The Financial Times

The Financial Times (FT) Group was bought by Japanese media group Nikkei Inc in 2015 for £844 million ($1.3 billion). The pricey sum stood at over 30 times the publication’s annual earnings. This made it  the most highly-valued newspaper since media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion purchase of Dow Jones, which sold for 40 times its yearly earnings.

Nikkei produces media across print, digital and broadcast platforms. The Japanese firm’s acquisition of the FT in 2015 signaled wealthy investors’ desire to tap into the English-language financial news landscape. The deal covered the FT newspaper, FT.com, and titles such as The Banker and Investors Chronicle.

The FT Group generated £334 million ($518 million) worth of sales and £24 million ($37 million) of adjusted operating income in 2014. Over 70 percent of its circulation is digital.

The FT’s parent company, Nikkei, has a range of affiliate firms, including Nikkei CNBC and Nikkei National Geographic. The Japanese media giant also has a 58.6 percent stake in financial services giant Rating and Investment Information, Inc. (R&I) which is headquartered in Japan, but also operates in China.

The FT is a global daily publication, which covers business, politics, finance and economics. Founded in 1888, it framed itself as a prized "friend of the honest financier and respectable broker." The newspaper was bought by Pearson in 1957, which had interests in oil and media at the time. Pearson later became the biggest publishing and education firm in the world.

The FT’s distinctive pink shade is as much a symbol of the City of London as the iconic skyscraper known as ‘the Gherkin’. The publication offers readers a mixture of news, comment, and analysis through a largely neoliberal lens.

The publication has a team of almost 600 editorial staff spread across over 40 states.

Nikkei President Tsuneo Kita has promised the Japanese media giant will not influence the FT’s editorial lens. However, concerns have been raised over the FT’s editorial integrity under its new parent company. Following Nikkei’s purchase of the FT, Brooklyn-based New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi vented her concern on Twitter, comparing Nikkei to "Japan Inc."

Worrying. Nikkei is basically a PR machine for Japanese biz; it initially ignored the 2011 Olympus accounting scandal (which FT broke)

— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) July 23, 2015

Nikkei has also hardly covered the Takata airbag defect; almost no investigative work on that issue whatsoever. Nikkei *is* Japan Inc.

— Hiroko Tabuchi (@HirokoTabuchi) July 23, 2015

Ken Doctor of Harvard journalism fellowship program the Nieman Foundation also notes that the FT brand is key in Asia and America.

Oxford University-educated John Ridding became CEO of the FT in 2006. Over a 25-year period at the publication, he oscillated between a range of editorial and executive roles.

Ridding was editor of the FT’s Asia edition and Chairman of Pearson’s Asia wing, before becoming FT chief in 2006, where he worked under Rona Fairhead. Fairhead, who was HSBC’s non-executive director, had been appointed chief executive of the FT Group as Ridding received his promotion.

Ridding eventually replaced Fairhead as FT Group chief in 2012, and later helped to negotiate the FT’s sale to Nikkei.

He is believed to have a strong relationship with Nikkei execs.

Chief FT economics commentator Martin Wolf is considered to be one of the world’s most influential writers on neoliberal economics. A high-profile visiting fellow for international economics at conservative US think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), he is a regular attendee of the Bilderberg conference and is credited with predicting the 2008 global financial crisis.

Wolf was awarded the accolade of CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in 2000 for his "services to financial journalism."

The Oxford-educated FT commentator joined the World Bank’s young professionals program at the age of 25, and became a senior economist there in 1974. A self-described social democrat in his younger years, Wolf’s political compass shifted further to the right in the 1970s as he embraced free-market economics. In the 1980s, he ran a Thatcherite, pro-free trade think tank in London.

Wolf is extremely well-connected within the elite world of politics and finance, and has been a forum fellow at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos since 1999. The veteran FT commentator was also a member of Britain’s Independent Commission on Banking in 2010-2011. The inquiry explored structural and non-structural reforms to Britain’s broken banking sector in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Wolf has been named among the top 100 global thinkers by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

He is appalled by Russian foreign policy, and appears to believe Realpolitik is a luxury of the West. Likening Russia to a murderous man in an FT article on October 20, 2015, he accused it of stealing Ukrainian territory. He also chided Russia for allegedly stoking a civil war in Ukraine and demanding full repayment of $3 billion that Moscow lent Kiev in December 2013. Absent from his scathing analysis, however, was a mention of how US-EU interests are served by Ukraine’s regime change and the Western-backed International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) role in it.

Award-winning British journalist and FT Editor Lionel Barber previously acted as the FT’s US managing editor, its Brussels bureau chief, and its Washington correspondent. He is considered one of the world’s most influential right-wing economics commentators. He has also interviewed some of the world’s most prominent politicians, including US President Baraсk Obama, austerity advocate German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

Oxford-educated Barber was the only newspaper editor to attend a lavish state banquet at Buckingham Palace on October 21, 2015. The glitzy affair saw Prime Minister David Cameron, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Queen Elizabeth celebrate a so-called "golden era" in UK-Chinese relations.

So farewell Buckingham palace #red carpet #Xi #golden era pic.twitter.com/swBIWGfmkz

— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) October 20, 2015

The FT published six complete pages of adverts from Chinese firms welcoming President Xi Jinping to Britain on the eve of his arrival.

The governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney also bagged an invitation, but Cameron’s ex-strategy chief Steve Hilton who accused the PM of embarrassing Brits by "sucking up" to the Chinese government, was not so lucky.

Influential left-wing French economist Thomas Piketty accused the FT of "ridiculous" and "dishonest" criticism of his book ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ in May 2014, after FT Economics Editor Chris Giles attacked its central thesis.

Piketty drew on data spanning 20 states and 200 years to illustrate how the West is regressing to levels of inequality not seen since the Victorian era.

His 577-page meditation on inequality became a global publishing sensation, earning a top place on the Amazon bestseller list. It also sparked heated debate, causing progressive and rightwing economists to clash furiously.

Piketty’s book, which secured a top place on the Amazon bestseller list, has provoked a debate with opinions both pro and against.

Giles claimed Piketty had selectively picked data, fudged figures, and failed to rely on primary sources throughout the course of his analysis. The FT Economics Editor concluded there was scant evidence in Piketty’s source material to back up his theory that the most affluent people in the world are amassing more wealth, as the gap between wealthy and poor people in Europe and America widens.

But Piketty, who co-founded the Paris School of Economics, defended his research, telling Agence France-Presse (AFP) the FT’s criticisms were ridiculous because all of the paper’s contemporaries "recognize that the biggest fortunes have grown faster." Piketty had published his data online to encourage transparency and open conjecture.

While he acknowledged the data available to him was not perfect, he insisted his core argument remained intact. "Where the Financial Times is being dishonest is to suggest that this changes things in the conclusions I make, when in fact it changes nothing," he told the FT. "More recent studies only support my conclusions, by using different sources."

The FT accidentally identified a picture of Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa as the alleged architect of Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks in 2013, causing the publication considerable embarrassment. It is understood that he was mixed up with Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. A picture of the foreign minister was captioned as "among five detainees on trial."

The FT later published a correction and apology to al Khalifa. "We apologize unreservedly to His Excellency Sheikh Khalid for the error and any distress caused," the paper said. "We wish to make it clear that His Excellency Sheikh Khalid has no connection whatsoever with the article."

Top apology in this morning's FT. pic.twitter.com/54YkgwZ7WR

— Philip Cowley (@philipjcowley) December 23, 2013

Nikkei was accused of raiding FT staff’s pensions in October 2015, after it reportedly moved to take at least £4 million (US$ 6.1 million) annually from employee pension schemes.

The #FT press office says talk of £4m pensions cost savings is "untrue". Documents from FT HR say different #NUJ pic.twitter.com/lFnAE2wAAI

— FT NUJ Chapel (@ftnuj) October 18, 2015

National Union of Journalists (NUJ) General Secretary Michelle Stanistreet decried the maneuver, saying the "shabby treatment" of FT employees is not the behavior the union would expect from a FTSE 100 firm.

Commenting on the prospect of FT staff’s eroded pensions, Stanistreet said: "It is vital that Nikkei now involves itself properly in this consultation process and demonstrates to FT staff that they will be treated fairly and equitably."

Nikkei denied that it has proposed any pension changes to the Financial Times’ labor union.

In November 2015, FT journalists voted in favor of industrial action as tensions over proposed changes to the FT’s pension scheme heightened.

The industrial action had been scheduled to take place on the final day of Nikkei’s takeover of the paper. However, FT journalists eventually decided to delay the strike, following concessions reportedly offered by the Japanese media giant.