FirstFT: UK law to quash all Post Office scandal convictions

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Good morning. The UK government will introduce unprecedented legislation today to quash all convictions in England and Wales relating to the Post Office scandal, one of the country’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

The bill, which the government hopes to pass into law before the end of July, will exonerate hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly prosecuted using flawed evidence from the Post Office’s faulty Horizon IT system.

It will cover alleged offences carried out between 1996 and 2018 involving sub-postmasters, their employees, family members or direct employees of the Post Office, the government said.

Sub-postmasters can either accept a “fixed and final offer” of £600,000 in compensation or have their claims assessed under existing processes, where the size of the payout has no limit, Kevin Hollinrake, the postal affairs minister, said.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were convicted for alleged offences, including theft and fraud, in cases brought by the Post Office, using data from the faulty Horizon IT system developed by Japan’s Fujitsu. Read more about the legislation.

Here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:

• UK: The Treasury Committee takes evidence from chancellor Jeremy Hunt about last week’s Spring Budget statement. The Office for National Statistics publishes its January gross domestic product estimate.

• Results: Adidas is expected to report an operating profit of €268mn despite the Yeezy debacle. Other companies reporting include Balfour Beatty, Eni, Eon, F&C Investment Trust, Ferrexpo, Geberit, The Gym Group, Inditex, Metro Bank and Volkswagen.

• Financial Times Climate Capital Live: The two-day event provides a unique forum for climate leaders, politicians, CEOs and financiers to discuss how their organisation can move from commitment to implementation on net zero targets.

Five more top stories

1. A new mobilisation law in Ukraine is due to be put to a parliamentary vote on March 31. The bill seeks to update the country’s legal framework ahead of an anticipated recruitment wave this year in which up to 500,000 people could be drafted. The effort is mostly aimed at replacing the 330,000 exhausted troops currently on the battlefield, but the law is proving controversial.

• More on Ukraine: EU countries are set to agree a new €5bn top-up to a fund used to finance military shipments to Kyiv, while the US managed to scrape together $300mn more in ammunition and artillery.

2. The EU is readying a €7.4bn aid package for Egypt aimed at shoring up its economy amid fears that the conflicts in Gaza and Sudan risk exacerbating financial troubles in the north African nation and raising immigration pressure on Europe. The proposed deal is the latest in a series of EU pacts with northern African countries aimed at avoiding economic instability and halting irregular migration from the region.

3. UK Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has pledged to give MPs a free vote on legalising assisted dying in England if his party wins the general election expected this year. MPs voted against changing the law in 2015, but Kit Malthouse, former Conservative minister and co-chair of the all-party parliamentary group for choice at the end of life, last year said “sentiment in parliament has moved significantly” and was “getting towards a majority”.

4. Donald Trump and Joe Biden have each secured enough delegates to clinch their parties’ US presidential nominations, setting up a rematch of the 2020 race for the White House in November. Trump gained sufficient backing for the Republican nomination after winning a primary contest in Washington yesterday, while Biden prevailed in Georgia. The comfortable wins have demonstrated the candidates’ dominance over their respective parties, but they have also masked some weaknesses on both sides.

5. China is scrapping infrastructure projects as it struggles to reconcile austerity and economic growth. Beijing has ordered a dozen highly indebted areas, many of them less-developed and far from the coast, to curb infrastructure spending as it tries to unwind a decade-long investment binge many believe is unsustainable. But the austerity drive may make achieving the government’s ambitious 5 per cent growth target even more difficult.

News in-depth

At first, it was Lazard and Rothschild that Roger Altman’s boutique New York investment bank Evercore had in its sights. Almost three decades after its founding, the firm is instead closing the gap with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley on its core business of deal advice. The firm has achieved the feat in part by tapping the alma mater of current chief executive John Weinberg: Goldman Sachs. His arrival validated Evercore’s model — and marked a new era of ascendancy that has earned the uptown firm the nickname “Goldman North”.

We’re also reading and listening to . . . 

• Carried interest: A top London private equity lawyer has warned that Labour’s plan to raise the tax rate on buyout executives could be more damaging than Brexit.

• Israel-Hamas war: Israel has yet to achieve all its wartime goals in Gaza. But for Hamas, victory now has largely narrowed to one thing: survival.

• Unhedged 🎧: Host Ethan Wu visits AQR’s Cliff Asness to discuss factor investing — picking stocks without relying on judgments about stories or sectors.

Join FT colleagues on March 21 at noon London time for a subscriber webinar on the Israel-Hamas war, fears of a wider conflict and the chance of a long-term settlement. Register now and put your questions to the panel.

Chart of the day

What is the economic future of China? This question raises many issues, notably China’s persistent macroeconomic imbalances, the threat of population decline and worsening relations with parts of the outside world, writes Martin Wolf. But underneath all of these lies a deeper one: is “communist capitalism”, that seemingly self-contradicting invention of Deng Xiaoping, inexorably fading away under Xi Jinping?

Take a break from the news

The power of place, women starting start-ups and the good, bad and ugly of management are among the topics of business books we are reading this month.

Additional contributions from Benjamin Wilhelm and Gordon Smith