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Flooring Superstore Mulls Restructure as Harpin-Backed Retailer Faces Store Closures

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Flooring Superstore Mulls Restructure as Harpin-Backed Retailer Faces Store Closures

The 50-strong flooring chain backed by Sir Richard Harpin’s Growth Partner has appointed restructuring advisers, raising the prospect of store closures and redundancies as the cost-of-living squeeze continues to drag on consumer spending.

Flooring Superstore, which employs around 300 people from its Bishop Auckland headquarters in County Durham, has drafted in Begbies Traynor and the restructuring arm of Santander to weigh its options. People familiar with the matter said a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) or a full administration are both on the table, controversial routes that typically squeeze landlords and suppliers while preserving the equity of incumbent owners and senior creditors.

The retailer was co-founded in 2012 by Dan Foskett and sells vinyl, laminate and wood flooring alongside artificial grass through its branded showrooms and online channels. Growth Partner, the investment vehicle established by Harpin, the entrepreneur behind home emergency repair group HomeServe, backed the business in 2020 with a £5 million injection that allowed Foskett to crystallise a portion of his shareholding. He retains a 22 per cent stake, while Growth Partner holds 25 per cent. The remainder is split between three individual investors.

Harpin, who last year published “How to Make a Billion in Nine Steps”, focuses on British and European retail names primed for scale. His portfolio includes pizza oven specialist Gozney and bathroom retailer Easy Bathrooms. However, several Growth Partner-backed businesses have collapsed in recent years, among them Crafters’ Companion, co-founded by Dragons’ Den investor Sara Davies, and Yorkshire-based Keelham Farm Shop.

Flooring Superstore was a pandemic winner, riding the wave of home-improvement spending while consumers were confined to their properties. That tailwind reversed sharply once lockdowns eased, as the chain was forced to absorb spiralling energy and raw material costs and unwind the additional capacity it had built. The cost-of-living crisis has since hammered demand for big-ticket household refurbishments.

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Connection Retail, the parent company that also owns Direct Wood Flooring, Grass Direct and Snug Carpets, posted turnover of £49.3 million in the year to the end of July 2024, down from £51.8 million a year earlier. Pre-tax profit nonetheless swung from a £3.3 million loss to a £619,000 profit, while net debt stood at £3.5 million at the year-end.

Santander shored up the group’s balance sheet last June with a debenture, a secured loan agreement under which the lender acts as security trustee. Filings at Companies House show Connection Retail has two outstanding charges, having pledged its property and overall business assets as collateral to both Growth Partner and the high-street bank.

The disclosed restructuring talks mark a striking pivot from the expansion blueprint Foskett set out only twelve months ago, when he told The Times that he intended to grow the estate to as many as 150 stores, deepen the brand’s marketing reach and continue building its exclusive product range.

Growth Partner and Flooring Superstore had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication. Santander and Begbies Traynor declined to comment.

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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.

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Kayne Anderson president Baker buys $339,250 in KYN stock

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Kayne Anderson president Baker buys $339,250 in KYN stock

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Trent announces record date for its 1:2 bonus issue. Check details

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Trent announces record date for its 1:2 bonus issue. Check details
Trent has fixed Friday, May 29, 2026 as the record date to determine shareholders eligible for its first-ever bonus share issue in a 1:2 ratio. In an exchange filing, the Tata Group retail company said shareholders will receive one bonus equity share for every two fully paid-up equity shares held as on the record date, subject to statutory and regulatory approvals, including shareholder approval through a postal ballot.

The announcement follows Trent’s earlier disclosure of the bonus issue alongside its Q4 results and a Rs 6 dividend. The company had at the time indicated that the record date would be announced separately.

The bonus issue marks a milestone for the Westside and Zudio parent, which has never issued bonus shares before. As part of the plan, Trent will issue around 17.77 crore equity shares of Re 1 face value each, capitalising a portion of its share premium reserves.

The company expects to complete the allotment of these bonus shares by June 21, drawing from its share premium pool, which stood at over Rs 1,900 crore as of March-end FY26.

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A bonus issue involves distributing additional shares to existing shareholders at no extra cost, typically reflecting a company’s confidence in its financial position and growth outlook. While the move increases the total number of outstanding shares, it does not alter the company’s overall market capitalisation. However, it tends to improve stock liquidity and makes shares more accessible to retail investors.


Only those shareholders holding Trent shares as of May 29 will be eligible to receive the bonus allotment.
Trent reported a 26% growth in its consolidated net profit for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, at Rs 400 crore versus Rs 318 crore in the year-ago period. Its revenue from operations, meanwhile, rose 19% YoY to Rs 5,028 crore in Q4 FY26.Further, Trent has also earlier approved the plan to raise additional funds through the issue of equity shares via rights issue or other methods. The company announced an Employee Stock Option Plan (ESOP) to issue nearly 8.89 lakh shares to its eligible shareholders.

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Lp(a) drugs from Novartis, Amgen and Eli Lilly aim to prevent heart attacks

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Lp(a) drugs from Novartis, Amgen and Eli Lilly aim to prevent heart attacks

Pharma thinks it’s found the next frontier in preventing heart attacks. 

Novartis, Amgen and Eli Lilly are among the drugmakers betting that slashing levels of a particularly bad form of cholesterol could deliver the next blockbusters in cardiology. All three of the pharmaceutical giants are in late-stage trials to test whether drugs that cut Lp(a) can protect people from heart attacks.

If they can, the opportunity could be massive: an estimated one in five people worldwide have elevated Lp(a), and there’s not much they can do to lower it. Evidence from human genetics suggests the idea could work, but drugmakers don’t know for sure. That makes the first late-stage trial results from Novartis, expected later this year, important for the entire pipeline. 

“History has taught us you can’t make assumptions,” said Dr. Steve Nissen, chief academic officer of the Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic who is the principal investigator of Novartis’ Phase 3 Horizon trial of pelacarsen, the company’s experimental drug to lower Lp(a). “We thought raising HDL would be beneficial and that didn’t work, so I think we have to keep an open mind.”

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Lp(a), or lipoprotein(a), was first discovered in 1963. It’s a more dangerous cousin to the well-known LDL cholesterol because it simultaneously clogs arteries and promotes blood clots, posing two risks with just one particle. Almost 50 years after Lp(a) was discovered, researchers found that people who have high levels of it had a more than twofold higher risk of heart attack than those who don’t. 

How much Lp(a) a person has circulating in their body is almost entirely determined by their genes. Lifestyle factors like diet and exercise don’t influence Lp(a) levels like they do LDL levels, leaving people with few good options to reduce it. 

Currently, doctors encourage people to focus on the factors they can change, such as lowering their LDL cholesterol, decreasing blood pressure, treating obesity and diabetes and exercising. Those strategies can help protect people from high Lp(a) for some time, Nissen said. New medicines could treat people for a longer time. 

Novartis, Amgen and Lilly have already proven their experimental drugs slash levels of Lp(a) by more than 80%. Now, they will need to show that translates into tangible benefits. If that happens, the drugs could reach annual sales of $5.6 billion by 2032, according to consensus estimates from Evaluate, a pharmaceutical commercial intelligence firm.

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“We don’t know how much you have to lower levels,” Nissen said. “We don’t know how high you have to be to benefit from getting your level lowered. Estimates of how much you have to lower levels to prevent events based upon genetic studies are highly variable, so we don’t have an answer, and we won’t have an answer until on the date that we unblind the trial.”

That should happen around the middle of the year, Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February. The trial is studying whether Novartis and its partner Ionis’ drug pelacarsen prevents outcomes like heart attacks and strokes in people with elevated levels of Lp(a) who already have cardiovascular disease. Novartis delayed the readout by a year because people weren’t experiencing events as quickly as the company expected in the yearslong trial. 

Narasimhan has said that might have to do with the fact that researchers were managing participants’ other risk factors. He said Novartis is still excited to see the data and to potentially create “an entire new class of medicines that can help a whole group of patients that have no other option.” 

Novartis’ drug uses a different mechanism than its next closest competitors from Amgen and Lilly. Those drugs, Amgen’s olpasiran and Lilly’s lepodisiran, looked more potent in mid-stage trials, leading to larger Lp(a) reductions.

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Amgen’s pivotal trial results were expected later this year or early next before the company also pushed back the timeline. The company now says it plans to provide an update on timing in early 2027.

Jay Bradner, Amgen’s executive vice president of research and development, said it’s impossible to say why it’s taking longer for enough people to have heart attacks to analyze the results without seeing the data.

“The clarity of the signal from population genetics and the encouraging signs from [earlier trials] render this a very smart bet,” said Bradner. The forthcoming results from Novartis will provide direction on how Lp(a)-targeting drugs can affect clinical outcomes, he said, adding that he’s “very bullish about the hypothesis.”

Lilly expects to share data from its Phase 3 trial of lepodisiran in 2029. All of the trials are designed slightly differently, which could create variation in the results, said Dr. Michelle O’Donoghue, a cardiologist at the Mass General Brigham Heart & Vascular Institute and the principal investigator of Amgen’s Ocean(a) trial of olpasiran.

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“So there’s reason to think that the magnitude of the benefit might be different across the different programs,” she said.

Despite the focus from drugmakers, few doctors test their patients’ Lp(a) levels. Less than 1% of adults were tested for it in the U.S. in 2024, and testing was concentrated in a handful of states, according to one study of electronic health records.

Screening involves a routine blood draw like what’s used to measure other types of cholesterol. Leading cardiology organizations recently started recommending every adult be tested for Lp(a) at least once in their life. Currently, some doctors are reluctant to screen people for a problem when they don’t have any medicines to offer them to treat it, Nissen and O’Donoghue said.

The Family Heart Foundation plans to advocate for adding Lp(a) to the standard lipid test that measures other types of cholesterol like LDL, said the organization’s CEO, Katherine Wilemon. Living with elevated Lp(a) and another genetic heart condition herself, Wilemon has pushed for more screening since experiencing a heart attack at 38 and founding the organization in 2011.

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She said the Lp(a) drugs have already helped raise awareness about testing. If the treatments succeed in clinical trials, more screening could follow. Morningstar analyst Jay Lee thinks it could take time to build the market, especially since Novartis’ pelacarsen would initially be used for people with high Lp(a) levels and a history of cardiovascular events. 

Amgen and Lilly are already testing whether drugs could protect people with elevated Lp(a) from having that first event. Those results are still years away, with Lilly’s trial expected to read out in 2029. 

In the meantime, Lilly isn’t waiting to make more bets. The company is testing a daily pill, and it acquired a company that wants to use gene editing to slash Lp(a) levels with a one-time treatment. 

“We’ve got a bunch of shots on goal,” Cleveland Clinic’s Nissen said. “We hope at least one of them ends up in the back of the net.”

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Investors are skeptical, said Goldman Sachs analyst Asad Haider. They’re nervous what the delay in Novartis’ trial means for the drugs, and they’re concerned that even if the drugs work, it could take years for them to become mega-blockbusters, he said.

“That’s why this Novartis trial is going to be so important in how people think about the unlock,” Haider said.

Wilemon from the Family Heart Foundation thinks the market for the drugs is there. She sees screening as the most important issue and access as the second one. She points to PCSK9 inhibitors, powerful drugs that slash levels of LDL cholesterol, which struggled for years to gain traction until drugmakers lowered their prices.

But before uptake comes the data — and she said she and the whole Lp(a) community are crossing their fingers Novartis’ drug works.

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Colombian peso drops 2.36% as leftist leads presidential polls

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Colombian peso drops 2.36% as leftist leads presidential polls

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Aircraft Technicians Make Six Figures and Airlines Can’t Find Enough of Them

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Aircraft Technicians Make Six Figures and Airlines Can’t Find Enough of Them

Coltin Stidham wanted to be a pilot, but his eyesight didn’t make the grade. Now, the high-school junior is training for another six-figure aviation job even more in demand.

Inside an 8,500-square-foot hangar at Middletown Regional Airport in southern Ohio, the 17-year-old is learning to become an aircraft maintenance technician—a job that doesn’t require a college degree, is AI-proof and, within several years, can earn more than $100,000.

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Wall Street Is Sorting Software Companies Into Winners and Losers

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Wall Street Is Sorting Software Companies Into Winners and Losers

The threat that artificial intelligence tools will fuel a software apocalypse has rattled stocks, triggered record withdrawals from private-debt funds and stirred fears of a new type of credit crisis.

But a key market is sending a more mixed message: Not all software companies are equally endangered. While prices of software-company loans have fallen sharply on average since late January, a Wall Street Journal analysis of more than 100 loans showed wide variations in price moves, with parts of the sector hit much harder than others.

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Cleveland Kitchen unveils functional innovation

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Cleveland Kitchen unveils functional innovation

The company’s vinegar-based coleslaw is formulated with probiotics. 

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Princess Cruises ship recovers five bodies in Mediterranean during voyage

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Princess Cruises ship recovers five bodies in Mediterranean during voyage

A Princess Cruises ship recovered five bodies from the water during a voyage in Europe this month, the company confirmed.

The Sapphire Princess altered course on April 21 after crew members spotted an orange inflatable life jacket in the water while sailing en route to Cartagena, Spain, according to a statement from Princess Cruises.

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The vessel deployed its Fast Rescue Boat to investigate and ultimately recovered five deceased individuals, the company said. The ship’s crew coordinated the response with the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center.

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Sapphire Princess in Uruguay

The Princess Cruises’ Sapphire Princess remains anchored in the port of Montevideo.  (Ivanna Infantozzi/AFP via Getty Images)

The individuals were not passengers or crew members aboard the Sapphire Princess, according to the company.

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Sapphire Princess in Guatemala

The Sapphire Princess altered course on April 21 after crew members spotted an orange inflatable life jacket in the water. (Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images)

“We extend our sincere condolences for this loss and are grateful to our crew for their swift response and efforts to render assistance,” Princess Cruises said in a statement.

CRUISE INDUSTRY GIANT MAKES $100M STRATEGIC BET ON FLORIDA WITH MASSIVE MIAMI HEADQUARTERS

Sapphire Princess in San Jose

The Sapphire Princess cruise at the Marina Pez Vela Cruise Terminal in Puerto San Jose, Guatemala on Oct. 5, 2024. (Johan Ordonez/AFP via Getty Images)

The Sapphire Princess departed from Civitavecchia, Italy, on April 19 for a 14-day voyage to Copenhagen, Denmark, according to cruise tracking site CruiseMapper.

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Further details about the identities of the individuals or the circumstances surrounding their deaths were not immediately available.

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Oil could spike above $150 if Middle East conflict drags on, analyst warns

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Oil could spike above $150 if Middle East conflict drags on, analyst warns

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Venezuela central bank says it and U.S. have each hired firms to audit assets abroad

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Venezuela central bank says it and U.S. have each hired firms to audit assets abroad


Venezuela central bank says it and U.S. have each hired firms to audit assets abroad

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