Friday newspaper round-up: Tata, Post Office, John Lewis, KPMG

Members of a steelworkers’ union have voted to take industrial action in protest at planned job losses at Tata. The company last month rejected a plan by unions to keep open a blast furnace at the Port Talbot steelworks, ending hopes of avoiding as many as 2,800 job losses. – Guardian

A barrister who advised the Post Office to stop prosecuting branch owner-operators told a public inquiry he was “now sure” that the state-owned company “must have deceived” him because it failed to provide him with “highly relevant material”. Simon Clarke, who worked for the law firm Cartwright King when it was advising the Post Office, was being questioned on Thursday as part of the judge-led hearings looking into the Horizon IT scandal. – Guardian

John Lewis has shed 3,800 jobs over the past year, as it races to cut costs across its stores. New filings reveal the number of staff working for the John Lewis Partnership, which runs department stores and Waitrose supermarkets, dropped to 70,500 at the end of January, compared to 74,300 a year earlier. This coincided with the company saving around £26m in employment costs over the year. – Telegraph

KPMG missed multiple red flags in the run-up to the 2018 collapse of Carillion, with auditors at the Big Four firm joking to each other that their work was “more Mills & Boon than Shakespeare”, a report by the City watchdog has concluded. The Financial Reporting Council hit the company with a record £21 million fine last October for what it called “textbook” failures when signing off the construction and facilities outsourcer’s accounts. – The Times

Thousands of international travellers who used to visit the UK for VAT-free shopping have turned to luxury retailers in Paris and Milan after the British government scrapped the tax incentive in 2021. New research has found that 162,000 visitors from non-EU countries sought VAT refunds in the UK in 2019. Now 20 per cent of those tourists are claiming tax rebates in EU countries which still have shopping schemes. – The Times