Oil price touches $95 as US-Iran conflict escalates; UK inflation cools faster than expected – business live

The Environment Agency has brought criminal charges against four Southern Water employees, including ex chief executive Matthew Wright, over allegations that they manipulated wastewater testing results.

The regulator has alleged that the four employees conspired to defraud it and the water regulator Ofwat by manipulating its self-monitoring testing through “artificial no-flow events†at sewage treatment works.

An Environment Agency spokesperson said:

We can confirm that we are taking criminal proceedings against Southern Water Services Ltd and a number of former employees.

We take our responsibility to protect the environment very seriously and will always pursue and prosecute those alleged to have committed serious offending against the environment.

The environment secretary, Angela Eagle, said:

The public are rightly sick of environmental pollution and attempting to cover it up is outrageous. Anyone found guilty of this crime will face the full force of the law.

This government will always back tough enforcement action to protect our rivers, lakes and seas. We have already committed to ending the practice of operator self-monitoring to ensure this cannot happen again in the future.

EasyJet shares have fallen sharply after reports that the EU is preparing to tighten up airline ownership rules, potentially putting planned takeover bids in doubt.

Reuters quoted an unnamed EU official who said that a review would “protect strategic autonomy†and ensure control of regional airlines remains within Europe.

The comments came as two US investment firms are vying to buy easyJet. The airline's board originally accepted the fifth bid from Castlelake, worth £5.5bn, but then recommended a higher bid from Apollo Global Management, worth £5.7bn or more than £7 per share.

EU rules demand 51% local ownership, and while Castlelake had named EU citizens as co-investors, Apollo has not explained how it plans to meet the requirements.

The official told Reuters that the review would look to clarify which kinds of corporate structures were allowed, and said that none of Apollo, Castlelake or easyJet had to European regulators about the details of their proposed deals.

Shares in easyJet slumped 11% in the minutes after the news emerged of the review. They remain around 50% higher than before the first takeover approaches were disclosed in late May.

The US stock market is a bit wobbly today – the blue chip S&P 500 index has slipped 0.1%, and the tech heavy Nasdaq index is down 0.5%. The Dow Jones has ticked up 0.1%.

The oil price is still higher today, but it has pared back some of its earlier gains, with Brent crude now up 2.5% to $93.26 a barrel.

Now turning to the world of AI: the US chip company AMD has announced a new deal with Anthropic, the company behind Claude.

AMD has said it will make an investment of up to $5bn (£3.7bn) in Anthropic, while Anthropic has agreed to buy billions of dollars worth in AMD's latest AI server chips.

Shares in AMD are flat in early trading.

Dr Lisa Su, chair and CEO of AMD, said:

This collaboration brings together Anthropic's leadership in frontier AI with the full strength of AMD high-performance computing. Together, we will accelerate AI adoption at scale and establish Helios as a major platform for the next generation of AI infrastructure.â€

Tom Brown, co-founder and chief compute officer at Anthropic, said:

Access to compute is central to keeping Claude at the frontier and meeting demand from our customers,†said“By partnering with AMD across the stack, we are securing the capacity we need and optimizing it for training and serving Claude. Running across a diversified range of hardware lets us map the right workloads to the right hardware.â€

UK bond yields are also rising across the curve today, as higher oil prices push investors to prepare for elevated interest rates this year.

The 10-year gilt yield has risen by about 3 basis points to 5.06%, its highest level since May. The equivalent 10-year yield in the eurozone has also risen by about 2 basis points to 3.19%.

US stock futures are slipping this afternoon, as investors look cautiously ahead to big tech earnings this week.

The S&P 500 index is poised to fall 0.2% later this afternoon when the US market opens, while futures for the tech heavy Nasdaq are down 0.6%.

Alphabet and Tesla will report their quarterly earnings this evening.

House prices in London dropped 3.7% year-on-year in May, according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics, the ninth month in a row where there has been an annual fall in the capital.

London was the only region in England to record a fall in house prices, with the average across the UK rising by 2.7%. That did however mark a deceleration from April, when prices rose by 3.8%.

The biggest falls in London were in the inner parts of the city, such as Westminster and Tower Hamlets, the ONS said.

The ONS did however note that the figures were affected by changes to stamp duty in April 2025, which brought forward several property transactions as homebuyers sought to get ahead of the tax change deadline.

Profits at Norway's state oil company nearly doubled to $11.5bn (£8.6bn) in the three months to the end of June as the jump in oil and gas prices caused by the war against Iran boosted earnings.

Equinor benefited from a decision to increase oil and gas production at the start of the conflict, filling a gap in the market after a near-halt to shipping through the strait of Hormuz caused Gulf oil flows to slump.

Equinor also profited from the jump in oil prices. Fears over a drop in global supplies left Brent crude prices swinging between $75 and more than $100 a barrel between April and June this year. That compares with roughly $60 to $70 during the same period last year.

Prologis, the US property group, is still pursuing the FTSE 100 warehouse landlord Segro. It has announced its “best and final†offer, which values the business at about £14bn.

The offer is made up of 0.0920 new Prologis shares for each Segro share and a partial cash alternative of up to £3.5bn.

The fourth offer by Prologis comes just two days after Segro rejected its previous £13.5bn bid.

The FTSE 100 company has also come under pressure from one of its biggest investors, Norges Bank, which said yesterday that the proposal “merits considerationâ€.

Prologis said in a statement that its proposal “is final and will not be increasedâ€.

Dan Letter, the chief executive of Prologis, said:

There is no doubt a combination of both companies would deliver meaningful value. We have listened to feedback from shareholders and this morning, we have improved our proposal to make a compelling offer to the Segro Board. We run Prologis with discipline and this is our best and final offer.

Segro shares are up 3.8% this morning.

Oil has breached the $95 a barrel mark today – but some analysts have predicted that the price could rise to more than $120 by the end of the year if disruptions at the strait of Hormuz continue.

Analysts at the US bank Goldman Sachs sent out a note on Monday saying that Brent crude could rise above $120 by the fourth quarter, although it is not their base case assumption, Bloomberg reported.

Oil prices have not been above $100 a barrel since May, and topped $126 at the end of April.

Oil prices are climbing further this morning as investors grow fearful around the impact of the war in the Middle East on global supply.

Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, is up 4.6% to $95.16 a barrel, its highest point in six weeks. Oil prices have risen by abut 20% this month as Washington and Tehran have exchanged fire.

Last night the US carried out its eleventh night of consecutive strikes against Iran, while the Iran-backed Houthi movement has threatened a naval blockade on Saudi Arabian ports.

Kathleen Brooks, of the broker XTB, notes the sharp rise today comes after Donald Trump said he was not interested in holding talks with Iran last night.

The rise in the oil price comes after President Trump played down the prospect of fresh talks with Iran. He also said that he would escalate tensions even further and will hit Iran's Pickaxe Mountain, which contains an underground nuclear site.

…Reports suggest that US allies in the Gulf are getting tired of US strikes on Iran due to their ineffectiveness, however, there is no immediate solution to break the impasse. Should there be a wider war to bring Iran to its knees, or should the two sides commit to fresh peace talks? Markets would likely prefer fresh peace talks, especially now that the crisis is impacting global oil flows beyond the Strait of Hormuz. There are signs that tankers are avoiding or slowing down their approach to Bab El-Mandeb Strait near Yemen, after the Houthis threatened attacks on cargo ships in alliance with Iran. For now the Red Sea remains operational, but global supply chains are increasingly coming under threat as escalations in the conflict heat up. This will keep upward pressure on global supply chains, and inflation risks are ramping up every day this conflict escalates.

OpenAI has revealed an autonomous AI agent powered by its technology went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a prominent startup by itself in an “unprecedented incidentâ€.

The company behind ChatGPT said Hugging Face had detected and contained the agent – an AI tool designed to carry out tasks without human assistance – which had entered its systems.

OpenAI said;

We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.

The company warned that it expected this type of incident to become more commonplace as models – the technology that underpins AI tools such as chatbots and agents – become more capable.

Bloomsbury has said it will receive a share of the $1.5bn US court settlement that resolves claims Anthropic used copyrighted books to train its AI models without paying for the content.

The company said in a statement today:

Bloomsbury confirms that it is among the beneficiaries of the Anthropic settlement and will receive settlement spread over several payments estimated to start in the second half of the financial year.

The court has listed 14,087 Bloomsbury titles as within the settlement and the proposed settlement is for about $3,000 for each work… to be divided equally between the author and the publisher.

Analysts at the broker Peel Hunt estimated that the company will receive about £14m in total.

Shares in Bloomsbury, which is listed in London, are up by about 1% this morning.