The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is remaining tight-lipped over the timing of its recently announced review of consolidation in the advice sector.

On 7 October, the regulator unveiled plans to examine consolidation, emphasising the need for strict approval processes when firms acquire or increase control over regulated entities.

Despite speculation that the review may have been prompted by concerns over rushed deals ahead of potential capital gains tax (CGT) changes, the FCA declined to confirm or deny this.

When asked by Money Marketing if this was the reason, the FCA’s head of advisers, wealth and pensions, Nick Hulme, stated he would not “specifically answer the question”.

In an interview at the Consumer Duty Alliance conference in Birmingham today (11 October), Hulme added: “I think we wanted to really reiterate the point that you need to get FCA approval before a change of control.

“We wanted to make it as clear as we possibly could that this is our expectation and if we find out that it hasn’t been we will act.”

“The ‘why now’ comes out of a number of reasons.

“One is, it’s been a while – seven years – since we last ‘kicked the tyres’ and had a look at this.

“Consolidation comes up a lot, sometimes from the consolidators about what other consolidators are doing, so I think it’s important that we have a look at it.”

Earlier in the day, Hulme told delegates: “I really want to stress that we are agnostic to whether consolidation is a good or bad thing.”

In a letter to advice and investment firm bosses, the FCA said that while industry consolidation can provide benefits, various types of harm can occur where this is not done in a “prudent manner”.

“Where we receive notifications from individuals or firms to acquire or increase control in regulated firms, we will assess and challenge their suitability and the financial soundness of the acquisition,” it said.

It added that buyers must “notify us and get our approval to acquire or increase control in a firm we regulate”.

Where acquisitions complete without prior regulatory approval, “we may use our enforcement powers to object to the transaction or initiate criminal proceedings”.

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London-listed shipbroker Braemar closed down 6 per cent on Thursday, the biggest one-day drop in more than a year, after the Financial Times reported its involvement in the sale of nine ageing oil tankers that have joined Russia’s “shadow fleet”.

Braemar’s shares ended the day at 278p, the lowest since May, and were down another 5 per cent to 264 on Friday.

London has been a global centre of the maritime industry for centuries, and Braemar, founded in 1982, is one of the sector’s leading brokers, matching buyers and sellers of vessels in return for a percentage of the purchase price.

Since the first western restrictions on Russian oil exports were introduced in December 2022, Moscow has assembled a so-called shadow fleet of more than 400 such vessels that are at present moving about 4mn barrels of oil a day beyond the reach of the sanctions and generating billions of dollars a year in additional revenue for its war in Ukraine.

Most of those tankers were bought from western sellers but the use of offshore ownership structures has meant western officials have struggled to identify how the ships were acquired and who owns them now.

The FT reported on Thursday that at least 25 of the vessels in the shadow fleet had been purchased by a British accountant on behalf of Eiger Shipping DMCC, the Dubai-based shipping arm of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil producer. Eiger had financed the acquisitions by paying in advance to charter the vessels, the FT reported.

The accountant’s lawyers, and one other person familiar with the matter, told the FT that Braemar was fully aware the vessels were being acquired for, and financed by, Eiger.

Braemar confirmed it had served as the broker for at least nine of the purchases but declined to comment on its knowledge of Eiger’s involvement.

“For every transaction that Braemar considers undertaking, it conducts all appropriate due diligence with know-your-customer checks, legal, compliance and regulatory adherence,” it said in a statement. Braemar on Friday said it had no further comment.

It is not alleged that the transactions have broken any laws. Although Lukoil has been under US sanctions since 2014, neither Eiger Shipping DMCC nor its Dubai-based owner Litasco Middle East DMCC, is a sanctions-hit entity. Dubai-based companies are also not required to comply with the west’s restrictions if they do not use G7 financing or services.

However, individuals and companies that have helped to assemble and operate the shadow fleet are increasingly in the crosshairs of western governments. At least seven of the 25 vessels originally acquired by the British accountant have since been hit with sanctions by the UK or EU, as have two companies that previously managed many of the ships.

In a call to action in July, 44 European leaders, including UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, pledged to target the shadow fleet’s “ships and facilitators” and called for the support of the maritime industry, including ship brokers.

M&S customers have blasted the retailer for hiking its popular Gastropub dine-in deal by 25%.

The revamped offer now includes creations by celebrity chef Tom Kerridge – but shoppers are still furious that the cost has risen from £12 to £15.

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The deal for two – which includes a main, side and a starter or desert – is among the priciest of M&S’ dine-in offers.

There’s also a pasta bundle for £7, an Indian meal for £15 and a slow-cooked one for £12.

But the Gastropub offer has hit shoppers radars in recent weeks after it was revamped at the end of September.

One fan complained to the retailer: “So food inflation is flattening or in some instances reversing. So you have put your dine-in meal deal price up 25%? (£12 to £15).”

Another added: “I have no doubts about the quality and having awesome chefs endorsing it adds a nice touch, but I’d prefer you kept the pricing reasonable.

“Gastro dine in from £12 to £15 is a noticeable hike.”

A third said: “I expect prices to rise every now and again but a 25% increase in the Gastropub meal deal in a week is just a little beyond the pale.”

Others complained that the deal previously offered fish and chips together as a main dish, but now the dish is only haddock and the chips must be bought separately as a side.

One said: “Extremely disappointing to see that the Gastropub dine-in deal has not only increased a whopping 25% to £15, but the chips have also been removed from the haddock and chips box.

“Bad deal, I didn’t bother buying.”

M&S – which has highlighted “British Beef Cheeks” and Kerridge’s Treacle Tart as top picks of the range – said the offer was intended to “bring the flavours of your favourite restaurant home”.

Analysis by The Sun has revealed that many of the dishes present in the relaunched offer were included in M&S’ old Gastropub deal, including lamb moussaka, cottage pie, chicken forestiere and lasagne.

Meanwhile triple cooked chips, greens, emperor carrots and dauphinoise potatoes remain as sides, as well as runny scotch eggs and prawn cocktail for starter options and tarte au citron and sticky toffee pudding for dessert.

But the retailer said 95% of the dishes are new or had been improved and all now only use selected M&S Foodhall ingredients or specific ingredients from its Gastropub larder list.

Tom Kerridge has also brought in various new dishes into the deal, including a pork and bacon pâté, British beef cheeks, treacle tart and molten cookie dough.

How to save money on your food shop

Consumer reporter Sam Walker reveals how you can save hundreds of pounds a year:

Odd boxes – plenty of retailers offer slightly misshapen fruit and veg or surplus food at a discounted price.

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Lidl sells five kilos of fruit and veg for just £1.50 through its Waste Not scheme while Aldi shoppers can get Too Good to Go bags which contain £10 worth of all kinds of products for £3.30.

Sainsbury’s also sells £2 “Taste Me, Don’t Waste Me” fruit and veg boxes to help shoppers reduced food waste and save cash.

Food waste apps – food waste apps work by helping shops, cafes, restaurants and other businesses shift stock that is due to go out of date and passing it on to members of the public.

Some of the most notable ones include Too Good to Go and Olio.

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Too Good to Go’s app is free to sign up to and is used by millions of people across the UK, letting users buy food at a discount.

Olio works similarly, except users can collect both food and other household items for free from neighbours and businesses.

Yellow sticker bargains – yellow sticker bargains, sometimes orange and red in certain supermarkets, are a great way of getting food on the cheap.

But what time to head out to get the best deals varies depending on the retailer. You can see the best times for each supermarket here.

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Super cheap bargains – sign up to bargain hunter Facebook groups like Extreme Couponing and Bargains UK where shoppers regularly post hauls they’ve found on the cheap, including food finds.

“Downshift” – you will almost always save money going for a supermarket’s own-brand economy lines rather than premium brands.

The move to lower-tier ranges, also known as “downshifting” and hailed by consumer expert Martin Lewis, could save you hundreds of pounds a year on your food shop.

Some have praised the overhaul, with one fan enthusing on X: “This new Tom Kerridge Gastropub range from @marksandspencer is absolutely banging, btw.”

Expert Amir Mousavi, a food consultant at the Good Food Studio in London, suspects rising costs were behind the hike.

He said: “Supermarket meal deals, traditionally, run as low-margin permanent promotions.

“Retailers often make 5% to 10% less margin on these offers compared to full-priced products, and their white label producers also sacrifice 5% to 10% margin.

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“With rising costs of goods over the last few years, margins have naturally shrunk for both retailers and suppliers.

“Meal deals are not as commercially viable as they once were, necessitating a price restructure to maintain profitability.”

M&S said: “As part of our exciting recent relaunch of our Gastropub range we’ve improved the quality of our dishes to ensure our customers get restaurant- and pub-quality food at home.

“As part of this we have improved 95% of our dishes and also incorporated what we call the Gastropub larder – where all our dishes use ONLY ingredients from this select list.”

“So, for example, rather than any butter being used, the only butter in these dishes are M&S Salted/Unsalted British Butter, M&S West Country Butter Sweet Cream Butter, or M&S West Country Brue Valley Butter.

“All of these are found in our Foodhalls and ensure that the quality and taste is the same across every dish.

“We have also included the exciting new Tom Kerridge range within the Dine In deal, meaning you can get Michelin star-inspired food in the comfort of your own home and at a just a fraction of the price compared to a restaurant.”

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Shares in J Sainsbury fell more than 5 per cent on Friday after the largest shareholder in the UK’s second-biggest supermarket chain sold nearly a third of its shares.

The Qatar Investment Authority sold about a third of its 14.2 per cent stake in the grocer in a private placing, according to messages sent by Goldman Sachs and seen by the Financial Times.

The transaction, made late on Thursday, leaves the QIA with a stake of about 9.5 per cent, just behind the 10.1 per cent held by the investment vehicle of Czech businessman Daniel Křetínský. The messages showed that the QIA sold the shares at 280p, a price that would raise £306mn.

Neither Sainsbury’s nor the QIA immediately responded to requests for comment on the sale. Goldman Sachs declined to comment.

Sainsbury’s shares were down 16p — or 5.6 per cent — at noon in London, at 272p.

A person familiar with the QIA’s thinking described the sale as part of its “regular portfolio management” and said the authority was fully supportive of the supermarket group’s strategy and action plan.

Sainsbury’s in February said it planned to cut annual costs by £1bn, launch a £200mn share buyback and embark on a “progressive dividend policy”.

Including Friday’s fall, Sainsbury’s shares are down 9 per cent so far this year amid concerns about the company’s ability to compete in an aggressively competitive UK retail environment. Sainsbury’s also owns the Tu clothing and Argos brands.

The QIA first bought a stake in Sainsbury’s in 2007, quickly building up to a 25 per cent holding. But it has been reducing this since 2021 when it sold a nearly 7 per cent stake in the grocer to Křetínský.

In a note to investors, analysts at JPMorgan said that “given the strategic nature” of the QIA’s stake, they did not expect the sale to be related to forthcoming UK events such as chancellor Rachel Reeve’s first Budget statement later this month.

Křetínský is best known in the UK for his successful bid for International Distribution Services, parent of the Royal Mail postal service, agreed earlier this year.

Additional reporting by Laura Onita and Ivan Levingston

A few weeks ago I had an absolute nightmare of a day when my work email account got hacked.

The hacker sent out a message to around 500 of my email contacts saying: “Good morning, I hope this email finds you well. Please see attached for your records. Alternatively, you can also access by copying the highlighted link and pasting in browser: [with a link that I’m obviously not going to post here]. It would be greatly appreciated if you could review at your earliest opportunity. Many thanks, Lois”.

They even used my email signature, and I found out from a few people who had replied to “me” that the hacker had replied to them assuring them that the email was definitely from me and the link was fine to click.

They also created an Outlook “rule”, which meant that all emails with an @ sign in the address would be immediately deleted. This meant I did not receive any emails from about 11am when the attack happened, until the wonderful IT team retrieved all of my lost emails. It also meant I assumed I’d lost access to my emails.

I felt pretty helpless. All I could do was post on LinkedIn telling people to delete the email and not click the link and hope the majority would see it.

Most people, thankfully, realised it was a scam. Anyone who knows me knows I do not use ‘email language’ like “I hope this finds you well”. And I certainly never request things at another person’s “earliest opportunity”. But I know some people clicked the link and I have no idea what the hacker was after. Money, I presume.

Our company IT team sorted it all out pretty quickly and got me back access to my email account. But there was a big chunk taken out of my working day where I didn’t have access even to my laptop while they investigated and changed my passwords.

I’m still not sure how this happened. I’m generally pretty good at sniffing out a scam, so I don’t think it was due to anything I clicked on.

I have noticed a marked increase in phishing emails coming into my inbox recently, and they often trick even my email spam filter.

They are easy to avoid if you’re cynical and paying attention, but I fear for older people or anyone in vulnerable circumstances, who are much more likely to fall for these kinds of scams.

And things are getting worse. An article by the International Monetary Fund back in April noted that cyber-attacks have more than doubled since the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is largely because hackers are constantly evolving. A report by security software company Egress – published in 2021 – pointed out that cybercriminals are constantly devising new ways to bypass traditional anti-phishing technologies.

In fact, it said, 98% of all phishing cases rely on social engineering, where victims are manipulated into supplying confidential information to a supposedly legitimate sender.

Financial advice firms may be wondering what all of this has to do with them.

Fraser Jack, founder of Australian firm The Cyber Collective, used to run a financial planning practice before he became a consultant. He says that, back then, he thought cybercrime was a “vague concept” that was not relevant to him or his business. But a 2019 report by Boston Consulting Group found that financial services organisations are 300 times more likely to be the victim of a cyber-attack than other types of companies.

And, in September last year, international law firm RPC revealed that UK financial services firms had reported a more than a threefold increase in the number of cyber-security breaches to the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) in 2023 compared to the previous year.

It said that during the year to June 2023, 640 cyber security breaches were reported to the ICO, up from the 187 from the year to June 2022. The pensions sector saw the biggest rise, from six in 2021/22 to 246 in 2022/23.

The IMF article said attacks on financial firms account for nearly one-fifth of the total. Banks are the most exposed but advice firms, which hold a huge amount of client data, are certainly not immune.

“In the wild west of cybercrime, someone trying to steal your client data is less of a case of ‘if’ and more of a case of ‘when’,” Fraser Jack wrote, in an article on The Cyber Collective’s website.

It makes sense. I know if I were a cybercriminal I’d target financial advice businesses, with all their minted clients. If you have no morals, why wouldn’t you go for them?

We know it goes on. Back in February last year, Aviva-owned Succession Wealth, which has around 200 advisers and 20,000 clients, suffered a cyber-attack, off the back of which it said it had launched an investigation and “notified the appropriate authorities”. It also introduced “further security measures”.

At the time the company would not elaborate on the nature of the attack, or give details about the security measures it had brought in.

This was a high-profile attack that was widely reported on in the media. But it is by no means the only attack of this nature on a financial advice firm.

Compliance consultancy B-Compliant said in December last year that an advice firm had contacted it to report that it had been targeted by a phishing email purporting to be from the Financial Conduct Authority. The recipient had noticed a spelling mistake and reached out to see if it was genuine. It was not.

This, B-Compliant warned, goes to show that hackers aren’t just targeting big firms. Everyone within the sector is fair game and SMEs in particular can be seen as low-hanging fruit, as they are thought to have less infrastructure and controls in place.

Cybersecurity is a key priority for the Bank of England and the financial regulators.

Late last year, the BoE insisted that all financial firms should be testing their resilience to cyber-attacks through CBEST – a targeted assessment that allows regulators and firms to better understand weaknesses and vulnerabilities and take “remedial actions”.

“True and meaningful cyber resilience cannot be delivered or achieved without a whole-organisational, continuous effort,” it said.

“We strongly encourage firms/FMIs to build and reinforce resilience through a strong foundation of cyber hygiene practices.”

As technology becomes more advanced and the world becomes more connected, cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated. Financial advice firms of all sizes must be ready.