Wednesday newspaper round-up: Port Talbot, Amazon, Tripadvisor
The British steel industry is braced for 2,500 job cuts at the Port Talbot steelworks, with thousands more jobs at risk in the UK, as the government prepares a taxpayer-backed deal for the south Wales plant. The business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, is expected to outline on Wednesday details of a rescue deal which will see the government hand the historic Welsh plant’s owners, Tata Steel, £500m to build a new electric furnace – but at the cost of huge redundancies from the closure of its last remaining blast furnace. – Guardian
Amazon’s cloud computing arm will invest £8bn in the UK to build datacentres that support customers in London and the west of England, Rachel Reeves said on Wednesday. The chancellor said the investment, which it was estimated would create as many as 14,000 jobs at Amazon and in local businesses, was part of the government’s “long-term mission to boost growth, unlock investment and make every part of Britain better off”. – Guardian
Tripadvisor has provoked anger by abruptly cancelling holidaymakers’ accommodation bookings as the company shut down its Airbnb rival. The travel website emailed tenants and hosts on Tuesday to say that it would no longer honour reservations after Nov 1. Tripadvisor, best known for reviews and travel guides, acquired a string of holiday booking websites during the 2010s in an attempt to take on websites such as Airbnb. – Telegraph
The former head of oil at Glencore has appeared in court in London to face corruption charges relating to the commodities trader’s operations in Africa. Alex Beard, 57, has been charged by the Serious Fraud Office with two counts of conspiracy to make corrupt payments to government officials and officials of state-owned oil companies in Nigeria between 2010 and 2014, and in Cameroon between 2007 and 2014. He would plead not guilty, his lawyer told Westminster magistrates’ court. – The Times
The serviced offices provider that owns Regus has been told by one of its largest shareholders to move its stock market listing to the United States “immediately”. Buckley Capital Management said that switching from London to New York would help to boost IWG’s flagging share price, which is struggling 60 per cent below its pre-pandemic level. – The Times