FedEx has launched legal action against the US government seeking a full refund of tariffs imposed under Donald Trump, after the US Supreme Court ruled last week that the levies had been introduced unlawfully.

The case, filed in the US Court of International Trade, names the United States, US Customs and Border Protection and its commissioner Rodney Scott as defendants. FedEx did not specify the amount it is seeking to reclaim but said it is entitled to reimbursement as an importer of record.

The lawsuit marks the first major corporate attempt to recover funds from an estimated $175bn in tariffs collected under Trump’s trade regime. Other companies are expected to follow.

In a 6–3 ruling, the US Supreme Court found that Trump had exceeded his authority by using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose sweeping import duties during peacetime. The court held that Congress retains sole constitutional authority to levy taxes, including tariffs.

However, the justices did not directly address whether importers would be entitled to refunds. In a dissenting opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that the judgment left open questions about how billions of dollars already collected might be returned and warned that large-scale repayments could have significant implications for the US Treasury.

FedEx said it was taking action to protect its rights following the ruling. “While the Supreme Court did not address the issue of refunds, FedEx has taken necessary action to seek duty refunds from US Customs and Border Protection,” the company said.

The decision represents the first time the Supreme Court has overturned a major policy initiative of Trump’s second term and challenges the administration’s expansive interpretation of executive authority in trade matters.

Despite the setback, Trump signalled he would press ahead with new tariffs under alternative statutory powers. He announced a temporary 10 per cent global tariff, which was subsequently raised to 15 per cent within 24 hours.

US trade representative Jamieson Greer said the policy direction remained unchanged, arguing that tariffs provide leverage in international negotiations.

Senate Democrats have called for any refunded tariff revenues to prioritise small businesses and consumers. According to analysis by the Tax Foundation, tariffs in 2025 effectively amounted to a $1,000 tax increase on US households, contributing to higher prices and reduced economic output.

If successful, FedEx’s claim could open the door to a wave of refund demands from importers, potentially reshaping the financial legacy of one of the most aggressive trade policies in modern US history.

Amy Ingham

Amy is a newly qualified journalist specialising in business journalism at Business Matters with responsibility for news content for what is now the UK’s largest print and online source of current business news.

The U.S. women’s hockey team, fresh off a dramatic gold medal victory at the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, has declined an invitation from President Donald Trump to attend his State of the Union address Tuesday night, citing scheduling conflicts and prior commitments in a move that echoes past tensions between athletes and the White House.

The decision, announced Monday, February 23, 2026, came a day after Trump extended invitations to both the men’s and women’s teams during a congratulatory phone call with the men’s squad following their overtime gold-medal wins against Canada. The women’s team, which defeated Canada 2-1 in overtime on Sunday to claim their third Olympic gold in the last four Games, released a statement through USA Hockey expressing gratitude but opting out.

“We are sincerely grateful for the invitation extended to our gold medal-winning U.S. Women’s Hockey Team and deeply appreciate the recognition of their extraordinary achievement,” the statement read. “Due to the timing and previously scheduled academic and professional commitments following the Games, the athletes are unable to participate.”

The men’s team, which also secured gold in a thrilling overtime finish against Canada, is expected to attend the address, according to sources familiar with the plans. During the call with the men, Trump joked that he would be “impeached” if he didn’t invite the women as well, saying, “I must tell you, we’re going to have to bring the women’s team, you do know that.” The comment drew laughter from the men’s team, sparking backlash on social media for perceived insensitivity, with critics accusing the players of endorsing Trump’s humor at the expense of their female counterparts.

The women’s team, led by captain Hilary Knight and featuring stars like Kendall Coyne Schofield and Alex Carpenter, has been celebrated for its resilience and dominance. Their gold-medal run included a semifinal shutout of Sweden and a hard-fought final against archrival Canada, marking the first time both U.S. hockey teams won gold in the same Olympics since the sport’s inclusion. The victory capped a strong showing for U.S. women at Milano Cortina, where they contributed significantly to the country’s medal haul.

Trump’s invitation highlighted the teams’ achievements but quickly became a flashpoint. The president’s quip about impeachment — a nod to his own political history, including two impeachments during his first term — was seen by some as dismissive of the women’s accomplishments. Social media erupted with criticism, with one X user posting, “Why are they laughing? Disappointed and disgusting.” Others defended the men, noting the lighthearted context of the call.

The women’s decline aligns with a pattern of athletes skipping White House or political events during Trump’s presidencies. In 2018, after their PyeongChang gold, the team did visit the White House, but several high-profile athletes, including NBA stars like Stephen Curry and the entire Golden State Warriors team, opted out of visits amid political disagreements. The 2026 decision appears more logistical than overtly political, but it has fueled speculation given the timing — just days after the Olympics ended on February 22.

USA Hockey emphasized the honor of the invitation while underscoring the players’ post-Games obligations. Many team members are professional athletes in the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL), with seasons resuming shortly, or have coaching and academic roles. Knight, for instance, balances her PWHL career with advocacy work for women’s sports equity.

Reactions poured in from across the sports world. Former U.S. captain Meghan Duggan praised the team’s focus: “These women just achieved something historic — let them celebrate on their terms.” ESPN analyst Emily Kaplan noted on air that the decline avoids potential controversy, allowing the spotlight to remain on their athletic triumph.

The State of the Union, set for Tuesday evening, comes amid Trump’s second term, where he has prioritized domestic issues like economy and immigration. Inviting Olympic champions is a tradition to showcase national pride, but athlete participation has varied by administration. Under President Joe Biden in 2022, the women’s team visited the White House after their Beijing silver, highlighting equal pay achievements.

Trump’s administration has faced criticism for its handling of women’s issues, including sports equity. The president’s joke drew particular ire from advocates, who pointed to ongoing disparities in women’s hockey funding and visibility. The PWHL, launched in 2023, has helped professionalize the sport, but players like those on the U.S. team continue pushing for better support.

The women’s gold-medal game drew record U.S. viewership for women’s hockey, peaking at over 12 million on NBC, underscoring the sport’s growing popularity. The team’s decline of the invitation shifts focus back to their legacy: breaking barriers, advocating for equality and inspiring young athletes.

As the address approaches, the White House confirmed the men’s team attendance but did not comment on the women’s decision. Trump, in a brief statement, congratulated both teams again, calling their wins “a great American moment.”

The episode highlights the intersection of sports and politics, where athletes increasingly weigh public appearances against personal and professional priorities. For the U.S. women’s hockey team, the choice prioritizes recovery and commitments over a high-profile event, allowing them to savor their hard-earned gold without additional spotlight.

With the PWHL season resuming and international competitions on the horizon, the team looks ahead. Knight, in a post-Olympics interview, emphasized unity: “This gold is for every girl who dreams big — and for our sisterhood that made it possible.”

Milestone Signals Shift from AI Pilots to Production Systems and Previews the Next Generation of CoCounsel Legal

TORONTO, Feb. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Thomson Reuters (TSX/Nasdaq: TRI), a global content and technology company, today announced one million professionals have chosen CoCounsel, the company’s professional-grade AI technology, across 107 countries and territories. The milestone reflects a broader transition underway across high-stakes industries including legal, risk, compliance, tax, accounting, audit and global trade professionals. AI is moving from experimentation to production. Rather than standalone tools, firms are embedding AI directly into daily workflows where accuracy, sourcing, and data protection are essential.

General-purpose AI can generate plausible answers. Regulated professionals, however, need AI that withstands review in courtrooms, audits, and regulatory proceedings.

These systems need to retrieve authoritative sources, verify citations, and apply jurisdiction-specific rules.

CoCounsel fulfills those requirements, powering intelligent capabilities across the company’s portfolio—including CoCounsel Legal, CoCounsel Tax and Audit, and ONESOURCE+. It integrates into the tools professionals already use, analyzes licensed content refined over 175 years, incorporates expert-developed validation logic, and delivers structured, citation-backed outputs. Customer data remains protected and is not repurposed to train third-party models. More than 4,500 Thomson Reuters subject matter experts contribute to the validation and continuous refinement of CoCounsel’s outputs across legal, tax, and compliance domains.

“Professionals are not deciding whether to use AI anymore. They are deciding which AI they trust when their reputation and their clients’ data are on the line,” said Steve Hasker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Thomson Reuters. “CoCounsel is built for moments when being almost right is not good enough. It is grounded in decades of authoritative content, validated by domain experts, and backed by a clear commitment that customer data remains theirs. That is why one million professionals rely on CoCounsel.”

“When the work matters, the AI must be professional grade. Professionals need systems that can complete sophisticated work within the standards they are accountable to every day. That’s the gap between CoCounsel and everything else,” added David Wong, Chief Product Officer, Thomson Reuters. “One million CoCounsel users across 100+ countries and territories reflects a shared global consensus.”

Built for Regulated Work
CoCounsel’s adoption reflects design decisions tailored to professional environments:

• Licensed, authoritative content. Outputs are grounded in editorially enhanced legal and tax sources, not scraped public data.
• Expert validation. Domain specialists shape workflow logic and quality standards in areas where errors carry consequences.
• Workflow integration. CoCounsel operates inside research, drafting, and compliance platforms enabling task execution within established professional systems.
• Data boundaries by design. Thomson Reuters does not repurpose customer inputs to train third-party models or generate outputs for other users.
• Multi-model architecture with governance. Thomson Reuters works with leading frontier models, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI‘s GPT and Google’s Gemini, alongside proprietary AI technology and structured datasets to maintain performance control and system-level oversight.

From Tool to Execution Layer
In legal, tax, audit, and compliance workflows, AI must retrieve relevant authority, analyze structured and unstructured information, apply jurisdictional rules, and generate outputs that stand under review. That requires vertically integrated systems.

CoCounsel functions as an execution layer embedded within professional platforms, combining foundation models, proprietary AI engineering, proprietary content, and domain expertise to complete multi-step workflows end to end.

The next generation of CoCounsel Legal, entering beta soon, is designed around conversational task execution. Soon, legal professionals within law firms and corporations, will be able to describe an objective as they would brief a colleague. CoCounsel will build a plan, retrieve authority from Westlaw and Practical Law, search relevant user documents and precedent, analyze the material, verify that citations remain in good law, and deliver structured work product within a single system. Additional next-generation capabilities within CoCounsel Tax and ONESOURCE+ are planned for later in 2026.

As AI becomes embedded in professional systems, the defining question is not how quickly it can produce text, but whether it can support work that carries legal or financial consequences.

With one million professionals relying on CoCounsel, Thomson Reuters is not participating in the AI race. It is defining how AI operates in the world’s highest-stakes work.

About Thomson Reuters 
Thomson Reuters (TSX/Nasdaq: TRI) informs the way forward by bringing together the trusted content and technology that people and organizations need to make the right decisions. The company serves professionals across legal, tax, audit, accounting, compliance, government, and media. Its products combine highly specialized software and insights to empower professionals with the data, intelligence, and solutions needed to make informed decisions, and to help institutions in their pursuit of justice, truth, and transparency. Reuters, part of Thomson Reuters, is a world-leading provider of trusted journalism and news. 

For more information, visit thomsonreuters.com/cocounsel.  

Media contact 
Ali Hughes, Director, Technology and Innovation Communications 
Ali.Hughes@tr.com 

Notes to Editors 

• Product scope: CoCounsel is the AI technology underpinning generative and agentic capabilities across Thomson Reuters legal, tax, accounting, audit, risk, compliance, and corporate solutions. 
• Recent product update: Over the past year, Thomson Reuters has launched dozens of CoCounsel-powered capabilities across research, drafting, analysis, compliance, and workflow automation, including Deep Research and Ready to Review.
• Model Strategy: Thomson Reuters works with leading model providers and is developing a proprietary large language model designed specifically for professional and regulated use cases. 
• Investment: Thomson Reuters continues to invest significant capital in AI development and acquisitions, reinforcing long-term commitment to professional-grade AI without raising external capital. 

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SOURCE Thomson Reuters

Standard Chartered launches £1.2bn share buyback and 65% dividend increase despite missing analyst profit expectations, as wealth division delivers record performance.

Standard Chartered rewarded shareholders with generous returns following its full-year results, even as the London-listed bank fell short of the profit target forecast by analysts.

The Asia-focused lender posted a two per cent rise in pre-tax profit to $814m, coming in below analyst expectations of $1.1bn.

The shortfall was driven by weaker-than-anticipated net interest income, which tumbled 12 per cent to $1.5bn in the final quarter, despite a one per cent increase on an annual basis.

For the full year, pre-tax profit surpassed $7bn for 2025, climbing from $6bn the previous year.

Annual operating expenses also edged up four per cent to $12.3bn, with the bank attributing the rise to targeted business growth investments, the strategic recruitment of relationship managers and higher performance-related pay, as reported by City AM.

Nevertheless, wealth management remained the bank’s strongest division, with income surging 24 per cent to $3.1bn. Growth was largely driven by a record $52bn in new net inflows as more than 275,000 new affluent clients were brought on board.

Notwithstanding the profit shortfall, Standard Chartered pressed ahead with plans to return capital to investors.

The bank, best known in the UK as Liverpool FC’s shirt sponsor, announced a $1.5bn share buyback and declared a final dividend of 49 cents per share, bringing the total dividend for 2025 to 61 cents – a 65 per cent jump on the prior year.

Earlier this month, the lender endured its steepest single-session share price decline since President Donald Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs. Shares in the FTSE 100 lender tumbled six per cent following confirmation that finance chief Diego De Giorgi was departing to take the helm at asset manager Apollo.

Standard Chartered’s annual report, published on Tuesday, disclosed that chief executive Bill Winters had seen his remuneration package rise to £12.7 million for 2025, bolstered by £10.5 million in bonuses and share awards.

De Giorgi had been widely regarded as the principal architect behind Standard Chartered’s ‘Fit for Growth’ programme.

The initiative, launched in 2024, set in motion a three-year overhaul designed to streamline, standardise and digitise the bank’s operations, whilst targeting cost reductions of nearly $1.5bn over the same period.

De Giorgi’s exit has prompted fresh scrutiny over the succession planning around Winters, currently the longest-serving chief executive of any major British bank, with many analysts having previously tipped the departing finance director as the frontrunner to eventually take the top job.

The membership-based app will officially launch next weekend at an investor event in Manchester

A Yorkshire property company is poised to launch a new mobile app amid moves to transform the way investors source, assess and purchase investment properties. Wetherby-based The Property Sourcing Company (TPSC) has developed the membership-based app to give users access to off-market, below market value properties across the country.

The app is designed to give an end-to-end property sourcing service, overcoming common frustrations of property investors in the UK. The platform will operate on a simple membership model, with various tiers designed to suit different levels of investors.

The standard option provides investors with full access to deals from across the UK, allowing them to track property value and rental income. Other levels include a diamond membership, where users can get early access to new opportunities, whilst diamond plus provides investors with an account manager from TPSC’s team of property experts and sourcing.

TPSC forms part of The Property Buying Company, which has a team of more than 40 property specialists involved in sourcing, renovating and selling. As a group the business has bought, sold and traded over 5,000 properties across the UK since the company was founded in 2012 by Jonny Christie and Karl McArdle.

Mr Christie, CEO of The Property Sourcing Company, said: “Our mission is to remove the friction from property investing, whether you’re a first-time investor or a seasoned professional. Demand for property investment remains strong, however investors face a barrier with the process of sourcing good deals becoming increasingly fragmented and time-consuming.

“This app is a UK market first; it streamlines the investment journey into one professional and structured platform which is accessible from the palm of your hand.

“We are excited to be bringing this unique platform to the industry to revolutionise property investment and provide a seamless eco-system to property investors.”

The membership-based app will officially launch on February 28 at an investor event held in partnership with Together in Manchester. Speakers at the event will include property experts and household names, including TV presenter Dion Dublin and social media property expert Oliver Adams.

Elliot Vure, sales director at Together, said: “We’ve seen first-hand how challenging it can be for investors to source strong opportunities in a changing market. TPSC’s new app brings professionalism, structure and data-driven insight into a space that needs it. Together is delighted to collaborate on this launch and support a solution that strengthens the investment journey for buyers at every level.”

Like this story? For more news from the commercial property scene around the regions, visit our dedicated section here for the latest news and analysis within the sector.

Escalating geopolitical tensions have had a bearing on the marine insurance market

Shipping insurer NorthStandard has revealedf a year of “intense challenges” amid a significant expected rise in its premium income. The Tyneside-based mutual, which is among the world’s largest of its type, says premium income could rise by more than 5% to $930m (£689.3m) in the year to February 20.

It comes as global geopolitical tension has escalating further in the last year, creating a higher risk environment for insurers. Sanctions, tariffs and attacks on vessels have presented challenges.

NorthStandard, which employs about 300 people on Tyneside, has maintained the size of its poolable tonnage – the volume of ships it insurers – at 270million gross tonnes. It said the flat number came after a renewal that focussed on rebalancing its global risk portfolio.

Meanwhile, free reserves are projected to pass $900m (£667m), up from $800m (£593m) in February last year and well above the S&P Global requirements to keep its AAA capital status.

Paul Jennings, managing director of NorthStandard, said: “We are grateful for our members’ continued support and loyalty. Strong Member retention and commitment during renewal reflects the value and importance they place on the high levels of expert service NorthStandard teams deliver daily around the world.”

Bosses said that diversification efforts had helped boost results, pointing to the group’s Coastal & Inland-Sunderland Marine joint product for hull and protection and indemnity which is said to have been popular. NorthStandard has traditionally provided insurance for the operators of large, ocean going vessels involved in global trade, but more recently it has also eyed opportunities in the renewables sector – including via a partnership with NIORD/Norwegian Hull Club.

And in autumn last year, North Standard began recruitment of a new Upstream Energy and Marine & Energy Liabilities team. Jeremy Grose, managing director of NorthStandard, said further diversification will also drive premium growth next year, as ‘churn’ from newbuilds replacing older vessels could stymie premium growth.

He added: “Diversification, leaner operations, sound investments and consolidation have created the critical mass to open new offices and overhaul our digital services. We have also expanded our risk management tools, introduced a range of AI-led initiatives across our business, and broadened the scope of our loss prevention products for the direct benefit of our members.”

Elsewhere, NorthStandard said it had been focussed on driving maritime decarbonisation through its team of in-house experts offering guidance on alternative fuel options. That has included some of its members signing up to the BetterSea digital fuel pooling marketplace and supporting others with access to fuel performance analytics tools. The organisation is also a founding member of the Martime Nuclear consortium that launched only last month and focuses on the development of safe and efficient nuclear-powered vessels.

Looking ahead, Mr Jennings added: “Our focus is to support Members with the stability, strength, and innovation NorthStandard is known for. This year’s results prove our strategy is working and we intend to keep leading our industry forward.”