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Good morning from the Financial Times.

Today is Monday, January 17th, and this is your FT News Briefing.

We'll start today's show with a scoop about pension money, private equity, and Israeli spyware.

Investors that have for a long time been able to hide behind, you know, not disclosing their

involvement in this messy situation. We'll now have to be sort of held accountable for it.

And global management consultants have been under fire for aiding state corruption.

The latest is Bain & Company for its role in a scandal in South Africa.

The FT's Joseph Cottrell will tell us about that.

And new data on European car sales shows electric moving ahead of diesel.

I'm Joanna Gau, InfraMark Filipino, and here's the news you need to start your day.

The FT has learned that pension money from the UK's largest energy supplier was used to buy an

Israeli spyware maker that's blacklisted by the US. The parent company of British gas used

retirement funds to become a major investor in a private equity fund. This fund then bought a

majority stake in the Israeli company called NSO. The FT's private capital correspondent Kay Wiggins

broke the story. And she reminds us why NSO is so controversial.

NSO is an Israeli company that makes cyber weapons, essentially, so spyware that can be used

to hack phones. And so that has been found on the phones of human rights activists and journalists.

So NSO itself has now been put on a trade blacklist by the US Department of Commerce,

which says that there's evidence that it has supplied its spyware to foreign governments,

which had then used that to maliciously target people ranging from journalists to

...