supplier

BRITS could receive as much as £2,500 in free cash to spend in the likes of Greggs, M&S or Waitrose, thanks to a scheme run by a major energy supplier.

E.ON has relaunched its ‘refer a friend’ scheme and the company will hand out £50 in retail vouchers for customers and their friend, if there is a successful referral.

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So under the new, improved scheme both the existing customer and the new one will both receive the voucher.

They can be spent at a number of high street retailers, including Waitrose, Argos, Greggs and Ticketmaster.

However, the money is capped at £2,500.

Both parties will receive their voucher once the new customer has paid their first direct debit.

Julian Lennertz, Chief Commercial Officer, E.ON Next, said: “We know our customers have really valued the £50 credit they received on their energy account under our previous scheme.

“We’ve also learned that our customers want more choice over where and how they spend their £50 thank you, so they can get the best value for them.

“That’s why they can now choose from hundreds of retailers.

“And because we appreciate all of our customers, old and new, we have expanded the scheme to reward our new customers as well as the existing ones who are making the referrals.”

E.ON Next’s new scheme has been launched in collaboration with its new referral partner, MentionMe.

To be eligible, all existing customers have to do it simply sign up to the scheme.

There are some strings attached though.

To be eligible for the voucher, the new customer must transfer from another supplier and sign up to through the existing customer’s unique MentionMe link.

Customers can make up to five referrals a day, with an overall total of 25 referrals each year.

Which means that both the customer and friends could be better off to the tune of £2,500.

Last month, millions of households were urged to apply for free energy grants worth up to £1,700.

Families who have fallen behind on their gas and electricity bills qualify for help through a little-known fund.

The British Gas Individual and Families Fund is open to prepayment meter customers who are in up to £1,700 worth of energy debt.

If you can’t get help through British Gas’ Individual and Families Fund, you might be able to knock money off your energy bill through the Household Support Fund.

The fund is a giant £742million pot of money that’s been shared between councils in England.

These local authorities are now distributing their share of the fund and can set their own eligibility criteria.

That means what you’re entitled to depends based on where you live, but you will likely qualify for help if you’re on benefits or a low income, and may be able to get energy vouchers or cash.

Speak to your local council about what help is on offer. You can find your nearest by visiting – www.gov.uk/find-local-council.

Depending on what benefits you’re on, you might be eligible for a Winter Fuel Payment, the Warm Home Discount or a Cold Weather Payment too.

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For Kalpesh Patel, Diwali, the festival of lights celebrated across India, might well mark lights out for his eight-year-old diamond cutting and polishing unit.

The 35-year-old employs about 40 workers who transform rough diamonds into perfectly polished gems for exports at the small factory in Surat, a city located in the western Indian state of Gujarat.

His business has survived multiple speed bumps in recent years. But United States President Donald Trump’s mammoth 50 percent tariffs on imports from India might be the final nail in the coffin for his unit, part of an already struggling natural diamond industry, he said.

“We still have some orders for Diwali and will try to complete them,” he told Al Jazeera.

Diwali, arguably India’s single biggest festival, scheduled for late October this year, usually sees domestic sales of most goods soar. “But we might have to shut the business even before the festival, as exporters might cancel the orders due to high tariffs in the US,” Patesh said.

“It is becoming increasingly difficult to pay the salaries and maintain other expenses with falling orders.”

He is among the 20,000-odd small and medium traders in Surat, known as the “Diamond City of India”, which together cut and polish 14 out of every 15 natural diamonds produced globally.

The US is their single largest export market. According to the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), India’s apex body for the industry, the country exported cut and polished gems worth $4.8bn to the US in the 2024-25 financial year, which ended in March. That is more than one-third of India’s total exports of cut and polished diamonds, at $13.2bn over the same period.

Dimpal Shah, a Kolkata-based diamond exporter, told Al Jazeera that orders have already started getting cancelled. “Buyers in the US are refusing to offload the shipped products, citing high tariffs. This is the worst phase of my two-decade-old career in diamonds.”

US imposes penalty

A 25 percent reciprocal tariff on all Indian goods, which Trump announced on April 2, came into effect on August 7, after talks between the two countries failed to yield a trade deal by then. Negotiations are continuing.

Meanwhile, on August 6, Trump announced an additional 25 percent tariff, taking the total tariff rate to 50 percent. He termed the additional tariff that would come into effect from August 27 as a penalty for India’s continued buying of Russian oil, as the US president tries to push Moscow into accepting a ceasefire in Ukraine.

For the gems industry, which already faced a pre-existing 2.1 percent tariff, the effective tariff now amounts to 52.1 percent.

Ajay Srivastava, the founder of Global Research Trade Initiative (GTRI), a trade research group, termed the Trump government’s additional hike as an act of “hypocrisy”, citing how the US itself continues to trade with Russia, and how China – Russia’s biggest oil buyer – faces no similar penalty.

“Trump is targeting India out of frustration as it refused to toe the US line on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and for its refusal to open its agriculture and dairy sector,” he added, referring to broader ongoing trade talks and differences over US demands for greater access to critical Indian economic sectors.

Yet, whatever the reasons for Trump’s tariffs, they are hurting a diamond industry already bleeding from multiple hits.

Diamond sector badly hit

More than 2 million people are employed in diamond polishing and cutting units in Surat, Ahmedabad and Rajkot cities in Gujarat — and many have already suffered salary cuts in recent years, first because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

“The pandemic led to economic slowdown affecting the international markets in Hong Kong and China,” Ramesh Zilriya, the president of Gujarat’s Diamond Workers Union, told Al Jazeera. The “Western ban on rough diamond imports from Russia due to the Russia-Ukraine war and the G7 ban on Russia also affected our business”, he added.

Russia has historically been a major source of raw diamonds.

Zilriya claimed that 80 diamond workers have died by suicide over the past two years because of this economic crisis.

“The situation in the international market led to the wages of the workers getting halved to approximately 15,000-17,000 rupees ($194) per month, which made survival difficult in the face of rising inflation,” he said.

Once the Trump tariffs fully kick in, Zilriya fears that up to 200,000 people in Gujarat may lose their livelihoods.

Already, more than 120,000 former diamond sector workers have applied for benefits. A 13,500-rupee ($154) allowance per child, to support their families, was promised in May by the state government to those who have lost jobs due to the tumult in the sector in recent years.

But the tariffs, pandemic and war are not alone to blame for the crisis: Lab-grown diamonds are also slowly eating into the market of their natural counterparts.

“Unlike natural [diamonds], the lab-grown diamonds are not mined but manufactured in specialised laboratories and priced at just 10 percent of the natural ones. It is difficult even for a seasoned jeweller to identify the natural and lab-grown with a naked eye. The taste of consumers is now shifting to lab-grown [diamonds], as they are cheap,” said Salim Daginawala, the president of the Surat Jewellers Association.

Decline in exports

In the 2024-25 financial year, India imported rough diamonds worth $10.8bn, marking a 24.27 percent decline from the $14bn imported in 2023-24, as per the statistics by the GJEPC.

The exports of cut and polished natural diamonds similarly witnessed a 16.75 percent decline, with exports declining to $13.2bn in 2024-25 as compared with $16bn in the preceding year.

“This move [the tariffs] would have far-reaching repercussions on the Indian economy that might disrupt critical supply chains, stalling exports and threatening thousands of livelihoods. We hope to get a favourable reduction in tariffs; otherwise, it would be difficult to survive,” said Kirit Bhansali, the chairman of the GJEPC.

The tariffs could also hurt US jewellers, warned Rajesh Rokde, the chairman of the All India Gems and Jewellery Domestic Council (GJC), a national trade federation for the industry.

“The US has around 70,000 jewellers who would also face a crisis if the jewellery becomes expensive,” Rokde added.

A domestic solution?

Traders say that the need of the hour is to increase domestic demand for diamonds and diversify to new markets.

A stronger domestic market “would not only contribute to the local economy, but would also create jobs for several thousands of people”, said Radha Krishna Agrawal, the director of Narayan das Saraf Jewellers in Varanasi city, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The tariffs, he said, could prove a “blessing in disguise” if they end up reducing the dependence of India’s gems industry “on other countries”.

Bhansali said that the domestic gems and jewellery market was growing, and expected to reach $130bn in the next two years, up from $85bn at the moment. The industry is also looking for new markets, including Latin America and the Middle East.

Gold already offers an example of a strong domestic market, cushioning the impact of hits on exports, said Amit Korat, the president of the Surat Jewellery Manufacturers Association.

But for now, the diamond sector in India has no such shield. It needs to be saved, urgently, said Patel, the Surat business owner on the cusp of shutting down his polishing and cutting unit.

Without help, he said, “the business will lose its shine forever”.

A distributor to the UK’s major supermarkets has said it is being held to ransom by cyber hackers.

Logistics firm Peter Green Chilled said it supplies supermarkets including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Aldi, but it is relatively small compared with larger UK food distributors.

It told BBC’s Wake Up to Money clients were “receiving regular updates” including “workarounds” on how to continue deliveries while one of its customers said thousands of their products could go to waste.

Recent major cyber-attacks on Marks & Spencer and Co-op were larger, but the attack highlights the challenges smaller logistics firms face, an industry source said.

In an email sent on Thursday, seen by the BBC, Peter Green Chilled said it had been the victim of a ransomware attack.

A ransomware attack is when hackers encrypt a victim’s data and lock them out of computer systems, demanding payment to hand back control.

The email said no orders would be processed on Thursday, although any order prepared on Wednesday would be sent.

Peter Green Chilled confirmed to the BBC the cyber attack happened on Wednesday evening but it said it was not in a position to discuss further.

“The transport activities of the business have continued unaffected throughout this incident,” its managing director Tom Binks said.

One of Peter Green Chilled’s customers, Black Farmer founder Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones, said he had “something like ten pallets worth of meat products” with Peter Green Chilled.

He said if those products don’t get to the retailers in time they will have to be “thrown in the bin”.

Ten pallets is “thousands and thousands of packs of products, sitting there, and the clock is ticking,” he said. “There’s no information. Everything along the chain has to be stopped, and then there are thousands of pounds worth of product that are just wasting away.”

Peter Green Chilled is a firm based near Shepton Mallet in Somerset that transports chilled food, mainly to regional stores.

There are much larger chilled food distributors in the UK – for example, Lineage, GXO, and Culina.

An industry source said these big firms, which distribute the largest volume of chilled food in the UK and internationally, have the resources to try to combat cyber attacks, while smaller firms may not.

However, Phil Pluck, chief executive of the Cold Chain Federation, said the warehousing, food storage and distribution sectors were “constantly under attack”.

A few years ago, there were a few cyber and ransomware attacks, but in the last year there has been “a huge increase”, he said.

About half of the food consumed in the UK “goes through the cold chain sector”, he said, so hackers “know how critical” distribution is for “putting food on supermarket shelves”.

He added that was “a really good lever to put the pressure on our companies to actually pay that ransomware”.

Mr Pluck said that he knew of at least ten attacks on member companies, but that firms like to keep attacks “under the radar”.

He said cyber attacks were “hugely underreported” in any sector “because once you’re attacked you lose control of your company” both through the attack and the mitigations by police and insurers.

Co-op narrowly avoided being locked out of its systems during an attack which exposed customer data and caused shortages of stock.

A ransomware group claimed responsibility for the attack on M&S which saw customer data stolen and empty shelves. The retailer itself said it had suffered a cyber attack.