TheChek News Flow

Apple seeks to buy memory chips from blacklisted Chinese company

iPhone maker wants Trump administration to sign off on purchases to ease pressure from rising semiconductor prices

Apple is lobbying the Trump administration for clearance to buy memory chips from CXMT, a Chinese company that the Pentagon has put on a blacklist because of alleged connections to the People’s Liberation Army, according to six people familiar with the matter.

The iPhone maker has waged a lobbying campaign to get the White House’s blessing in order to ease the financial pressure of the rise in memory chip prices.

One person said Apple approached the commerce department more than a month ago, but the tech company has been targeting other officials across the administration and allies in Washington.

Apple is not barred from buying chips from CXMT, or YMTC, another Chinese memory chipmaker. But the Pentagon has put both companies on its Chinese Military Company blacklist. The so-called 1260H list contains dozens of Chinese groups with alleged ties to the PLA that undermine US national security.

Apple’s rare move on Thursday to raise prices for MacBooks and iPads wiped $263bn from its market capitalisation, its second-biggest single-day drop. The company blamed “unsustainable” memory prices for its decision to pass on the costs to consumers, following similar moves from other consumer electronics companies.

Securing CXMT as a memory supplier would help remedy a situation in which the tech giant is being squeezed by its own suppliers.

The lobbying campaign comes after President Donald Trump met his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing last month. Ahead of the summit, and in the months ahead of their previous meeting in South Korea in October, the US has held back from introducing new technology-related export controls that would affect Chinese companies. The Pentagon’s 1260H list creates reputational risk for companies, but in most cases it has no legal ramifications.

The commerce department last year added CXMT to a package of Chinese groups it intended to place on a trade blacklist called the “Entity List”. But the White House told it to hold off on new export controls because the administration was in the middle of tough negotiations with China to try to reach a truce in the trade war.

But most of the people familiar with the matter said it was unclear if Apple would get any guarantee from the administration, especially a promise that the US would not later put CXMT on the Entity List. Trump last year agreed to let Nvidia sell advanced H200 chips to China, a move many of his officials opposed.

In February, the Pentagon updated the 1260H list before withdrawing it within an hour. Several people said it was removed because the White House was angry that someone at the Pentagon had taken CXMT and YMTC off the list. When the Pentagon re-released it this month, both of the Chinese memory chip manufacturers had been reinstated.

Congress would probably object strongly if the administration blessed Apple purchases from CXMT, which is the Chinese national champion.

“Apple choosing to partner with a Chinese military company would be a grave mistake,” John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House China committee, told the FT.

“Helping the [Chinese Communist Party] succeed in its plans to dominate critical supply chains will make our country’s tech industry and economy more dependent on China at a time when we must build secure tech supply chains with our allies,” Moolenaar said.

Apple faced a backlash in 2022 when it considered buying memory chips from YMTC for iPhones to be sold in China. Marco Rubio, who was then the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, told the FT that “Apple was playing with fire”.

Rubio added that Apple would be “subject to scrutiny like it has never seen from the federal government” if it proceeded to procure YMTC chips.

“It makes no sense for the administration to decouple America’s reliance on critical minerals from China, only to approve new dependencies in a field as critical as AI,” said Michael Sobolik, a security expert at the Hudson Institute.

One former official warned the US risked losing another industry by letting Apple buy memory from a group that receives Chinese subsidies.

“Trump can show the courage to keep American memory alive for our security and our competitiveness or pour it down the drain so [Apple chief executive] Tim Cook can squeeze out a few more points of margin.”

Outside China, the memory chip industry is heavily consolidated into three companies. Apple relies on US chipmaker Micron in addition to South Korea’s Samsung and SK Hynix for the DRam memory used in its devices.

CXMT has received regulatory approval to list in Shanghai as the Chinese national champion positions itself to challenge the DRam incumbents.

DRam prices collapsed in 2023 because of a supply glut. This was a boon for buyers such as Apple, which was able to secure massive amounts of cheap inventory.

But the AI boom of the past three years has seen a reversal in fortunes for the memory suppliers. As Big Tech has spent hundreds of billions of dollars for AI infrastructure, demand for advanced DRam — known as HBM — has led to a protracted shortage of traditional memory for consumer electronics.

Apple declined to comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

The Nazi files shedding new light on family secrets

Party membership records are now searchable online. But, as many Germans are finding out, the archive poses more questions than it answers

Last year, I sat with my grandmother in her care home in Germany, and we shuffled through some old photographs she kept in a shoebox. Between sepia wedding pictures and the fading faces of long-deceased great-uncles, I found a snapshot I have not forgotten since. It showed my grandmother as a little girl smiling into the camera, strands of her wavy hair escaping from under a military cap on which you can just about make out the emblem of an eagle clutching a swastika.

My grandmother must have been about six or seven when she dressed up in her father’s uniform of Nazi Germany’s armed forces, the Wehrmacht. This might have been the last time she ever saw him. He was sent to the Eastern Front and died in 1945 in a prisoner-of-war camp in present-day Poland. Today, she has almost no memories of him. I tried to imagine the man whose uniform seemed so at odds with his young daughter’s smile on that photograph. Was my great-grandfather a Nazi, a reluctant conscript or something in between?

Like many Germans born after the second world war, I have only the haziest of notions of my ancestors’ lives in Nazi Germany. My grandparents were children in 1945. Most of the stories they told me were based on what their surviving parents told them, and that was very little. In the immediate postwar era, most Germans — East and West — were keen to leave the past behind and regard 1945 as Stunde Null or zero hour. By the time their children and grandchildren began to ask questions, it was often too late.

There is a paradox in German memory culture: while most Germans know a lot about the general history of the Nazi era due to the focus on it in education, we tend to know less about our own family stories. Most of us never quite found the time or the inclination to start digging around in our personal backgrounds. After all, broad, ready-made explanations for what happened existed. The silence of those who lived through the Nazi era, combined with the emergence of national narratives taught in schools and museums in the postwar decades, allowed for a degree of personal detachment from this dark and terrifying history. But that’s changing drastically now. As the 1930s and 1940s are sliding out of living memory, a potent mix of renewed interest and easier access to sources is transforming the ways Germans think about their history.

At the beginning of April, the newspaper Die Zeit launched an online tool that allows anyone to search the fully digitised records of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), as Adolf Hitler’s organisation was officially called. In May, another prominent newspaper, Der Spiegel, followed suit. In theory, this information isn’t new. The physical membership cards are held at the German Federal Archives and can be accessed by application. As a historian, I have done this for research, but it never occurred to me to look for family members among the rank and file of the Nazi Party.

The breakthrough moment for the general public came outside of Germany. The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) has microfilm copies of the membership cards and made them accessible online earlier this year. Aided by AI, Die Zeit and Der Spiegel then processed the information on more than 12mn membership cards and created searchable, user-friendly interfaces. Now anyone can enter the details of any person and see whether there is an NSDAP membership card with their name on it.

When the news broke, so many people tried to access the NARA website that it crashed. By the end of April, more than 1.5mn people had accessed their digitised records. Die Zeit also reported “millions of visits” for its search engine. Buoyed by the enormous interest from the German public, Der Spiegel ran a cover story under the headline “Was grandpa a Nazi” and invited prominent German politicians to reveal what they found out about their fathers and grandfathers and how they felt about it.

Renate Künast, a veteran member of the Green Party and former minister for agriculture, wrote that she used the search engine “almost immediately because I’d long wanted to know if one of my ancestors was in the NSDAP.” She found that her father Willy Künast joined in 1933, the year Hitler became chancellor. “It wasn’t a shock,” she admitted, “but it still hit me and has occupied my thoughts ever since.”

Künast can’t remember as a young woman ever asking her father whether he was in the Nazi Party and suspects that if she had, it might have earnt her a slap rather than an answer. “After the war my family was like so many others,” she mused, “a cartel of silence.” Her father died in 1995 and took his story to his grave. Künast used the search tool to find answers but seems to have come away with more questions: “Why did father join the party? Was he a Nazi by conviction? I don’t know.”

When I typed my great-grandfather’s name and date of birth into the boxes on the screen, my finger hovered over the search button for a moment. Was I about to find out that he was a member of the Nazi Party? If so, what exactly was I going to do with this knowledge? When I finally pressed “search”, I found nothing. I tried my other great-grandparents on both sides of the family with the same result. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. They were all from working-class backgrounds, a group under-represented in Nazi activism. Many workers were either part of left-leaning movements, ranging from communism to social democracy, or not political at all.

But those are general patterns that verify nothing about an individual. Just as Künast couldn’t tell why her father had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 — around a time when many people did so out of opportunism rather than ideological fervour — I couldn’t tell why my great-grandparents had not joined. My great-grandfathers might still have committed terrible atrocities on the Eastern Front — you didn’t need a party membership card for that. Or they may not have done so. Without further research, information about party membership gives only a limited view of their culpability within Hitler’s regime.

In some cases, this information can even be misleading. Consider the case of Carl Weirich, a stationer who features strongly in my recent book Weimar. Unusually for his social class, he never joined the Nazi Party. But he did temporarily become a “Patron Member” of the infamous SS, donating small sums of money to the organisation that ran the concentration camps. His name does not show up in the search engine, seemingly exonerating him.

Conversely, another member of my book’s “cast”, the hotelier Arthur Schmidt, shows up as Nazi Party member 3,743,593, having joined in 1936. But history rendered him a victim of the regime. Arthur’s wife Rosa was Jewish and was later murdered in Auschwitz. Neither Weirich nor Schmidt fit neatly into the judgments a simple search on the Zeit tool seems to promise.

If used with due consideration and embedded in wider research, the eased access to the Nazi Party files can still be a powerful driver of cultural change. People who lived through the 1930s and 1940s often had no wish to talk, leaving future generations to process this history as an abstract thing, as a story that happened to “the Germans” rather than their own family. The easy-to-use search tools have fuelled a more personal form of interest.

There have been previous attempts by postwar generations to tackle this history, especially in West Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when global student activism merged with German questions of guilt, responsibility and reckoning on campuses from Frankfurt to West Berlin. But that discussion was intensely morally charged as left-leaning students demanded answers from their defensive parents underpinned by the implicit assumption that they would have acted differently in their elders’ stead.

The years that have passed since may allow for more nuance. At the same time, we now live in a world where the rise of far-right parties, especially the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, is prompting more people to look to the past for patterns and explanations of how and why ordinary people turn to radical politics in times of crisis. Perhaps what we are witnessing now, as this history slides further out of personal reach but simultaneously seems to become increasingly relevant, is a new and different kind of interest, driven by a desire to understand first and judge second, to preserve knowledge of what happened and to draw meaningful lessons from history rather than to distance oneself from it.

While access to the Nazi Party register alone cannot provide answers to all the questions postwar generations of Germans have about their ancestors, it’s clearly helped prompt a surge of new questions in the first place. Such increased historical curiosity can only be a good thing. Understanding what drove people to make decisions in the past is the first step towards avoiding the repetition of their mistakes in the present.

Utility boss warns US faces blackouts due to power supply shortfall

Exelon chief executive says electricity bill increases are necessary to fund infrastructure to support AI boom

The head of the US’s largest utility has warned that the nation could face blackouts as soon as 2027 due to the strain AI has put on the grid, saying electricity bill increases are needed to fund new infrastructure.

Calvin Butler, chief executive of Exelon, the largest US utility by customer count, told the FT that Americans could “absolutely” lose power next year, due to a shortage of power plants in the north-east and Midwest.

“We came very close, this past winter, to having to curtail power for about 400,000 customers on some of the coldest days of the year,” he said. “And it’s only getting worse.”

Butler’s warning comes as utilities and policymakers grapple with balancing the electricity needs of the AI boom with keeping the lights on and prices low amid rising inflation. US electricity demand is expected to grow by 39 per cent by 2035, according to data from consultancy ICF.

Electrical grid operator PJM, which operates across the north-east and Midwest has predicted that it will face a 60-gigawatt power supply shortfall over the next decade. At its last auction in December, the grid operator reported a 6.5-gigawatt deficit.

Electricity prices have risen by 7 per cent nationally since last year, according to data from the Energy Information Administration, with several large markets Exelon serves seeing even sharper increases: 17 per cent in New Jersey; 16 per cent in Maryland; 13 per cent in Pennsylvania.

Exelon, which serves nearly 11mn customers, is the parent company of six utilities including Chicago-based ComEd, BGE, which serves Baltimore and central Maryland, and PECO in Southeastern Pennsylvania.

Rising costs are being driven by growing electricity demand, as well as volatile natural gas prices. The cost of upgrading ageing and weather-damaged grids is also a factor.

But utilities and Big Tech are bearing the brunt of the backlash, with politicians across the spectrum encouraging state regulators to scrutinise and even reject attempts to raise bills.

States including New Jersey, New York and Maryland have passed legislation to more closely assess utility rate increases and provide credits and financial assistance to consumers.

Butler said that AI hyperscalers were “caught flat-footed” and “under-appreciated the pushback” their data centres would receive. He added that utilities have been “made the scapegoat” for high costs.

Exelon’s subsidiary PECO in April withdrew its request to raise a typical electric and gas bill by $35 per month in 2027, less than two weeks after Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro lashed out at the Exelon company.

Shapiro had called the company’s $814mn profit in 2025 “obscene” and said that its latest attempt to “jack up prices” through a process known as a rate case was motivated by “pure greed”.

While Butler said he had “made my apologies” to the governor for not adequately explaining the rationale for the rate rise, he added that retracting the price increase would only defer higher costs.

“I cannot run a world-class system without investing in the system . . . I’m increasing my rate case because of the economic growth that you want,” he said.

“I can’t do that and not come in for a rate case. That is not good math, it is not good business and it doesn’t work.”

Exelon increased its four-year projected capital expenditures by $400mn in May.

Butler says he is being further hamstrung by limits on utilities owning power plants in several states where PJM operates. Since the 1990s, transmission and distribution infrastructure has been managed by utilities, while independent power producers own generation assets.

Advocates say the set-up allows for greater competition and protects consumers from bearing the costs of failed or over-budget projects.

But Butler said that independent power producers are not incentivised enough to build new plants that may take 10 to 20 years to reach profitability. Utilities, meanwhile, can have the advantage of being able to charge customers a fixed rate to help fund infrastructure projects.

Butler’s lobbying efforts to allow utilities to build and run their own plants have so far fallen on deaf ears. The Maryland legislature allowed two proposals that would have expanded utilities’ ownership rights to die in committee.

While he is optimistic about similar efforts in New Jersey and Delaware, he believes state legislators are underestimating the scale of the power shortfall.

“Change is hard, and legislators really do well in crisis. But right now they don’t perceive it as a crisis,” he said.

The struggle over Wimbledon’s finances

The cost of running the prestigious tournament has risen significantly and players want a greater share of revenues

At the World Cup, fans are scouring Fifa’s online marketplace for tickets that can cost thousands of dollars and enduring the advertising bonanza created by “hydration breaks” during the matches.

In comparison, at Wimbledon next week corporate branding will be, as usual, sparse on Centre Court while the reselling of ordinary tickets is banned. Spectators are even allowed to bring their own food and drink into the grounds.

“We consciously leave money on the table,” Deborah Jevans, chair of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, which organises the Championships at Wimbledon, told the FT.

But the Wimbledon model is under pressure. The cost of running what is widely considered tennis’s most prestigious tournament has already significantly increased over the past decade, and leading players are now campaigning for a greater share of its revenues.

They will cut short their media duties during the first week of the tournament to make their point, part of a wider attempt to push the four tennis Grand Slams — which are also held in Australia, France and the US — to increase prize money.

The All England Club has already increased the total pot handed out to players by 20 per cent to £64.2mn this year — the biggest jump in Wimbledon’s history. But players say this equates to about 14.4 per cent of the £444.8mn revenue they expect Wimbledon to make this year.

All England Club officials have argued that it makes no business sense to calculate prize money based on revenues alone — costs have also risen over the past decade, partly because of inflation following the pandemic.

In 2015, costs of generating revenue and administrative expenses totalled £139mn. Last year, they amounted to £370mn. This is because of a host of factors, including spending on technology, such as installing electronic line-calling, and infrastructure.

Jevans says Wimbledon will not just increase revenues for the sake of it. The board had looked at dynamic pricing but decided against it. “We like the way we do it, it’s a fixed price and you can’t sell that ticket,” she said.

Restraint is part of the business model. Grounds passes to the tournament in south-west London for the first eight days are priced at £33 this year. Those lucky enough to buy tickets in the public ballot can get into Centre Court for as low as £80. A daily queue offers another relatively affordable entry point during the two-week event.

“It can be that national treasure, and it can be exclusive but that doesn’t mean you can’t be accessible, that you can’t be open and open your gate and invite as many people as you can to that special event,” said Jevans.

Hospitality packages are unashamedly premium, however. At the Rosewater Pavilion, prices start at £2,495 per person excluding VAT.

Just under half of Wimbledon’s revenue comes from broadcasters. Jevans says she would rather work with them and other commercial partners to increase what they are willing to pay than stop people from bringing their own snacks to “sit on the hill and have a fantastic day”.

“If people in the queue bring in a bottle of champagne and a sandwich, in the big scheme of things, it’s not going to move the dial that much,” she added. “To deny that opportunity would not change the bottom line so much, and it would change part of our character.”

She added: “We’re a sustainable business that’s been around for 150 years, and we want to keep running it in the way that we do, which does include maintaining those values.”

Patrick McEnroe, the ESPN analyst, former player and brother of three-time Wimbledon champion John McEnroe, said the tournament and other majors made “tremendous amounts of money” and that “they can find a way to give the players a little bit more and also do the other things they’re doing, growing the sport and supporting community tennis”.

“I don’t think anyone’s thinking [the players] should get 40 per cent or 50 per cent like they do in other sports. But mid-teens is pretty low,” McEnroe said.

Revenues from the Championships totalled £423.6mn in 2025, up from £179.9mn a decade earlier. However, any increase in prize money takes away from what the organisers can invest in infrastructure.

The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club is the private members’ club that owns the Championships, which it owns via another business entity.

The All England Lawn Tennis Ground Company — a separate entity in the structure — issues debentures, which guarantee a seat, to raise money to fund improvements such as roofs on the main two courts and a practice facility at nearby Raynes Park. The Club is also looking to expand the Wimbledon site.

More importantly, cost increases eat into a vital source of funds for grassroots tennis — the money that goes from the tournament to the Lawn Tennis Association, the sport’s governing body in Great Britain. Prize money has exceeded the payment to the LTA — it was £48mn in 2025 — for two years running.

Ultimately, Wimbledon is not a football club with a billionaire owner or investment firm to inject capital to subsidise losses. “We invest back in the players, we invest back in grassroots tennis, and we invest in our infrastructure,” said Jevans. “Private equity isn’t something we are considering.”

“I’m comfortable that the model we have is fit for purpose for a number of years yet,” she added.

Luxury may be in the doldrums, but perfume passes the smell test

Fragrances are among the faster-growing areas of the beauty industry — though investing in them isn’t straightforward

When the beauty industry is transfixed by the age-defying properties of snail slime, the origin of luxury perfume — a sperm whale’s insides — seems positively pedestrian. Fragrances, though, are one of the faster-growing elements of the personal care world, helped by their position as a gateway product for prestige brands. 

The global beauty market should grow at a 5 per cent annual clip through to 2030, McKinsey forecasts. Within that, fragrance is expected to grow the most consistently throughout the pricing spectrum, as sales steady after a boom period. That was driven by trends for layering multiple scents and for lighter formats such as body mists. By the end of the decade, fragrance will rival haircare as the second-biggest segment, the consultancy reckons, behind skincare but well ahead of colour cosmetics. 

Investing in scents isn’t straightforward. Many of the best-known names such as Dior sit in luxury powerhouses such as LVMH, whose fortunes depend far more on handbags and champagne. Beauty brands too have proven problematic. Estée Lauder is in the middle of a broader restructuring. This year’s merger talks with Spain’s Puig, which would have added significantly to its fragrance portfolio, failed. Coty, licensee of Hugo Boss and Burberry among others, is also undergoing a turnaround after its shares halved in the past year. 

Perhaps the sniffy attitude of many perfume leaders — self-styled world number one L’Oréal included — to breaking out their fragrance businesses for investor assessment is one reason US-listed, Paris-based Interparfums has outperformed them all so far this year. Holder of licences for Jimmy Choo, Longchamp, Coach and Montblanc, among many others, it is somewhat similar to eyewear specialist EssilorLuxottica, which is known for glasses for labels, ranging from Chanel to Miu Miu, alongside its own brands, including Oakley and Ray-Bans.

Interparfums’ asset-light model — unlike EssilorLuxottica, it outsources actual manufacturing to others — makes the 44-year-old company nimble when it comes to taking on new licences or developing its own luxury offering, as it is now doing with Solférino. While last year’s 2.5 per cent profit growth won’t set investor hearts aflame, it compares well against the flat or falling earnings reported by LVMH, L’Oréal, Estée Lauder and Coty. Interest in upcoming launches for Longchamp, a new win, should help. 

While Chanel No 5 may have made it to 105 years of age, most brands come nowhere near. Fragrance is a crowded market: two decades back, there were about 300 launches per year and now there are more than 2,000, reckon Berenberg analysts, which could limit profitability. Still, so long as humans desire to smell nice — something that will hopefully never fall from fashion — perfumes should provide the troubled luxury industry with a reassuringly buoyant base note.

EasyJet’s top shareholders hold out for £5.3bn bid from Castlelake

Many large investors agree that private credit group’s offer must reach £7 per share

Top shareholders at easyJet are coalescing around a price tag of at least £5.3bn for the carrier after the airline’s board opened formal negotiations with US suitor Castlelake. 

The airline rejected a fourth bid for £4.9bn — or £6.50 per share — from Castlelake, but has agreed to open its books with the hope that the US private credit group will raise its price. It said the latest offer “fundamentally undervalues” the airline. 

Many of the large shareholders are in agreement that the price must reach £7 per share, or £5.3bn, to be sufficiently attractive. 

“The view about [holding out for] £7 is largely consensus,” said one significant investor in the airline. Another, who is also in the top 20, said: “I don’t think [chair Sir Stephen] Hester will accept below £7. He’s very shareholder focused.” 

Sam Ziff at Oldfield, one of its 15 largest shareholders, said: “As long-term shareholders, we think any acceptable offer would need to be significantly higher than today’s offer.” 

He added: “We think the current proposal undervalues easyJet. The company owns a very attractive set of assets, particularly its slot portfolio and fleet; management has articulated credible medium-term profitability targets.”

Much of easyJet’s defence rests on the promise that the airline will significantly improve its profitability in the coming years, bolstered by new fuel-efficient aircraft and a rise in its holidays business. 

About a fifth of easyJet’s shares are held by retail investors, who tend to be longer-term shareholders, while the company also has a significant number of UK investors, who are generally more focused on long-term ownership than US funds. 

EasyJet rejected the first three bids, but has opened negotiations with Castlelake after the private credit group said it could raise its price if given more financial information. The carrier has pushed the deadline for a potential Castlelake offer back to 5pm on July 5, raising expectations that an agreement can be reached. 

The board previously criticised the Castlelake offer as being opportunistic given the slide in easyJet’s share price since the start of the Iran conflict in late February. Since any deal would take months to close, the price offered must also reflect that easyJet shares will recover as the conflict recedes, investors believe.

One shareholder said easyJet had plenty of earnings recovery potential. The suitors were “using the current blip, aided by the headwinds around the Iran war, to make a bid at a time which is very good for them, but unlikely to be a good time to contemplate selling for a long-term shareholder”, they said. 

Another significant shareholder said: “It’s interesting [easyJet are] now engaging as it means ‘here’s an offer that allows us [Castlelake] to speak to you’ and then they will come back with another offer.” 

However, the investor said that shareholders may well accept an offer because of concerns that next year could be difficult for the airline, which has been hit by higher fuel prices after the Iran conflict. 

Both easyJet and Castlelake have been engaging with some of the airline’s largest investors to gauge their thoughts.

The largest shareholder is Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder and former CEO whose family owns 15 per cent. He also has a deal that pays royalties from the easyJet brand. 

Castlelake has left the door open to current investors, such as Haji-Ioannou, to continue to hold stakes in the airline once private. The structure would allow the founder to keep his position and influence at the airline, in the hope this may help sway him to back the takeover proposal. 

Haji-Ioannou has held discussions with both easyJet and Castlelake since the offer was announced last month, according to multiple people with knowledge of talks, but has repeatedly declined to comment on the deal so far.

Anti-corruption campaigners sound the alarm after previous programme was scrapped owing to dirty money

The Labour government has discussed reviving a “golden visa” scheme for wealthy individuals who come to the UK, four years after it was scrapped amid concerns about dirty money from Russia.

Business secretary Peter Kyle has told colleagues that Britain is in a “brutal fight for global talent” and argued that a system can be devised that prevents the pathway becoming a vehicle for oligarchs’ wives and crooks.

Government officials confirmed that the idea was on the table but it has met resistance from both the Home Office and the Treasury, which is sceptical that it would boost economic growth.

Under the proposal, individuals who invest £5mn in British businesses could become UK citizens in as little as five years. Campaigners against corruption and money laundering have sounded alarm about the idea.

At a meeting this month hosted by the Cabinet Office under conditions of strict secrecy, the government’s Global Talent Taskforce invited professional services firms, tax experts, economists and civil society groups to discuss the idea of reviving a fast track to British citizenship for investors.

In 2022, Priti Patel, the then Conservative home secretary, scrapped the previous “Tier 1 investor visa” as part of a crackdown on Russian money after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Closing this route is just the start of our renewed crackdown on fraud and illicit finance,” she said. The Home Office issued 2,581 investor visas to Russian citizens after the scheme was introduced in 2008.

One ally of Kyle said: “Peter believes it is possible to develop a scheme for people who genuinely want to invest in Britain and to have a social contract with people who want to come here with extreme wealth.”

A spokesperson for the government said: “We are determined to make the UK the best place to do business, whilst protecting our national security.” A government official briefed on the discussions said: “We are looking at options to attract investment.”

Immigration lawyers say that current visa routes are poorly suited to, for example, rich Americans fleeing the Trump administration and that this “cohort” needs some version of an investor visa.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think-tank that has strong links to the Labour government, believes it would be possible to design a scheme that addresses the risks of fraud. That could involve excluding foreign nationals from some countries.

Experts, who are opposed to reintroducing a similar visa and were invited to the meeting on June 10, say the idea has been developed in government over the past year.

The IPPR has been supported by law firm Mishcon de Reya to work up ideas for a new scheme to tempt high-net-worth individuals to the UK and solve what they deem a serious problem for UK start-ups accessing finance to scale up. Their report is due soon.

Steven Bostock, partner at Mishcon de Reya , said that the firm had seen “consistent client desire for an investor visa since the last scheme ended”.

Mishcon confirmed they had been at the June 10 meeting. “There is currently a gap in the UK’s immigration system for high-net-worth individuals who are willing to make substantial investments in the UK,” the firm said. “We think that such a scheme, designed carefully, would lead to a positive impact on the UK’s economy and encourage growth.”

But campaigners against corruption are dismayed. “This would be reputationally disastrous for the UK and would shred any credibility that the UK is serious about tackling dirty money,” warned Susan Hawley of Spotlight on Corruption.

The scheme as sketched out offers settled status in the UK after three years and citizenship after five years.

Tax experts at the meeting told the FT they gave “robust” feedback that reintroducing a route for “oligarchs and their wives” would represent serious backsliding in the fight against corruption.

One government insider said: “The Treasury is sceptical about whether it would do anything to boost growth. The idea isn’t going anywhere.”

Andy Burnham, the left-of-centre prospective prime minister, may also be wary of any scheme that rolls out the red carpet to super-rich foreigners.

Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford university, concluded in a paper last year that investor visas in high-income countries like the US and UK “often fail to deliver expected economic benefits”.

She said they often attracted “lifestyle migrants”, such as the families of Russian or Chinese oligarchs, who came to London to take advantage of schools, shopping and legal security, while their husbands continued making money in their home countries.

Officials swore attendees at the June discussion to secrecy. The FT has learnt that tax experts and others are concerned that their strong warnings at the meeting might not be enough to kill off what is still a live idea. “There are better ways to tempt overseas investors,” said one attendee.

Another said that any looser regime in the UK could open the world up to kleptocrats again: The EU had pressured member states to clean up similar visa schemes over the past few years to combat fraud and Australia also abandoned a similar visa route. Hawley said groups like hers fear a “domino effect” if the UK goes down this route again in order to attract rich individuals.

Groups invited to the June meeting included Transparency International and Spotlight, alongside wealth advisory firms including Mishcon de Reya, Withers and accountants Blick Rothenberg.

Le groupe se diversifie dans d’autres services pour les entreprises et leurs salariés. La chute de son cours de Bourse depuis deux ans, en fait une cible alléchante pour les fonds d’investissement.

« Bienvenue chez Edenred PayTech. Ici, vous êtes dans le cœur du réacteur, lance Damien Périllat, directeur général solutions de paiement et nouveaux marchés chez l’ex-Accor Services. En temps réel, nous suivons la plupart des transactions réalisées par les dizaines de millions d’utilisateurs de nos cartes (Ticket Restaurant , carte-cadeau, mobilité…). Nous sommes les seuls à pouvoir réagir instantanément en cas de problème, car nous maîtrisons toute la chaîne, de l’émission d’un porte-monnaie électronique à son utilisation. » Devant lui, un mur d’écrans truffés de chiffres, de tableaux et graphiques, que des ingénieurs scrutent en permanence, pour détecter le moindre problème.

Environné d’une campagne typiquement anglaise, ce « centre technologique » est installé à Swindon, entre Londres et Bristol. Cette ville de 185 000 habitants a récemment fait parler d’elle car le gouvernement britannique vient d’y ouvrir le plus grand centre de test de drones d’Europe. Edenred y cultive une certaine discrétion depuis près de vingt ans. « Nous avons une équipe de plus de 350 ingénieurs qui se relaient en permanence pour détecter la moindre fraude, un temps de transaction anormalement long, par exemple », précise Damien Périllat. Edenred, c’est une plateforme de paiement qui réalise 1,6 milliard de transactions par an, et émet plus de 25 millions de cartes de paiement digitalisées. » Cet argent est fléché : Edenred s’occupe de faire en sorte qu’il soit dépensé dans les points de vente autorisés (restaurant, station-service, borne de recharge électrique…), selon des règles prédéfinies (plafond quotidien à ne pas dépasser…).

Encore aujourd’hui, l’inventeur du titre-restaurant en France réalise 40 % de son activité avec son iconique Ticket-Restaurant. Pendant le sommet du G7, qui s’est tenu du 15 au 17 juin à Evian, l’entreprise s’est ainsi distinguée en équipant de cartes restaurants digitales, d’une valeur de 150 euros, environ 2 300 participants, à la demande des autorités françaises. Mais l’essentiel de ses revenus vient d’ailleurs. Les « avantages aux salariés » dépassent largement ceux liés à la pause repas.

Carte salaire à Dubaï, pour les employés qui n’ont pas de compte bancaire

Edenred développe des dizaines de programmes différents qu’il vend sous forme d’abonnement aux entreprises, pour renforcer l’engagement des collaborateurs - ateliers en ligne de gestion du stress, sessions de méditation…- et les récompenser - coupons de réduction pour faire ses courses…

Pour les entreprises qui ont des flottes de véhicules, le géant français s’est diversifié dans les services de « mobilité » comme les cartes carburant, les cartes péage, qui représentent aujourd’hui 25 % de l’activité. L’entreprise accompagne ainsi Amazon dans l’électrification à grande échelle de ses centres de distribution et sites logistiques. « Nous négocions des tarifs préférentiels avec les énergéticiens et les sociétés d’autoroute pour nos 300 000 clients », ajoute Diane Coliche, directrice générale mobilité. « Ils ont trois priorités : contrôler les dépenses liées à leurs flottes de véhicules, réduire leurs émissions de CO2 et éviter la fraude. »

Quant aux « nouveaux marchés », ils consistent à apporter des réponses sur mesure à des problèmes très variables d’un pays à l’autre. À Dubaï, où des millions d’employés n’ont pas de compte bancaire, Edenred a ainsi développé pour eux une carte salaire, afin qu’ils ne soient plus payés en cash. En Europe, le groupe émet des cartes virtuelles pour faciliter la vie des assurés quand il s’agit de régler un sinistre…

Si Edenred s’émancipe de Ticket Restaurant, c’est pour réduire sa dépendance à un marché très encadré par la loi. Coup sur coup, des changements de réglementation ont plombé son activité au Brésil et en Italie, qui pèsent chacun 10 % du chiffre d’affaires opérationnel mondial. Les gouvernements de ces deux pays ont mis en place un plafond sur les commissions reversées par les commerçants pour l’activité de titres-restaurant et titres-alimentation (à 5 % en Italie depuis septembre 2025, 3,6 % au Brésil depuis fin février). L’impact de la réforme en Italie a été estimé pour 2026 à « environ 60 millions d’euros », par la directrice financière, Virginie Duperat-Vergne, fin avril. Pour le Brésil, la perte est d’« à peu près 170 millions d’euros ». Soit, au total, « 230 millions de manque à gagner pour un volume d’affaires qui lui n’aura pas changé ». Le chiffre d’affaires du groupe a avoisiné les 3 milliards d’euros en 2025.

Les marchés n’ont pas apprécié. L’action se négociait mercredi aux alentours de 22 euros, loin de son plus-haut historique du 15 juin 2023, supérieur à 57 euros. Edenred, qui avait intégré le CAC 40 le 19 juin 2023, en est ressorti le 22 décembre 2025, remplacée par Eiffage. Depuis, les fonds d’investissement y voient une cible intéressante. Ces derniers jours, La Lettre révélait des discussions avec BC Partners et CVC. CVC a déjà essayé, sans succès, de racheter les titres-restaurant de Sodexo, avant qu’ils ne deviennent Pluxee, une société indépendante cotée en Bourse. « Depuis deux ans, de nombreux fonds s’intéressent à Edenred de manière exploratoire, reconnaît son PDG, Bertrand Dumazy. Ce n’est pas vraiment étonnant, compte tenu de la différence entre la valorisation en Bourse de l’entreprise et la solidité de son modèle économique. À ce jour, nous n’avons aucune information quant à la réalité de leur intérêt. »

Dans sa carrière, Bertrand Dumazy a dirigé des entreprises cotées et non cotées, avec des avantages et des inconvénients dans chaque situation. « Edenred peut se développer dans un cas comme dans l’autre », assure-t-il.