Siobhan Kennedy , Business Editor

On another bruising day for Britain’s retail sector, five thousand jobs are at risk at Poundworld as the company prepares to appoint administrators. Six thousand more could be in jeopardy at House of Fraser, which is closing more than half its stores around the country. That includes its flagship branch in London’s Oxford Street – leaving staff in…

Rupert Murdoch’s bid to take full ownership of Sky has been thrown a lifeline. The government says the deal could go ahead if Mr Murdoch agrees to sell off Sky News to a credible owner. Unfortunately for Mr Murdoch, the government has also cleared a rival offer for Sky from the US media giant Comcast.…

TV presenter Noel Edmonds took his legal battle with Lloyds Bank into the company’s AGM today.  He believes he was the victim of fraud by former staff inside HBOS.  That bank was taken over by Lloyds at the height of the financial crisis, and Mr Edmonds now wants compensation from them.  At today’s meeting in…

There is more misery for Britain’s high streets. as the retailing giant Marks and Spencer announces a massive fall in profits, thanks to the cost of closing more than 100 stores and falling sales in food, clothes and homeware – and the impact on its share price could see it drop out of the FTSE…

A firm which was “reckless in the pursuit of growth” and a board either “negligently ignorant of the rotten culture or complicit in it”. That’s just a couple of the scathing conclusions from MPs on the collapsed construction giant Carillion, which went bust in January with more than a billion pounds in debt and the…

The death of high street shopping has been predicted many times. But figures out today do appear to confirm a marked change in how we buy things. The last couple of months have seen visits to shops drop by almost five percent, the worst March and April since the recession almost ten years ago. Several…

RBS has had to agree to a £3.6 billion penalty with the US Department of Justice to end the investigation into sales of financial products – some of them toxic mortgage bonds – just before the 2008 financial crisis. Channel 4 News has seen a damning internal review into Lloyds’ disastrous takeover of HBOS in…

With the Home Office under fire after the Windrush scandal, attention has focused on what some business are calling another example of the so-called ‘hostile environment’ faced by people from overseas. A dip in EU workers has meant many businesses say they need to recruit from the rest of the world. But with a limited…

The former boss of Cambridge Analytica screeched off in his Audi when we tried to ask about the company being wound up in the wake of a joint investigation by Channel 4 News and The Observer. Authorities say the firm is still under investigation, despite closing down. The Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, tells us why…

Sainsbury’s planned merger with Asda is designed to help fight off competition, from cut price stores such as Aldi and Lidl and online grocery giants like Amazon. Our business editor Siobhan Kennedy went to meet the boss of Sainsbury’s to talk about whose interests will really be served by the deal.

MPs have accused Facebook of being a “morality free zone” – as the social media giant’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer faced questions from the culture media and sport committee. The MPs though weren’t impressed by his answers – describing his testimony as unsatisfactory.

He’s come out fighting: PR supremo Clarence Mitchell is now the public face of Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the heart of the Facebook data harvesting scandal. Just two days into the job he gave a feisty press conference – accusing the media of portraying the firm as “some Bond villain”. And he’s robustly denied…

For six weeks Cambridge Analytica has been at the centre of a global political storm over how data was harvested from millions of Facebook users. Today for the first time since the scandal broke they allowed questions from the press, two hours after an academic at the centre of the data scandal gave evidence to…

We asked Chancellor Philip Hammond, who was in Washington for the IMF’s spring meeting, if those caught up in the Windrush scandal would be in line for compensation, among other issues.

The Culture Secretary Matt Hancock announced an extra £15m to help bolster cyber-security amongst Commonwealth nations today. He’s also the minister investigating Facebook’s conduct in the UK following the data harvesting scandal exposed by this programme. We sat down with him and asked whether his threat to bring in extra regulation really had any teeth.