesville, Ga., said many of her patients benefit from gabapentin. Still, she said, she has become more cautious about prescribing it.

She warns of side effects like sleepiness since experiencing them herself. After taking a dose before a surgery a few years ago, she recalls, she felt “like, wow, I prescribe this all the time, and I cannot function.” A study earlier this year gave her further pause. It suggested a link between gabapentin for chronic low back pain and higher risk of dementia and mild cognitive impairment for adults under 65 with six or more gabapentin prescriptions.

“We’re just in the habit of making sure our patients are happy, and if they think a medicine works, we just refill it,” Grunch said.

Gabapentin was approved by the FDA in 1993 under the brand name Neurontin to help treat partial seizures. The FDA approved it in 2002 for post-herpetic neuralgia, or nerve pain after shingles.

Neurontin’s manufacturer, Warner-Lambert, which was acquired by Pfizer in 2000, sought a bigger market for its niche drug. Rather than seek more FDA approvals, it funded studies purportedly proving its efficacy for more common ailments such as anxiety, migraines and chronic nerve pain.

Warner-Lambert and Pfizer amplified the positive findings to doctors through sales calls and “continuing medical education” seminars that drew thousands of physicians, as well as a publication strategy focused on pushing positive articles about gabapentin in medical journals and suppressing negative data, including about harms, according to a review of legal documents, scientific studies and interviews with doctors and researchers.

Potential adverse events the companies knew about included depression, suicidal ideation, somnolence, edema, dizziness and confusion, documents from lawsuits show.

One Pfizer medical director referred to the drug as the “‘snake oil’ of the twentieth century” in an email later made public. The drug’s sales grew from almost $98 million in 1995 to more than $2 billion in 2003.

The Pfizer unit responsible for gabapentin ultimately pleaded guilty to criminal wrongdoing and was fined $430 million in 2004 for illegally promoting Neurontin’s off-label use to doctors. It was one of the largest Medicaid-fraud settlements at the time, and the case led to calls for new marketing standards for pharmaceuticals.

Pfizer said in a written statement that the company divested itself of the product in 2020, and added the company “is strongly committed to complying with the laws that apply to its business activities and regulations related to the marketing of its products.” Viatris, which now owns the brand name Neurontin, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

After the drug started going generic in 2004, its price dropped so significantly that it became the default pain reliever, said Ambrose Carrejo, a former national pharmaceutical contracting leader at Kaiser Foundation Hospitals, which alongside its namesake health plan successfully sued Pfizer over its Neurontin marketing practices and was awarded $142 million in 2010.

At the same time, a sharp rise in opioid overdoses led to new state and federal regulations that made it harder for doctors to prescribe the drugs. The amount of opioids prescribed began dropping in 2011—and gabapentin took off.

“It became the moral and regulatory safe harbor for clinicians under pressure to treat pain and cut back on opioids,” said Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the division of Stanford Pain Medicine and professor of anesthesiology.

In 2016, the CDC warned the medical community not to prescribe opioids routinely for chronic pain and listed gabapentin among alternatives for certain types of neuropathic pain.

Dr. Thomas Gilson, medical examiner and crime laboratory director for Cuyahoga County, Ohio, grew worried when gabapentin turned up in an increasing number of drug-overdose deaths. Although it isn’t addictive in the same way as opioids, he was concerned that, as with opioids, it was being prescribed widely for uses without much evidence.

“It was just such a bad idea to ever reach into using opioids for chronic pain,” he said. “What concerned me about seeing gabapentin was, is this just another chapter of this idea?”

Amid growing concerns, Gilson co-wrote a CDC report in 2022 warning about overdoses. The agency updated its opioid-prescribing guideline for pain later that year, warning of risks of gabapentin, including “blurred vision, cognitive effects, sedation and weight gain.” But it said gabapentin could be considered for some conditions.

A toxic combination

Just before Christmas last year, 77-year-old Nancy Hammer visited her family doctor seeking help for her worsening back pain. She left the office with prescriptions for gabapentin and an opioid. The next morning, Hammer’s husband of 49 years found her dead.

A toxicology review by a pharmacist found that gabapentin played a central role. Hammer’s doctor, William Scott Dacus, already had her on 14 other drugs for pain, anxiety and other conditions. The gabapentin and opioid combined with two others to create a toxic cocktail that slowed her breathing to the point of death.

Neither the doctor, his office nor the pharmacy had made clear to Hammer the danger of mixing gabapentin with other sedatives, her daughter Beatrice Stugart said. The doctor did prescribe naloxone, as needed to reverse a potential opioid overdose.

Hammer, who lived in Pelion, S.C., had been on gabapentin earlier in 2024 at a lower dose to treat shingles nerve pain. Hammer’s doctor, Dacus, was ranked among the top 10% of gabapentin prescribers to Medicare beneficiaries nationwide from 2018 to 2023, according to a Journal analysis of Medicare data.

Stugart and her father, John Hammer, filed a lawsuit in October against Dacus, another provider in his office, and their employer, Lexington Health, alleging negligence and wrongful death. “Doctors should be held responsible for making sure that people are aware, particularly older people,” Stugart said.

Lexington Health, based in West Columbia, S.C., declined to comment, citing the pending litigation. Dacus didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Many patients say doctors are often unaware how difficult it can be to quit.

Jessica Carman has been taking gabapentin for about a decade for anxiety and felt it helped. But the 38-year-old in San Antonio is trying to get off it. She became worried about dementia when she noticed her short-term memory fading and that she was dropping things and tripping over her own feet. She has also experienced tooth decay, and her dentist suggested the gabapentin might be a contributing factor, she said.

When Carman has tried to reduce her dose, she said, her body aches, she feels desperately tired and she becomes disoriented. She has stayed on the same dose for several months. She never would have taken gabapentin if she knew back then what she knows now, she said.

“I just don’t think it’s something that is meant to be used long-term like this,” she said.

A deadly standoff jolted India to stitch together a huge network of roads, tunnels and landing strips needed to move soldiers and supplies to the border region

India is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build roads, tunnels and landing strips throughout the Himalayas, as it prepares for a possible future clash with its longtime nemesis China.

India’s bloody border clash with China in 2020, which killed soldiers on both sides, exposed an alarming vulnerability along the disputed 2,200-mile border, a vague demarcation line known as the Line of Actual Control. While China has for decades built up a vast network of railways and roads along its border regions, India has done little to build the infrastructure its military would need to traverse its own mountainous border areas.

When fighting erupted in 2020—soldiers at 14,000 feet fought hand-to-hand using batons and clubs wrapped in barbed wire—Beijing could have rushed in reinforcements within hours, according to analysts. India would have needed up to a week to send additional troops along its bumpy or nonexistent roads.

“It was a dramatic shift in thinking,” said Maj. Gen. Amrit Pal Singh, former chief of operational logistics in the northern region of Ladakh, which is home to some of the most sensitive stretches of India’s border with China. “We realized we needed to change our total approach.”

Some of the projects are designed to link high-altitude areas with military outposts and civilian settlements that are isolated during the winter. One of the most ambitious is the Zojila tunnel, which is being carved into the mountains of northern India at around 11,500 feet. Work on the more than $750 million project began a few months after the 2020 clash.

The 9-mile stretch, projected to be completed in about two years, will ease the Herculean task of supplying border outposts in Ladakh, which is cut off by heavy snowfall for up to six months each year, said Lt. Gen. Deependra Singh Hooda, former commander of India’s Northern Command.

When roads are clear, a constant stream of food, fuel and essentials flow to remote outposts. Supplies first travel by truck or train to depots in the neighboring region of Jammu and Kashmir, then move by truck convoys to Leh, the capital city of Ladakh. From there, smaller vehicles navigate over rough terrain before porters and mules haul baskets on the final stretch, up to 20,000 feet above sea level.

“It’s a massive, massive logistical exercise undertaken regularly every year,” Hooda said.

Each soldier needs about 220 pounds of supplies—including food, clothing and essentials such as toothpaste—every month. An outpost for 30 soldiers with a couple of sentry points and barracks will burn through about 13 gallons of fuel a day.

“That has to be brought up to that post on somebody’s shoulder,” Hooda said.

The new tunnel will shave a few hours off each truck trip and make it possible to send supplies up year-round. The more than 1,000 construction workers laboring on it face temperatures that at times can drop to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A key engineering challenge: ensuring enough fresh air for tunnel workers now, and once diesel-fueled army trucks are running through it.

At Pangong Tso Lake, which straddles the border, Indian and Chinese troops have clashed at multiple points over the years. The 80-mile lake, which extends from Ladakh into China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, is under dispute.

Both sides rushed to build more buildings and roads after the 2020 fight in nearby Galwan Valley. Beijing constructed dozens of buildings and trenches partly as a show of force, said Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan, resident senior fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Last year, China finished building a bridge linking the north and south banks of the lake, allowing troops to cross it instead of going around it.

New Delhi followed suit by expanding its outposts and upgrading roads along the shore and in bases nearby. Despite a 2021 agreement to disengage troops at the lake, both sides maintain a military presence there.

In contrast to occasional patrols before 2020, the Indians now “believe that you have to have constant, regular, 24/7 monitoring of Chinese movement,” Rajagopalan added.

The budget of the Border Roads Organization, a construction agency under the defense ministry, has grown to $810 million this year, from $280 million in 2020. During the same period, India’s total military spending has jumped nearly 60% to $80 billion. The building agency has already constructed thousands of miles of new roads along the border.

India has also built over 30 helipads and upgraded and built several airstrips along its border.

At nearly 14,000 feet, the new Mudh-Nyoma air force base in Ladakh is India’s closest airfield to the border, with China 19 miles away. The base is capable of handling India’s heavier military transport planes such as the U.S.-made C-130J plane that the Air Force chief landed at the base in November, when it opened for operations. The base will serve as a staging ground for troops and equipment headed to border areas.

For decades, India avoided large-scale construction along much of its border, calculating that the soaring Himalayas and a lack of roads would deter a Chinese incursion.

“It was like rolling out the red carpet to a Chinese invasion,” said Daniel Markey, senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank. “The Indian perspective was that building significant roads was actually militarily detrimental to them.”

By the mid-2000s, however, New Delhi saw China speeding ahead by building tens of thousands of miles of roads and railways to strengthen its borders and pull the restive regions of Xinjiang and Tibet closer to the rest of the country.

Construction crews in the Himalayas have to contend with landslides, avalanches and extreme weather. Construction halts for months during the winter, when freezing temperatures make tasks like mixing cement impossible. The Zojila tunnel’s completion date, for example, was recently pushed back by over a year to at least 2028.

In recent years, China began showing increasing assertiveness by sending troops over the border and sparking occasional standoffs. In 2017, Chinese and Indian troops faced off for months over a road that China was building in an area claimed by China and Bhutan. If China gained control, Beijing would be within striking range of the Siliguri Corridor, a narrow stretch of land that connects India to its landlocked northeastern states. Both India and China eventually pulled back.

China has built new villages along disputed areas in Ladakh and the state of Arunachal Pradesh, which Beijing claims almost entirely and calls South Tibet.

Analysts said India’s infrastructure push increases the chance of a conflict, as the two countries accuse each other of infringing on sovereign territory. The 2020 clash was partly sparked by Chinese opposition to India building a new road near the border leading to a strategic air base, Daulat Beg Oldi.

“Both sides are going to areas beyond where they normally patrol,” Rajagopalan said. “Therefore there are increasing chances of the two forces running into each other.”

Analysts and officials said India’s goal isn’t to catch up to China’s vast infrastructure buildup but to create enough of a deterrence to make any further Chinese encroachment more costly.

“We’re not going overboard,” said Singh, the retired general. “At no stage should we ever try and catch up with China.”

The business of selling music has always been a source of grievance for those who create it

The biggest companies in music are provoking a rising drumbeat of criticism. Spotify paid out a record-breaking $10bn in royalties in 2024, but remains beset by allegations that artists aren’t being remunerated adequately. Its recommendation system is condemned for supposedly treating listeners like sheeple, herding them algorithmically from song to song. For haters, the world’s most popular music streaming service is the worst innovation to emerge from Sweden since fermented herring.

With more than 30 per cent global market share, Spotify bestrides streamed music like a colossus. Live Nation is similarly dominant in the live circuit. The US company has a global portfolio of venues and festivals, and owns the ticketing giant Ticketmaster.

CEO Michael Rapino recently argued that concerts are undervalued compared with sporting events. “They beat me up if we charge $800 for Beyoncé,” he joked with impolitic candour. There was uproar at his advocacy of higher prices, but it was unsurprising. Live Nation has gained a name for purportedly driving ticket costs upwards. 

Last month, Olivia Dean wrote an open letter to Ticketmaster and its rival AXS, decrying “vile” reselling practices that saw tickets for the London singer’s forthcoming tour being listed at upwards of $1,000. This time, Rapino struck a chastened note as Ticketmaster promised to cap resale prices and refund fans. “We share Olivia’s desire to keep live music accessible,” he said emolliently.

The business of selling music has always been a source of grievance for those who create it. In the past, the chief-baddie role was assigned to record labels. Pop lore abounds with tales of confrontation, such as Malcolm McLaren crowing about engineering “cash from chaos” when the Sex Pistols were signed and then dropped by EMI and A&M Records.

For rock’s insurrectionists, labels, especially majors such as EMI, were the enemy. They represented a parasitic world of recoupable advances and complicated contracts in which the men in suits usually came out on top. Standard industry practice of taking copyright ownership over recordings aggravated the ill feeling. The word “corporate” became a pejorative. Dave Grohl, speaking during a Nirvana interview in 1991, implausibly claimed that the band had signed to the major label Geffen in order to “get inside the machine and throw a wrench into the system and destroy corporate rock altogether”.

That sort of wild talk used to be common but died out as rock’s relevance faded. Rap, rock’s successor as rebel music, emerged outside the traditional record label system. Its entrepreneurial culture places value on branding and commerce. There is distrust of the music industry due to its history of racial exploitation, but also a close interest in its operations. Empire-building rappers such as Jay-Z wanted to take over the system, not throw a wrench in it. As he once rapped: “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

Collapsing sales in the 2000s also altered perceptions of labels. With revenues declining from $36.9bn in 2000 to $15.9bn in 2010, they ceased to be caricatured as soulless manipulators and were instead designated as underdogs. There was dismay when EMI, mocked as a haven for “useless fools” by the Sex Pistols in a track named after the label, was broken up and sold in 2012.

The antagonism formerly directed at the major labels has now been displaced on to Spotify. There is an irony here. The platform has always collaborated closely with the majors, to the extent of giving them equity stakes when it launched in 2008. Opacity surrounds the licensing agreements between the labels and the streaming service. That leaves Spotify bearing the brunt of charges that revenue is not being shared equitably with artists.

Its reputation has waxed and waned over the years. In 2014, Taylor Swift temporarily removed her songs from its catalogue in a dispute over payment rates. By 2017, however, Spotify was winning acclaim as the music industry’s saviour due to booming popularity.

This year may come to be seen as the tipping point when the public relations battle was lost. Live Nation’s perceived association with rampant ticket price inflation grates badly at a time when independent venues are closing and musicians complain of seeing touring earnings evaporate. Meanwhile, Spotify has been assailed on several fronts, from songwriters protesting royalty rates to its non-labelling of AI-generated music.

Massive Attack are among acts to have removed their work from the platform after a venture capital firm founded by its CEO Daniel Ek invested €600mn in a company developing military AI weaponry. This surely marks the point at which a Hollywood studio contemplating a biopic of Ek might consider a casting call to Mads Mikkelsen, Scandinavian specialist in movie villains.

EMI was also attacked for links to arms manufacturing in the late 1980s, via its then parent company. That was the era when the term “corporate” was spat out as though it were poisonous by the unrevolutionary likes of Grohl, aka the “the nicest guy in rock”. A similar sentiment has re-emerged in the otherwise transformed music business of today. The clamour may not change anything, but I expect it to grow in the year ahead. Stick it to The Man, in the argot of old.

Prosus boss criticises EU over curbs that hinder $15bn investment in Europe

Fabricio Bloisi hits out against bloc’s approach to antitrust issues following €4.1bn Just Eat deal

The head of Prosus said the EU is limiting his plan to invest as much as $15bn in Europe following the technology group’s €4.1bn takeover of Just Eat Takeaway, in the latest warning against the bloc’s approach to antitrust issues. 

Fabricio Bloisi said he was “willing” to invest more in the food delivery sector as part of Prosus’s goal of creating a $100bn European tech champion, at a time when US rival DoorDash has just bought Just Eat’s UK-based competitor Deliveroo.

But he said that plan was being held back by Brussels, which only approved the Just Eat deal after Prosus committed to selling down its 27 per cent stake in Berlin-based rival Delivery Hero as well as giving up its seat on the company’s board.

“We just made an acquisition [of Just Eat Takeaway], we committed to invest $10bn to $15bn in Europe, and the recommendation we got [from EU competition authorities] was to divest. We should be investing $10bn, but my goal is to divest now,” said Bloisi.

His comments come amid mounting calls by European companies, such as telecom groups Telefónica and Deutsche Telekom, for Brussels to loosen its merger rules to help them better compete against US and Chinese rivals.

The concessions made by Prosus — the investment arm of South African group Naspers — were made after EU officials raised concerns that the deal could lead to price rises for consumers in markets where Just Eat operated alongside Delivery Hero’s subsidiary Glovo, such as Spain, Poland and Italy.

Bloisi, who previously headed up Brazilian food delivery app iFood, said the process showed that EU officials had not yet listened to the recommendations of Mario Draghi’s 2024 report into European competitiveness. This suggested reforms to areas such as merger controls to allow the creation of “European champions”.

The report also specifically pointed to Europe’s weakness in the tech sector for the bloc’s lagging productivity compared with the US. Only a handful of the world’s top 50 tech companies are European.

“[The Draghi report] says we need local champions. This is not the mindset of the European Commission today; the mindset is ‘let’s look at our competition internally’. I think this is a big mistake,” said Bloisi. “I think the European mindset has to change, or we are to become irrelevant in terms of technology.” 

Despite pledges to move quickly to act on the former Italian premier’s recommendations, only 11.2 per cent of Draghi’s ideas had been implemented a year after his report was published, according to the European Policy Innovation Council, a Brussels-based think-tank. 

In September, Draghi himself hit out at Brussels’ “inaction” over the past year, warning that it threatened “not only our competitiveness but our sovereignty itself”.

The Commission said that Prosus’ acquisition of Just Eat, as originally proposed would have “decreased JET’s incentives to compete with Delivery Hero in the five Member States where both companies are active.”

It added it is currently reviewing merger guidelines following the Draghi report. “We are also reflecting on novel issues encountered in specific cases and broader trends that are relevant for the productivity and competitiveness of the whole European economy.”

Prosus — which has also recently acquired La Centrale, a motors classifieds platform in France, for €1.1bn through its subsidiary OLX — is expected to continue expanding its portfolio in Europe in sectors ranging from food delivery to classifieds.

Analysts had suggested that Prosus’s future dealmaking plans might have involved the acquisition of Delivery Hero, which also owns brands such as Foodpanda and Talabat. 

However, any deal would now face even more scrutiny in order to be approved due to the concessions made to secure approval for the Just Eat deal. Bloisi declined to comment on his future M&A ambitions.

World’s most valuable company will gain engineer who helped develop Google’s Tensor Processing Unit chip programme

Nvidia is scooping up the founder and other top talent from Groq, one of the most prominent start-ups aiming to challenge the chipmaker’s dominance in artificial intelligence processors.

Jonathan Ross, a former Google chip engineer who founded Groq in 2016, and the start-up’s president Sunny Madra, are among those who will join Nvidia as part of a technology licensing deal, the two companies announced on Christmas Eve.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, said in an email to staff that the Groq deal would “expand the capabilities” of the data centres that were built around its chips, which he calls “AI factories”. 

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the Nvidia AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” he wrote in the email, which was seen by the Financial Times.

Despite the loss of much of its leadership team, Groq said it “will continue to operate as an independent company”.

Groq has focused on developing chips that can accelerate AI “inference”, the process of returning responses to users’ queries via chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.

The start-up was valued at $6.9bn as recently as September, when it raised $750mn in funding. Groq claims its language processing units are up to 10 times more energy efficient than the kinds of graphics processing units produced by Nvidia and its main rival AMD.

Ross helped kick-start Google’s AI Tensor Processing Unit chips programme before leaving to found Groq. TPUs are widely seen as a significant asset in Google’s AI arsenal, helping its Gemini chatbot catch up with ChatGPT by OpenAI, which has largely relied on Nvidia chips.

Several Big Tech companies — including Microsoft, Meta and Google — have struck licensing agreements with start-ups that brought in top talent and assets without making an outright acquisition, after antitrust scrutiny over the sector’s dealmaking escalated in recent years.

“Antitrust would seem to be the primary risk here, though structuring the deal as a non-exclusive licence may keep the fiction of competition alive,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research, in a note to clients regarding Nvidia’s deal with Groq.

Groq said its agreement with Nvidia “reflects a shared focus on expanding access to high-performance, low cost inference”.

The tie-up comes as many of Nvidia’s biggest customers are developing their own AI processors or exploring alternatives to its GPUs, including adopting Google’s TPUs.

The FT reported last week that Amazon was in talks to invest more than $10bn in OpenAI as part of a deal in which the ChatGPT developer would use more of the ecommerce giant’s Trainium series of AI chips.

Nvidia has struck a series of high-value investment deals this year, including agreeing to invest up to $100bn in OpenAI.

The company hit a record $5tn valuation in late October but has seen its shares decline as concern has grown about the sustainability of the AI boom. Nvidia’s stock is up 36 per cent year to date, while Google parent Alphabet’s has risen 66 per cent over the same period, driven by growing investor enthusiasm about its latest Gemini models.

World’s largest museum faces calls to ditch €1.15bn revamp as series of crises exposes more basic challenges

Standing in front of the “Mona Lisa” in January, French President Emmanuel Macron unveiled what seemed like a winning plan. The Louvre museum would have a €1.15bn makeover, with a new entrance and a separate space for Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.

By December, that ambition was close to unravelling. A strike by workers over pay and staff shortages has capped a grim year for the world’s largest and most visited museum, following the spectacular theft of French crown jewels in October.

“We can’t spend hundreds of millions on a new entrance when the buildings are falling to pieces,” Elise Muller, a gallery guard and Sud Culture union representative, said as the strike got under way on December 15.

State auditor criticism over misguided spending has compounded calls to ditch the plans spearheaded by Macron and redirect funding towards basic maintenance. Late last month a water leak in an Egyptian wing damaged academic books while closures of other galleries in the Paris museum due to structural concerns have fuelled fears about the Louvre’s condition.

Under pressure, culture minister Rachida Dati has roped in Philippe Jost, the senior civil servant who oversaw the reconstruction of Notre-Dame. He would “profoundly reorganise the Louvre”, she said, without providing details.

Macron’s Nouvelle Renaissance project for the Louvre should have defined his cultural legacy, just as the museum’s glass pyramid from the 1980s is indelibly associated with the late French president François Mitterrand.

Instead, the series of crises has exposed more basic challenges facing the museum, leaving unions and opposition politicians calling for a sharper focus on practical fixes.

“There’ll be nothing left of it. The final great project of Emmanuel Macron is falling into the waters of the Seine,” said Pierre Ouzoulias, an archaeologist by training and a communist senator on the culture committee examining the theft. 

While all suspected culprits involved in the October heist have now been arrested, the sapphire and diamond-encrusted crown jewels, taken in a daring seven-minute break-in through a first-floor window, have yet to be recovered.

France’s state auditor criticised the museum after the heist for spending too much on acquisitions and too little on security, noting that just €3mn was spent on security upgrades from 2018 to 2024, out of a planned €83mn.

But parliamentary investigations into how Louvre director Laurence Des Cars and her predecessor, Jean-Luc Martinez, who left in 2021, managed the museum have also revealed glaring oversights and a botched handover between the two.

Senators raised a 2017 security audit and a 2019 report identifying vulnerabilities in the Galerie d’Apollon from which the jewels were stolen that were not fully acted upon. The 2019 report recommended reinforcing the window used by the burglars.

Martinez, who did carry out some unglamorous and basic repairs such as redoing toilets and signage, has said his security plans were partly derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Des Cars, meanwhile, defended her record, saying she was not informed of the 2019 report nor of the details of the 2017 audit until after the theft.

“I read the report . . . and I think I was in the same shaken state as everyone,” Des Cars said.

But she has also been criticised for prioritising jazzier events and taking too long on security measures of her own to roll them into the 2025 Nouvelle Renaissance plan.

“She delayed everything to sell it with her big project,” said Didier Rykner, founder of the Tribune de l’Art magazine, of the plan.

Martinez’s security proposals had included more surveillance cameras and a control tower, in a space Des Cars converted into an artists’ residency, according to a person familiar with the matter. The Louvre did not respond to a request for comment.

Workers’ unions have criticised the Louvre’s budget plans and urged the museum to focus on repairs, calling for “intelligent projects”.

At the strike in December dozens of workers held placards, including a replica of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa deploring the Louvre’s “shipwrecked” policies, as bemused tourists and school groups milled nearby.

Striking staff called a hiatus on industrial action after four days, but said they would meet again in January to decide next steps.

Unions have also condemned a proposal to raise ticket prices for non-Europeans from €22 to €32 from January, a move that would make the Louvre more expensive than New York’s Metropolitan Museum, calling them “anti-republican”.

Des Cars has defended the makeover plan before senators, noting that London’s British Museum also intends to build a new entrance and make infrastructure updates at a reported cost of £1bn. 

“What is at stake today . . . is not only to renovate and repair the Louvre, but also ensuring it does not lose its status as the most beautiful and greatest museum in the world,” she said.

Once the residence of French kings, the Louvre was first turned over to public displays in 1793, during the revolution. The last major overhaul transferred a wing once inhabited by the finance ministry to the museum and created the glass pyramid entrance. Designed for 4mn visitors a year, however, the Louvre now welcomes more than 9mn.

Critics argue Macron’s plan to revamp one 17th-century facade into another main gateway is excessive. “There need to be new entrances, but [not] an enormous one with restaurants and shops,” Rykner said.

The €1.15bn plan is due to rely heavily on the Louvre’s own resources instead of taxpayers. This includes €300mn from its licensing contract with its Abu Dhabi offshoot, but the museum still needs to find the rest of the money. Annual funding from patrons amounted to less than €8mn in 2024.

After a bruising 2025, the outlook for 2026 looks similarly challenging. Commissioned by Dati, Jost will deliver a report on security failings and broader challenges in February. Des Cars’ mandate expires in September 2026, and while Dati rejected her resignation after the theft, the director faces renewed calls to consider her position, while a blame game with Martinez has spilled into the open.

“They’re like two school kids fighting at break time, each saying the other started it,” said Ouzoulias.

The Takeaway