Shawbrook Group PLC

Chancellor John Healey has summoned the bosses of Britain's biggest banks to a pre-budget summit next Tuesday, amid industry expectations of a tax raid later this month. Sky News has learnt that the chief executives of lenders including Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and NatWest Group have been asked to attend, with the bosses of Santander UK and Nationwide also understood to have been invited. It will be the first such in-person meeting Healey has held with UK bank chiefs since he replaced Rachel Reeves as chancellor in July, and comes ahead of his inaugural major fiscal event towards the end of the month. Banking industry fears are growing that he will hike taxes on the sector by billions of pounds a year to fund spending commitments or tax cuts elsewhere, and sector chiefs have embarked on a frenetic lobbying campaign to head off a tax raid. Earlier this week, Sky News revealed that Revolut was among a pack of challenger banks urging the chancellor to remove the threat of an immediate tax raid, with a dozen mid-tier lenders signing a letter calling on him to lift the threshold at which the corporation tax surcharge applies to banks from £100m to £500m; the signatories also included Monzo, Paragon Bank and Shawbrook. Healey has not yet met the bosses of the UK's biggest banks, but has held face-to-face talks with Jamie Dimon, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, who has raised the prospect of cancelling a major new UK headquarters if international banks are hit with higher UK taxes.

Pollen Street Group said its assets under management reached £8.5 billion at the end of June, split almost evenly between private equity and credit strategies, while fee-paying AUM rose 18% to £5.5 billion. The group raised £1.8 billion in credit capital that remained undeployed at period-end, supporting future fee growth, and completed fundraising for Private Credit Fund IV above expectations, with almost half of the larger fund already invested. Fund-management revenue increased 22% like-for-like and fund-management EBITDA rose 73% to £16.1 million, helped by a 90% increase in performance fees. The investment company's reported balance-sheet return was 3.4%, reduced by a 3.8% mark-to-market impact from Shawbrook's share-price decline and a 0.2% one-time equalization effect tied to the larger Credit IV; excluding those, the underlying return was 7.4%. Pollen Street returned £25 million to shareholders in the first half, including £7 million of buybacks, and announced a further £17 million interim dividend, while targeting a €1.75 billion to €2 billion size for Private Equity Fund VI.