The head of the International Energy Agency has said energy prices may spike again this winter, forcing government to subsidise bills – just days after state support for UK households fell away. Fatih Birol said a rapid improvement in the Chinese economy, coupled with a harsh winter, could put pressure on gas supplies and push up bills for consumers. He said the agency “cannot rule out” another spike in gas prices this winter, which would mirror last year when a surge in wholesale costs as a result of Russia’s invasion…
Tag: Consumer affairs
‘Everything is fake’: how global crime gangs are using UK shell companies in multi-million pound crypto scams
A woman meets a man online. They flirt. Then, after a few weeks, they begin imagining a future together. Fast forward a few months and one of them has had their heart broken and been defrauded of their life savings. It sounds like a classic romance scam, but it isn’t. This is “pig butchering”: a brutal, elaborate and rapidly expanding form of organised crime, often involving criminal syndicates, modern-day slaves and victims around the world. Since it came to prominence in 2021, the fraud – which involves scammers grooming their…
Leading economies sliding into recession as Ukraine war cuts growth, OECD finds
The world’s leading economies are sliding into recession as the global energy and inflation crises sparked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut growth by more than previously forecast, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A dependency on expensive gas for heavy industry and home heating will plunge Germany, Italy and the UK into a long period of recession after global growth was projected by the OECD to slow to 2.2% in 2023 from a forecast in June of 2.8%. With the global economy needing to grow…
‘They took my world’: fashion giant Shein accused of art theft
Vanessa Bowman paints the world around her: the 19th-century village church, her back garden, the leaves on the trees in the fields where she walks her dog. Once she has chosen a scene from her rural Dorset idyll, she puts brush to canvas, sometimes poring over the details for days in her studio. Over three decades she has honed a unique style and earned a loyal fanbase, with 20,000 followers on Instagram and commissions from House & Garden, Prince Charles’s Highgrove shop and Farrow & Ball. But when she received…