TheChek News Flow

Spain deploys threats to push EU recognition of minority languages

¿Qué?

Spain is attempting to muscle other EU countries into recognising Basque, Catalan and Galician as official languages of the EU — even going so far as to question the deployment of its troops in eastern states, write Barbara Moens and Andy Bounds.

Context: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez needs the votes of Catalan separatists led by the party Junts per Catalunya to pass substantive legislation in the Spanish parliament. They, as well as Galician and Basque parties, are demanding their language be officially recognised.

Spain failed in a 2023 bid to have the languages added to the EU roster, which already boasts 24 official ones. But tomorrow, EU ministers are scheduled to vote on the demand again.

Some worry the recognition could set a precedent for other minority languages, balking at the additional translation costs. To garner support for the measure, Madrid has used carrots and sticks — deeply upsetting some EU allies.

Madrid has offered to pay for the annual translation and interpretation costs of €132mn, although diplomats doubt whether Spain will continue picking up the tab in the long run.

But Spanish diplomats have also threatened that a lack of support could make Madrid rethink their defence commitments to some EU countries, such as their troops in the Baltics, officials from other countries said.

Spain, which is the sole major holdout on a plan for all 32 Nato allies to commit to raising defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP, has around 600 troops in Latvia as part of Nato’s forward defence deployments. It also has jets participating in patrols in the Baltic and several based in Romania.

A spokesperson for the Latvian permanent representation in Brussels declined to comment on the threats, which come as Nato fears Russian aggression against eastern European states.

“It’s bullying,” said a diplomat briefed on the threats. “And outrageous at a time like this.”

A person close to Spain’s foreign ministry said: “Spain’s commitment to the security of eastern Europe and the presence of Spanish troops in eastern European countries is firm and unconditional. It is not and has never been in question.”

“With regard to the co-official languages, the Spanish government is working with all member states so that the final wording of the document resolves any doubts they may have,” they added.

Some countries are pressuring Poland, which holds the rotating EU presidency, to pull the item from the agenda to allow for more talks.

The Fed Economist Accused of Espionage for Beijing

John Rogers voiced admiration for China before U.S. prosecutors alleged that he sent secrets to Beijing

John Rogers was visiting Shanghai in May 2013, attending a business forum as a Federal Reserve economist, when he first received an email from an alleged Chinese intelligence agent.

The man described himself as a Chinese graduate student who was interested in learning about the Fed. Rogers says he refused the man’s offer to pay him. But they stayed in touch, and later, the man invited Rogers to visit China again, all expenses paid.

This time, Rogers made the trip, setting off a chain of events that led to espionage charges against him in the U.S.—and exposed new details about China’s alleged efforts to recruit informants inside U.S. government institutions.

Prosecutors allege Rogers handed over sensitive information to Chinese operatives, who posed as students and who offered to cover travel expenses to China. Rogers met his Chinese handlers in hotel rooms and in some cases shared internal Fed reports, including information prepared for discussions by the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, according to an indictment unsealed in January that accused Rogers of conspiring to commit economic espionage.

Federal Bureau of Investigation officers arrested Rogers in January and found $50,000 in cash at his Washington-area apartment—money that his wife said belonged to her.

Rogers, who left the Fed in 2021, has denied all charges against him, including that he knowingly assisted Beijing. People who know him, and his role at the Fed, say his value to China would have been limited because he wasn’t privy to high-level decision-making.

An attorney for Rogers said the government’s indictment lacks context and relevant facts that would undercut its implication of impropriety. For example, Rogers doesn’t speak Chinese, the attorney said.

The indictment “presents an overly-simplistic, one-sided, and skewed version of events,” said the lawyer, who added that Rogers’s legal team would provide a detailed rebuttal in court “where we will prove Dr. Rogers’s innocence.”

Prosecutors say Rogers was a logical target for Chinese espionage, with an important-sounding title at the Fed and a growing affection for China. In 2018, he married a Shanghainese woman whom he met through a Chinese matchmaking service. FBI agents would later find a note on his iPad, dated December 2018 and addressed to “Dear Chinese People,” in which he expressed admiration for China.

“I love your kindness, your generosity, and your humbly hard working, high-achieving society,” the note said. “I love you unconditionally, Shanghai.”

Asked about Rogers’s case, China’s Foreign Ministry said it wasn’t aware of the matter. China’s main civilian intelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, didn’t respond to queries.

Western officials say China has ramped up espionage activities to unprecedented levels under leader Xi Jinping, including targeting institutions such as the Fed, a linchpin of U.S. financial stability. While Chinese cyberattacks have gained more prominence recently, Beijing continues to groom traditional human sources such as informants to get information, even when they appear to offer limited insight.

A 2022 report by Republican staff on a Senate committee accused China of trying to “gain access to sensitive internal information and influence the Federal Reserve” since at least 2013, offering money and other benefits.

In one case in 2019, Chinese authorities allegedly held a Fed economist in a hotel room during a trip to Shanghai and threatened to imprison him unless he agreed to provide nonpublic economic data, according to the Senate committee report. Chinese officials allegedly told him they had been monitoring his phones, including conversations about his divorce, and would publicly humiliate him if he didn’t cooperate. The economist reported the incident to Fed officials after being released, the report said.

China’s Foreign Ministry denounced the report, calling it “political disinformation.”

In response to the report at the time, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said the central bank maintained robust information-security protocols. Those policies included reviews of foreign travel and personal contacts for staff with access to sensitive economic information, he said then.

The Fed updated its policies in 2021 to prohibit gifts and compensation from entities in countries, including China, that are subject to defense export controls by the State Department.

This account is based on interviews with Rogers’s associates and a review of documents related to the case.

Hot pot and currency policy

With a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia, Rogers joined the Federal Reserve Board as an economist in 1994. He later worked as a senior adviser researching exchange rates and interest-rate policy.

On social media, Rogers aired his fondness for bands such as R.E.M. and the Cure. A lanky figure standing more than 6-feet tall, he sometimes led yoga classes for Fed colleagues.

People familiar with Rogers’s work said his position as senior adviser could oversell to outsiders his involvement in the Fed’s sensitive policymaking discussions. While some officials with the “senior adviser” title help Fed leaders prepare for their highly secret monetary-policy meetings, others have simply been at the Fed a long time or have specialized research backgrounds.

Rogers fell into this latter category. He didn’t attend Federal Open Market Committee meetings or have access to sensitive FOMC materials.

Even so, alleged Chinese intelligence homed in on Rogers when he traveled to China in 2013. He went there to speak at an annual conference hosted by Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University, Rogers recalled in a podcast interview in 2024.

In 2017, Rogers accepted an invitation from the Chinese man who described himself as a graduate student to visit his university, Shandong University of Economics and Finance, in the eastern city of Ji’nan, according to the indictment. Rogers asked the student to pay for flights and hotels, and the man agreed.

Around that time, Rogers became acquainted with a 31-year-old Shanghainese makeup artist through a Chinese matchmaking service called Sky Love, which caters to Chinese women seeking romantic partners from abroad.

After months of online conversations, Rogers wanted to meet the woman, Liu Yu, in person. He added a stop in Shanghai, where they spent about two days together, sightseeing, enjoying a hot-pot meal and exchanging gifts, according to Sky Love, which detailed the romance in online posts publicizing its successes in matchmaking.

Rogers then traveled to Ji’nan, where he delivered a lecture, “Uncertainty, Currency Excess Returns and Risk Reversals,” at Shandong University.

The couple wedded in Hong Kong in March 2018, and Liu gave birth to their daughter in Shanghai later that year, the company said.

“A lot of trouble”

About two months after his wedding, Rogers reached out to the Chinese man who said he was a student and asked about an essay the man was writing, according to the indictment. The man sent Rogers questions about Fed policy, purportedly to get help for the essay.

Rogers emailed two Fed colleagues asking for information he could share during a trip to China, including on the Fed’s views on China’s currency. One colleague emailed him two PDF documents, one of which Rogers emailed to his Chinese contact.

After arriving in China, under the guise of teaching classes, Rogers met in hotel rooms with the man and another person—who U.S. prosecutors say was also an intelligence agent—and shared internal Fed information, according to the indictment.

In text exchanges made public by U.S. prosecutors, Rogers said the Fed wouldn’t allow him to discuss policy matters with Chinese contacts unless there was a sound academic reason for doing so.

“There has to be a lot more done to make this legitimate in the eyes of the Fed. Remember, it has to be teaching and not consulting. I am only allowed to teach,” he said in one text message in 2018.

If anyone questioned the relationship, “that would cause me a lot of trouble!” he wrote. Under U.S. law, economic espionage can be punished with up to 15 years in prison.

In a February court filing, Rogers’s lawyers said the text message “demonstrates the defendant’s commitment to do the teaching which he was hired to do—not to conspire with anyone.”

In the second half of 2018, Rogers took a sabbatical from the Fed, spending time in Shanghai as a visiting professor at Fudan, according to his podcast interview. He continued supplying information to the Chinese persons who described themselves as students, including notes on a briefing to someone awaiting Senate confirmation as a Fed governor around two weeks before a Fed policy meeting.

Attorneys for Rogers would later tell a Washington, D.C., court that the economist’s communications with his Chinese contacts reflected the teacher-student relationship between them. Rogers could answer his students’ questions without revealing trade secrets, the attorneys said.

Hundred-dollar bills

By 2019, Rogers had brought his new wife and daughter to live with him in Washington, according to a Sky Love post. His wife has another daughter in China and continued to spend “significant time” there, prosecutors said.

In 2020, Fed officials raised questions about Rogers’s Chinese ties in an interview with the Fed’s watchdog agency, the Office of Inspector General.

“The Chinese, they’re watching everything that the U.S. does. I don’t mean that in an espionage way, I’m sure they are doing espionage but I don’t confront that,” Rogers said, according to a court submission from prosecutors. “They just want to know what’s…the Fed thinking.”

Rogers added, “I was offered money, they’d come out with packets of hundred-dollar bills.” But he denied sharing restricted Fed information. Prosecutors would later charge Rogers with making a false statement during this interview.

Attorneys for Rogers said he lost access to most Fed documents in May 2020, around three months after the interview. He was forced out of the Fed in May 2021, according to a government filing. A Fed spokesperson, citing privacy rules, declined to comment on the case.

About two months before leaving the Fed, Rogers signed a contract to teach at Fudan, according to government prosecutors. His contract offers a salary of around $150,000 for one semester of teaching a year, according to his lawyers. They said he also received a $300,000 research grant, to be disbursed over three years, from a state-run research institution. Fudan didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Chinese persons describing themselves as students continued to contact Rogers. In February 2022, one messaged Rogers asking if he and his wife would be interested in traveling to the eastern city of Qingdao, and arranging a class there.

“All related expenses will be covered by us, and we can pay for the class,” the agent said. It couldn’t be learned if Rogers made the trip.

The $2.4bn takeover continues a trend of M&A as sportswear brand re-embraces retailers it spurned

Dick’s Sporting Goods’ $2.4bn swoop on its struggling rival Foot Locker could not have come at a better time, enthused Edward Stack, the retailer’s executive chair, upon announcing the unexpected deal this month. 

Nike’s multiyear efforts to reduce its dependence on retailers had helped send Foot Locker into a downward spiral by depriving the chain of some of its most in demand trainers. But with the world’s biggest sportswear brand now “leaning back into wholesale” to revive growth, Foot Locker was set to be a beneficiary, Stack told analysts.

While the deal carried a whiff of opportunism — Foot Locker shares had declined by more than 80 per cent since 2021 — it was nevertheless consistent with a long-running trend.

Sports shoe chains have been consolidating in a fast-growing industry: sales of sportswear have risen from $272bn in 2017 to $407bn in 2024, according to McKinsey.

Suppliers to retailers are often wary of mergers that pool the buying power of their customers. But Nike, the industry’s key supplier and power broker, which has recently lost its way, welcomed the Dick’s Foot Locker deal as an opportunity to drive sales growth.

Nike chief executive Elliott Hill said they were “two of the most storied and respected brands in our industry and have been our valued partners for decades”.

“Each has their own loyal consumer following . . . I am confident that together they will help elevate sport and continue to accelerate the growth of our industry,” Hill said in a statement.

The consolidation of US trainer retailers has been led by UK chain JD Sports. However, Dick’s bid for Foot Locker, which is subject to regulatory approval, is the industry’s biggest deal yet. If Dick’s can turn Foot Locker around, they could soon have substantial clout — from the outset the combined business will operate from 3,266 stores and make $21bn of annual revenue.

“It is a game that is all about momentum and scale, so the combined power of Dick’s and Foot Locker is pretty formidable”, said one industry executive. “Dick’s are already powerful in the Nike camp,” he said.

In 2017, Nike sent shockwaves through the world of trainer retailing when it began a cull of its wholesale customers. With hit franchises such as Air Jordans and Air Force 1’s riding the crest of a wave, Nike set out to funnel more sales through its own higher-margin retail channels.

Spurned retailers responded by filling their shelves with trainers from upstarts, such as On Running, Hoka or VEJA, giving Nike’s fledgling rivals additional exposure and an opportunity to take market share.

Nike was forced to abandon its direct to consumer strategy after consumers returned to shopping in stores in greater numbers than anticipated following the pandemic, and its own trainers fell out of fashion.

Hill, a veteran at ‘the Swoosh’, pledged last year to rebuild Nike’s wholesale business as part of his turnaround efforts, acknowledging that retailers felt Nike had “turned its back” on them. The Oregon-based company confirmed last week it planned to recommence direct selling on Amazon for the first time since 2019.

Nike is not the only brand in the midst of a U-turn. Under chief executive Bjørn Gulden, Adidas has also retreated from a previous ambition to make half of its revenue through its own retail channels by 2025.

Last year, the German sportswear brand increased wholesale revenues by 14 per cent, compared with an increase of 11 per cent through its own channels, as retailers increased shelf space for popular retro models such as the Samba and Gazelle.

The strategic reversals collectively amount to a seismic development in the world of trainer retail, adding to the codependence between brand and retailer.

Co-operation could prove to be increasingly important. Nike and Adidas will both be raising prices on trainers sold in the US because of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which threaten to take a heavy toll on Vietnam, a global production hub.

The industry executive said that retailers sought Nike’s approval before any major acquisition in the sector. Barclays analyst Adrienne Yih said half of Dick’s and Foot Locker’s combined revenues will be made on Nike products.

The enlarged group could drive some much-needed volume growth for Nike — particularly if it agrees to sell it products on more favourable terms, according to Jefferies analyst Randal Konik.

“Foot Locker is [now] run by a bigger, better company”, Konik said. “[So] the [benefits of higher] volumes would more than offset a [slightly] better margin given to that bigger entity.”

Consolidation in the trainer retail market, allied to growing popularity of performance-focused brands such as On and Hoka, is subtly shifting the balance of power back towards the retailers.

“Nike is not a fading force, but it’s not as powerful as it once was,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at GlobalData. “That means that the balance between retailers and Nike has been reset somewhat. It needs to now work more closely with a lot of these retailers and not just be dismissive of them.”

Another senior industry executive said the relationship between brands and retailers is now centred around mutual dependence rather than dominance. 

“We can’t do anything without the brands, they can’t do anything without us,” they said. “[Selling] direct to consumers was an attempt to say ‘why not get rid of those guys [retailers]’ [but] they discovered that to be able to reach the customer, to be able to get feedback on products, [they need us].”

However, not everybody in the world of sports retailing believes they are suddenly on a level playing field.

“Retailers like Foot Locker and Dick’s are curators”, said one former industry executive. “But the brands are the creators — they are the ones that really hold the power.”

Novo Nordisk’s hunt for boss with Danish values — and US commercial nous

Jørgensen’s ousting unusual for group where CEOs have had smooth transitions after long tenures

When Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen came down the grand circular staircase at Novo Nordisk’s headquarters last week, employees gathered to give the drugmaker’s ousted chief executive a standing ovation. 

The Danish company’s controlling shareholder, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, had pushed him to step down after the share price fell more than 50 per cent in a year, and its bestselling obesity and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic lost ground to US rival Eli Lilly. 

But for many employees, Jørgensen’s understated approach embodies corporate values that prize openness and a long-term view. 

Now, Novo Nordisk’s board, led by chair Helge Lund, and Lars Rebien Sørensen, the former Novo Nordisk CEO and now chair of the Foundation, will have to find a replacement who can spearhead a battle against Lilly and other rivals, while not abandoning the company’s prized culture. 

One headhunter summed up the dilemma, saying Novo Nordisk was “in essence an old-fashioned, slow-moving Danish diabetes powerhouse that has become a ‘sexy’ lifestyle company”.

The unceremonious ousting of Jørgensen, with a press release blaming him for the share price decline, was unusual for a company where chief executives have traditionally had smooth transitions after long tenures. 

The Foundation, though it owns shares representing 77 per cent of the votes and controls the election of new Novo Nordisk board members, has rarely intervened in this way in the past.

Mikael Bak, chief executive of the Danish Shareholders Association, which represents retail investors, questioned the sequence of events. “If they had done the right thing governance-wise, they would maybe have taken out the chair and then changed the chief executive. But it could be that the problems were so big that they needed changes very quickly,” he said. 

Jørgensen publicly expressed surprise that he had been pushed out. One person close to him said he was “super frustrated” with the situation, and would have preferred an orderly transition within the year. For now, he is staying as a caretaker chief executive, while the board searches for a replacement. 

Bak said the new chief would need to “put [their] shoulders back and get into the fight” with rivals. “We have been looking for a more sales-orientated, offensive-minded [candidate] and a good communicator,” he said. 

He added that Novo Nordisk had only ever had Danish chief executives and raised the question of whether the company would look at appointing Maziar Mike Doustdar, the head of its international operations. He is an Austrian-Iranian national who is a Novo Nordisk lifer and runs every market apart from the US and Canada. “An international profile that can secure the leadership position in the US is very important,” Bak said.

One person with knowledge of the board’s thinking has said Novo Nordisk is looking for a CEO with “commercial nous”, who can bring better judgment about the US market, even if the strategy does not change dramatically.

But Kurt Jacobsen, a Copenhagen Business School professor who has written a history of Novo Nordisk, said there was a “danger” that an outsider would have a culture clash with the company. “Simply taking a very aggressive, sales-orientated American manager into a culture like this . . . could be a very serious matter,” he said. 

Novo Nordisk declined to comment.

In the interim, Sørensen, who is joining the board as an observer but will stand for election to it next year, brings 16 years of experience running the company. Jo Walton, an analyst at UBS, noted that Novo Nordisk had already had to compete against Lilly and Sanofi on insulin. “He certainly understands price wars, if price wars are what it boils down to,” she said. 

There are already tentative signs of a change in approach. Last week, Novo Nordisk launched a special $199 offer in the US for new obesity drug customers, compared with $499 through its direct-to-patient prescription service NovoCare, or a US list price of $1,000 to $1,300.

Walton said the new chief executive would need to have “very strong commercial experience” because a key challenge was to stop Novo Nordisk from losing market share in the US. 

The new leadership would also need the research and development expertise to boost Novo Nordisk’s pipeline of new drugs, she added. Late stage trial results for its next generation obesity drug CagriSema have been disappointing and investors now believe Lilly has the stronger pipeline.

Walton noted that the leadership team would also need good relationships to negotiate the political situation in the US: an executive order signed by President Donald Trump this month included plans to force drug companies to cut prices.

But others worry about how the board will find a candidate with all the relevant experience who can make changes while preserving the company’s culture, and who will also be content with being less powerful and well paid than US peers.

Many US pharma companies, including Lilly and Pfizer, are run by chief executives who also chair their boards. But at Novo Nordisk, the chief executive does not even sit on the board. On the question of pay, in 2024 Jørgensen was paid about $8mn, compared with about $29mn for Lilly’s chief executive David Ricks. 

Martin Jers Iversen, an associate professor of strategy and innovation at Copenhagen Business School, said the new CEO “needs to be able to bridge things that are not easy to bridge”.

“On the one hand, there is a very delicate, commercial, scientific, regulatory set-up in the US, which is not easy at all, and a lot of decisions to make there,” he said. “And on the other hand, there is a company that has a very profound, deep corporate culture with so many strengths.” 

This dilemma has led some to float the names of internal candidates with outside experience, such as the recently appointed head of US David Moore, who has a background in US pharma including at Johnson & Johnson. Another name that has been mentioned is Jakob Riis, who was previously an executive vice-president in the US for Novo Nordisk but now runs Danish healthcare company Falck.

Walton said Novo Nordisk should certainly look at external options, including at Lilly, even if its current pay packages did not look large enough to lure a big name US executive.

“Pay might well limit their choices. All of these things could be negotiable, and if the Foundation really wants the very best person and he or she is more expensive, it is a drop in the ocean [for a company] the size of Novo,” said Walton.  

Should Everyone Be Taking Ozempic? Doctors Say More People Could Benefit.

Anti-obesity drugs are showing promise for an ever-expanding list of diseases

Key Points

Should Ozempic be added to the water supply?

That is the kind of half-joking question that doctors kick around when a new class of drugs begins to help a big chunk of the population. Cardiologists used to quip about spiking water systems with cholesterol-reducing statins because of their ability to prevent heart attacks.

Now, Ozempic and others in the “GLP-1” category of drugs are approaching that critical mass. They are showing promise for an ever-expanding list of diseases, beyond today’s most common uses of weight loss and treating diabetes. Heart, kidney and liver diseases. Sleep apnea. Arthritis. Alzheimer’s disease. Alcohol addiction. Even aging. Some of these are potential benefits that need further study.

“It is getting to the point of wondering what GLP-1 agonists aren’t good for,” pharmaceutical researcher and blogger Derek Lowe wrote in the academic journal Science last year.

If this trajectory continues, doctors say millions more people would benefit from them—maybe even one-third to a majority of adults.

But they also caution about use of the drugs in people who don’t medically fit the bill because it could cause malnourishment. Doctors would have to figure out ways to guard against excessive weight loss in people who aren’t overweight, perhaps putting them on special diets, said Dr. Scott Isaacs, an endocrinologist in Atlanta.

The drugs—which also include Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound—mimic naturally occurring gut hormones such as GLP-1. The medicines promote production of insulin, which helps control blood-sugar levels in people with Type 2 diabetes. They suppress appetite and make people feel full faster when eating, helping overweight people lose many pounds.

In diabetes and obesity alone, the eligible patient population is huge. More than 100 million American adults—or 40%—have obesity. About 38 million have diabetes.

Many of the proven and potential benefits of the drugs cascade from their effect on obesity. Losing weight relieves sleep apnea. It takes pressure off the joints, helping with arthritis.

“If you treat obesity, all of the complications of obesity that we spend a lot of our time treating in medicine should get better,” said Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.

But it also seems likely that some benefits are independent of weight loss, possibly because of anti-inflammatory effects of the drugs.

“The science is evolving very quickly in understanding how these medications affect so many organs and inflammation,” said Dr. Robert Kushner, an obesity-treatment specialist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine.

Doctors say GLP-1-type drugs may help with psoriatic arthritis, an autoimmune condition that causes joint pain and skin rashes, because of weight loss but also for their potential to reduce inflammation.

Susan Abernethy of North Cove, Wash., started taking Eli Lilly’s diabetes drug Mounjaro in 2023 to help treat her psoriatic arthritis after older treatments weren’t working as well.

The 58-year-old chief operating officer of a nonprofit credits Mounjaro with helping her lose weight and relieving her joint pain. She takes it along with Taltz, which is approved to treat psoriatic arthritis. Her insurance pays for the combination in part because she also has Type 2 diabetes.

“After about four years of not being able to run and do things, I’ve been able to do a couple of 5Ks again,” she said. “I can walk longer on the beach than before.”

Lilly is studying the combination of Taltz and Mounjaro’s main ingredient to treat psoriatic arthritis in a Phase 3 study, with hopes of seeking regulatory approval of the use if the study is successful.

Doctors are also seeing success in treating people with certain liver diseases. Isaacs prescribes GLP-1s for people with a fatty-liver condition called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis, or MASH, which is estimated to afflict about 15 million Americans.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April found that semaglutide, the main ingredient of Ozempic and Wegovy, improved the condition in patients.

Another area being considered: Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers believe GLP-1s may have neuroprotective effects, slowing loss of brain volume. A small study in the U.K. last year found that Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 liraglutide slowed cognitive decline versus a placebo. Novo is conducting a Phase 3 trial of semaglutide in patients with early Alzheimer’s.

About 137 million American adults—more than half of the adult population—are eligible for treatment with the GLP-1 drug semaglutide, based on having Type 2 diabetes, meeting the threshold for excess body weight, or having established cardiovascular disease and excess weight, researchers estimated in a paper published in JAMA Cardiology last year. In comparison, about 82 million U.S. adults are eligible for statins.

But only a fraction of those eligible are currently taking a GLP-1 drug—about 8.3 million in the U.S. this year, TD Cowen estimated. The percentage of the eligible population taking a GLP-1 outside the U.S. is even smaller.

“Global uptake of weight-loss drugs is minuscule relative to the addressable market,” TD Cowen analysts wrote in a research note.

Still, some people clearly shouldn’t take the drugs. “I do believe that a large percent of the population, but not everybody, is going to be able to get some benefit,” Aronne said.

People with a history of a type of thyroid cancer, or with certain head and neck tumors, shouldn’t take them because earlier studies showed the drugs caused those types of tumors in rats.

Some doctors are reluctant to prescribe them to people with a history of pancreatitis because some patients taking the drugs have developed severe cases of that condition. And some doctors shy away from prescribing them for cosmetic weight loss when no other medical conditions are present.

Use of the drugs will surely grow. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that by 2035, the number of Americans using a GLP-1 for obesity alone will rise to about 29 million. But even that would only represent 20% of the eligible obesity population.

That is because anti-obesity drugs are expensive. List prices are over $1,000 a month, many insurance plans don’t cover them and even manufacturer-discounted prices are still several hundred dollars a month.

Tolerability and manufacturing capacity of the drugs might also be issues. Some patients stop taking the drugs because they suffer unpleasant gastrointestinal side effects. And two main manufacturers, Lilly and Novo, only recently resolved drug shortages by increasing production. But they are still far from reaching enough capacity to supply significantly bigger percentages of both current and future eligible populations.

More studies and better drugs could help boost the treatment rate. Companies are developing newer GLP-1s that could deliver greater weight loss, and pill versions that might be appealing to patients who don’t like getting shots.

Roche extends trials of promising antibiotic against resistant superbug

If successful, it would be the first new class of drug against certain bacteria strains for more than fifty years

Swiss pharmaceutical company Roche is planning to move a new antibiotic into late stage clinical trials after early studies showed it had potential to tackle a common superbug that has become resistant to other treatments. 

If successful, it would be the first new class of antibiotic capable of killing acinetobacter or any other “Gram-negative” bacteria to be developed for more than fifty years. This type of bug has a structure that makes it more difficult to treat.

Roche will launch a phase 3 trial for zosurabalpin at the end of the year, or early next year. Acinetobacter can cause life-threatening infections including pneumonia and sepsis. Patients who are immunocompromised because of cancer or other serious diseases are particularly vulnerable. 

Larry Tsai, global head of immunology and product development at Genentech, a unit of Roche, and a pulmonary critical care physician, estimates that 40 to 60 per cent of acinetobacter infected patients die as a result of the bug. 

The trial will recruit about 400 patients at more than 100 sites worldwide, with the aim of getting the drug approved towards the end of the decade.   

Tsai said Roche was continuing its long legacy of developing new antibiotics “to ensure they are available as part of what we see as our societal commitment to global health security”.

After a period when it withdrew from the field, about ten years ago Roche reinvested in tackling the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance, which the World Health Organization estimates could kill 10mn people a year by 2050.

Many drugmakers are reluctant to pursue new antibiotics because of a difficult market: the drugs are now used much more sparingly to try to prevent bacteria from building up resistance, meaning it can be hard to sell enough to cover the cost of research and development. 

Many smaller companies focused on developing antibiotics have struggled and some have closed. Tsai said that he understood the challenges first hand, having worked at a company with a promising antibiotic that still shut down. 

But he said there was increasing global recognition that antimicrobial resistance has been “neglected over the past few decades” and that health systems were attempting to change the incentives. 

Policymakers have been searching for ways to encourage antibiotic development. The UK has adopted a model where drugmakers are paid an annual fee for making the medicines available, rather than for the volume used, while the US Congress has been discussing a similar model. 

Gram-negative bacteria are particularly hard to treat because they have a second outer membrane, creating a formidable barrier for drugs to cross. The last new class of antibiotics approved to treat Gram-negative bacteria was in 1968. 

Roche worked with researchers at Harvard to find a new way to kill the bacteria, weakening the cell’s membrane by inhibiting a key component — a chemical called lipopolysaccharide — that boosts the membrane’s resilience. 

Michael Lobritz, global head of infectious diseases at Roche Pharma research and early development, said looking for new classes of antibiotics involved “going back to the drawing board” and examining how bacteria work. Scientists can then build on new discoveries and potentially find other new antibiotics. 

“This antibiotic is important, but it can also serve as a catalysis point for future innovation. Finding new classes is very hard. There are very few . . . that have been discovered in the last 15 years. So if you are able to launch a new one, we can build off that for decades to come,” he said.

Copenhagen hits back as Berlin and Paris push to scrap rules on green supply chains

Danish minister agrees reporting obligations for companies need simplifying, but insists on the new regulations’ merit

Denmark has rejected calls from Germany and France to scrap a planned EU supply chain law that has become symbolic of the bloc’s dilemma between meeting its ambitious climate goals and helping its ailing industry.

“We don’t agree” on abandoning plans to ask companies to monitor, report and take action against forced labour and mitigate the environmental impact of their operations outside the EU, Danish industry minister Morten Bødskov told the Financial Times.

Copenhagen will gain greater policy influence in Brussels when it takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the EU in July. Denmark is one of the most ambitious countries in the bloc when it comes to adopting green legislation and pushing the EU to go even further than current targets and cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.

EU member states and the European parliament are currently negotiating the postponement of the supply chain rules, which are a key part of the bloc’s ambitious climate and human rights agenda.

But both Paris and Berlin have called for the law to be repealed altogether, saying the extra reporting requirements will only hurt the bloc’s competitiveness even further at a time when many European industrial sectors are struggling to keep up with Chinese and US competitors.

The CEO of a construction and logistics group that carries out projects in the US and Africa previously told the FT that it had begun to track more than 700 metrics to comply with the supply chain law at a cost of “several million” euros.

Bødskov acknowledged that the EU should look into simplifying the reporting obligations for companies, but insisted that “there are many, many positive sides to it that we have to remember”.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to cut red tape, including climate-related legislation, to help close the competitiveness gap.

Bas Eickhout, a European lawmaker for the Greens, said the law had already been “heavily butchered” after the commission’s original proposal was heavily watered down and underwent further simplification efforts this year.

The EU’s internal watchdog opened an inquiry this week into the commission’s current attempt to rework the law, after NGOs said that the EU executive broke its own rules by failing to consult or do an impact assessment before proposing the simplification measures.

Implementing the EU’s simplification strategy is a priority for Denmark during its six months at the helm of the Council, said Bødskov, but a part of that debate is also “to remember that the goals were right, but some of it has developed into too much and to difficult to reach the goals.”

Bødskov’s remarks reflect growing concern among some EU countries that the EU’s push for “better regulation” could be used as a vehicle to dismantle green legislation.

“Better regulation is not deregulation, it’s simplification,” he said, to avoid moving Europe away from its climate targets.

“We have to keep the targets, but we have to make it much easier for our companies and businesses to invest in reaching these targets.”

Europe’s largest shipbuilder calls on bloc to build up underwater defences

Fincantieri CEO says threat of attacks on subsea cables and other critical marine infrastructure will increase

The chief executive of Europe’s largest shipbuilder, Fincantieri, has called on European countries to scale up their underwater defence capabilities amid rising threats and the retreat of the US.

“The Mediterranean has always been populated by Russian and US submarines, it's up to us Europeans now to take responsibility for our underwater defence,” Pierroberto Folgiero told the Financial Times.

“If European countries are going to spend more on defence, we should spend better,” he added.

The Italian state-controlled shipbuilder announced last week that it expects its underwater division, which focuses on submarines, communication systems and autonomous vehicles, to double in size over the next two years reaching €820mn in revenue in 2027, equivalent to 8 per cent of the group’s current revenue.

It expects the global underwater economy to grow by €50bn a year as countries invest more in underwater defence and security.

Following the 2022 attack on the Nord Stream pipeline, governments have been scaling up underwater defence capabilities such as unmanned drone systems and anti-submarine technology.

Folgiero said the threat of attacks on subsea cables and other critical marine infrastructure was likely to increase and demand for technology and infrastructure that could prevent or minimise the impact of attacks would rise significantly.

“Attention has focused on the Baltic Sea following the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, but the Mediterranean is twice as big as the Baltic and a crucial juncture from a geopolitical perspective,” he said.

“This is why we are betting on underwater defence and technology and increasing our industrial capabilities.”

Fincantieri’s share price rose about 20 per cent last week to €15 a share after it said it would expand its underwater division.

It also announced a partnership with Graal Tech, an Italian technology group, to develop autonomous underwater vehicles.

Antonio Gianfrancesco, an analyst at investment bank Intermonte, said that “underwater is one of the key medium-to-long-term catalysts for [Finacantieri’s] equity story”.

Last year the company, which specialises in both military and civil shipbuilding, announced a €415mn deal with defence group Leonardo to take over its WASS submarine division. In 2023, it bought Remazel, an Italian engineering company focused on offshore equipment manufacturing.

Fincantieri, which failed in its 2020 merger attempt with France’s Chantiers de L’Atlantique amid opposition in France and EU competition concerns, has experienced strong growth since the pandemic. It has shipyards across the world, including in the US, and has had a surge in global orders.

Last week it said its earnings in the first quarter of 2025 rose 35 per cent to €2.37bn compared with last year. The value of its order backlog reached a record €57.6bn or seven times its 2024 yearly revenues.

Dispute over stake in Hess’s Stabroek oilfield has implications for joint operating agreements between companies

A bitter dispute between ExxonMobil and Chevron over ownership of a gigantic oil project with up to $1tn in reserves is scheduled to be heard before an arbitration court in London on Monday, in a case with big implications for both companies and the wider industry.      

The US supermajors are battling over the right to acquire a 30 per cent stake in Guyana’s Stabroek oilfield which is owned by Hess, a US energy company that agreed to a $53bn takeover by Chevron in September 2023.

Exxon, which owns 45 per cent of Stabroek, claims it has “right of first refusal” to buy Hess’s stake in the oilfield under the terms of a joint operating agreement (JOA) with Hess and another partner, Cnooc, the Chinese oil and gas company. Cnooc, with 25 per cent of the oilfield, has filed a claim seeking the same pre-emption right.

Lawyers are monitoring the International Chamber of Commerce arbitration to determine whether future JOAs will need to be updated to reflect the outcome of Exxon’s case, which involves pre-emptive rights — contractual provisions giving a party the right to buy an asset before it is offered to others.

Stabroek is one of the most lucrative oil discoveries in recent decades with an estimated 11bn barrels of oil reserves and further exploration likely to increase this figure. The project has transformed Exxon’s fortunes, enabling it to reclaim its position as the most valuable US oil company after briefly being eclipsed by Chevron in October 2020.

Over the next 15 years Exxon and its partners are forecast to generate $182bn in profits from oil and gas sales from the Guyana oilfields, according to Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy. Guyana’s government should receive more than $190bn, a vast sum for a country that was one of the poorest in South America until Exxon struck oil in 2015.

“Guyana is one of the most prized oil and gas projects on the planet. It was developed in record time, provides comparatively low-emissions oil at a break-even price that is below $30 a barrel, which makes it super profitable,” said Luiz Hayum, an analyst at Wood Mackenzie.

Chevron, which is not a direct participant in the arbitration case, is desperate to push ahead with its Hess acquisition to access the company’s Guyana assets. Last year Chevron’s oil and gas reserves fell to 9.8bn barrels, down from 11.1bn barrels in 2023, the lowest in more than a decade.

Mike Wirth, Chevron chief executive, has said he is confident the company will prevail over Exxon. “This has been studied extensively, and we feel like they clearly have the right side of this argument,” he told a Goldman Sachs conference in January.

In March, Chevron disclosed it had bought almost 5 per cent of Hess shares on the open market, an unusual move which analysts interpreted as a sign the company is confident the long-delayed transaction will proceed.

But Exxon chief executive Darren Woods has also talked up the company’s prospects and claimed last year it is “standing up for what we believe is a fundamental right”.  

The hearing will be held in private before a three-judge panel. Sources close to the process told the Financial Times the case probably hinges on the interpretation of a few words related to pre-emptive rights in the JOA, which has not been published by any of the parties.

Lawyers for Hess are expected to argue that a right of first refusal clause contained in the JOA only applies when one of the partners seeks to sell the Guyana assets, and not in a corporate takeover. Exxon is expected to argue the clause covers Chevron’s takeover of Hess because the Guyana assets makes up about 70 per cent of the value of the entire company.

“Exxon will argue Hess is basically a huge Guyana asset and a bunch of rats and mice. In other words, everything else is pretty insignificant,” said one veteran oil executive with experience of JOAs.

David Hoffman, a professor of law at University of Pennsylvania, said the outcome could shape how future JOAs are drafted.

“Because so much money is at stake here I’m sure the relevant lawyers will understand what the dispute is about and they are going to know who wins and they are going to try and adjust their practice accordingly,” he said.

Analysts said the outcome was more important for Chevron than Exxon because of the company’s need to find growth opportunities and boost its oil reserves.

“If Mike Wirth completes Hess he is in good shape to retire and leave his era in charge as a hero. But if Chevron loses then he may need a different big deal, like Oxy [Occidental Petroleum], to cement his long legacy,” said Paul Sankey, an oil analyst.