Worrying news in the week before Easter: cocoa prices are soaring.

The price of a ton of cocoa topped $9,000 on futures markets. Bloomberg News points out that that is more than a ton of copper – for the first time since 2003.

Bloomberg reports:

Poor harvests on the back of bad weather and crop disease in West African growers, where most of the world’s cocoa is grown, and little sign of production relief elsewhere have left the industry in a bind.

The price increase is too late to affect this year’s Easter eggs, but it will affect chocolate prices over the course of the year.

But prices are already high. The Guardian’s intrepid money editor, Hillary Osborne, found that Lindt’s gold-wrapped bunny is the priciest Easter treat – with rising cocoa costs an important factor.

Cocoa has become something of a speculative asset: it has outperformed bitcoin in the last 12 months.

The UK’s energy regulator is considering bringing in a lower price cap for vulnerable people and charging less at less busy times of day, among other possible changes mooted in a newly published paper.

The energy price cap has become a hugely important part of the UK’s energy policy in recent years, after the global energy shock prompted by Russia’s war on Ukraine. The steep increase in prices has meant that almost every household is paying the same rate for their energy, at the maximum allowed by Ofgem, the regulator.

Ofgem on Monday said it would consider a “more dynamic cap” to “encourage consumer flexibility” and reward them for using energy at less busy times. Energy companies are excited about the possibilities for balancing the grid better by shifting the time of some activities – such as putting on the washing machine during the day.

Tim Jarvis, Ofgem’s director general of retail and markets, said:

While the price cap played an important role in protecting consumers from the loyalty penalty that existed before its introduction, the energy market is changing as we move to net zero, and we recognise the systems we have in place may need to change too.

We’re looking in detail at the elements of the price cap that have worked well and the challenges we’ve identified in recent years, while also considering how a wide range of future consumers will use and pay for energy, to make sure we develop the right measures that will protect and benefit consumers across the board.

You can read more here:

Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun also lavished special praise on one of his key lieutenants. Stephanie Pope was recently promoted to chief operating officer, and will now be promoted further to head of the commercial planes division.

Pope is expected to be in the mix to succeed Calhoun. If that does turn out to be the case, she would become the first woman to lead Boeing in its 107-year history.

Calhoun wrote:

Stephanie knows our company inside and out and has a proven track record of superb leadership, including an innate talent for listening and responding to our people. Stephanie is a third-generation Boeing employee.

She is deeply committed to our company, to our employees and to our shared future; and she is the perfect person to take on the leadership of our commercial airplanes business at this moment.

Dave Calhoun’s time at Boeing has been dominated by crisis from the start. As he wrote in a letter to employees on Monday, he switched from chair to chief executive because of “unprecedented circumstances”.

Most of his time in the first few years consisted of dealing with those “circumstances”: two fatal crashes of the company’s bestselling 737 Max model, after a design flaw left the plane vulnerable to a single faulty sensor.

Calhoun did not name the 737 Max in his farewell letter, but he did acknowledge that Boeing is still struggling with the effects of that crisis, which forced the company to ground its key product for 20 months. Calhoun said:

It has been the greatest privilege of my life to serve in both roles and I will only feel the journey has been properly completed when we finish the job that we need to do. We are going to fix what isn’t working, and we are going to get our company back on the track towards recovery and stability.

The 737 Max crisis happened to coincide with the coronavirus pandemic, which wiped out revenues for most of Boeing’s airline customers, forcing it to rely on heavy bond market support from the US Federal Reserve.

More recently, Calhoun has had to contend with yet another safety issue. This time, thankfully, nobody was seriously injured when a door plug blew out in mid-air on an Alaska Airlines flight.

The latest safety scandal has put Boeing on the back foot once more, just as it was hoping to persuade airline customers and passengers that it has improved its culture.

After opening the day about flat, European stock markets have taken on a reddish hue at the start of this Easter-shortened week.

The FTSE 100 is down by 0.5%, while France’s Cac 40 is down 0.4%. Only Italy’s FTSE MIB and Germany’s Dax have edged into positive territory.

Margrethe Vestager says the big tech companies may not be meeting their new obligations.

She said:

These are serious cases. Had we been able to solve that with merely a discussion it would have been solved by now.

You can now read the full story here:

Microsoft has managed to avoid scrutiny so far, making it and ByteDance the only “gatekeepers” that do not – so far – face the prospect of an intense year of investigation.

The European Commission has said that the investigation will be concluded within 12 months – a quick turnaround in the usually glacial proceedings of technology policy.

If found to be non-compliant, the big tech companies could face fines of up to 10% of worldwide turnover, or 20% if they continue to violate the law.

The commission can also force the companies to sell off parts of their business, or ban acquisitions.

Asked if the Commission was rushing the process, EU industry chief Thierry Breton said the investigations should not be a surprise, according to Reuters. He told a press conference on Monday:

The law is the law. We can’t just sit around and wait.

The big tech “gatekeepers” are not showing any sign of backing down in response to today’s news of a full-scale investigation into their compliance with the EU’s digital markets act.

The companies may well have expected the action. The huge policy teams at the big tech companies will have carefully considered every word of the new law to try to work out where they might be under threat – and where the EU’s European Commission might take action.

A Meta spokesperson said the company was endeavouring to comply with the act’s guidance. Meta was criticised over offering customers the ability to pay upfront to avoid being tracked. A Meta spokesperson said:

Subscriptions as an alternative to advertising are a well-established business model across many industries, and we designed Subscription for No Ads to address several overlapping regulatory obligations, including the DMA.

Google, which said it has made significant changes to its services, said it “will continue to defend our approach in the coming months”.

Apple said it was “confident” its plan complied with the DMA and that it would work with the Commission.

The government’s shareholding in NatWest Group has fallen below 30% for the first time since 2008, the bank has confirmed.

The public’s stake in the group was last reported at 30.98% on 15 March.

While it doesn’t trigger any material changes in terms of the bank’s relationship with the state, there are some technical consequences: namely that the government no longer is classed as a “controlling shareholder” in relation to UK listing rules. That means at AGM season, it will no longer have to hold two separate votes to approve director appointments (one for the government to say yes or no; and one for other “independent shareholders” to give the greenlight).

The government appears to have accelerated its sell-off of NatWest stock in recent weeks, and taken advantage of a rise in the lender’s share price after it reported the biggest annual profit last year since the 2007 financial crisis. (It was that crisis that led to the bank’s £46bn taxpayer bailout in 2008, when it was still known as Royal Bank of Scotland.)

The government is hoping to return NatWest to private ownership by 2025-26, and is now teeing up a campaign that could see a chunk of its stake sold directly to retail customers as early as this summer.

Commenting on the latest stakeholding, a NatWest spokesperson said:

We welcome the government’s continued commitment to returning NatWest Group to private ownership. With the government shareholding now below 30%, we have been pleased with the recent momentum to achieving this shared ambition, which we believe is in the best interests of the bank and our shareholders.

UK retail sales rose marginally in the year to March, ending a run of 10 months of declines as the cost of living crisis bit, according to a long-running survey.

The Confederation of British Industry’s measure of retail sales showed that on balance more retailers reported higher sales over the last 12 months – ending a run of negative balances running back to April. The balance of firms is weighted by their size.

Martin Sartorius, the CBI’s principal economist, said:

The stabilisation of retail sales in March should give some hope that the sector’s downturn is bottoming out. The earlier timing of Easter will likely mean weaker year-on-year sales in April, but easing inflation should support retail spending going forward.

However, retailers are not out of the woods yet. Internet sales declined in the year to March after growing in February, the survey found.

The EU designated six big tech companies – five American and one Chinese – as “gatekeepers” in its digital markets act. That means those companies have special responsibilities because of their dominance of key mobile technologies.

Their “position can grant them the power to create a bottleneck in the digital economy”, the EU said.

The gatekeepers are Google owner Alphabet, retailer Amazon, iPhone maker Apple, TikTok owner ByteDance, Facebook owner Meta and computing giant Microsoft. They had until 7 March 2024 to comply with the law.

The European Commission suspects that Apple and Alphabet, which also runs the Android operating system, may not be allowing developers to steer users away from the big tech systems. For years, companies such as music streamer Spotify and Fortnite maker Epic Games complained that they were blocked from allowing customers to pay via their own systems.

The companies have made changes to try to get around the new laws, but “Alphabet’s and Apple’s measures may not be fully compliant as they impose various restrictions and limitations”, the commission said.

The commission is also looking into:

• Whether Google search results give preference to its own services, such as Google Flights and Google Shopping.

• Whether Apple is preventing users from uninstalling pre-loaded apps, and failing to offer choice for software such as web browsers.

• Whether Meta is not giving users a real choice over the use of personal data after it introduced a “pay or consent” model – which means users must pay to avoid having their data shared across platforms.

The commission is gathering information – the step before a full investigation – into:

• Whether Amazon is favouring own-brand products on its marketplace.

• Whether Apple fees for alternative app stores are blocking competition.

Legoland and Madame Tussauds may introduce surge pricing this summer, meaning customers will pay more for that and other well-known attractions at peak times.

Surge pricing is an obvious response to standard economic theories: when demand is higher, prices are higher. It is also hated by almost everyone.

Everyone except company executives, that is. Scott O’Neil, the chief executive of Merlin Entertainments, which owns the attractions, said changing prices to reflect higher demand was “very intuitive”, in an interview in the Financial Times. He said:

If [an attraction] is in the UK, it’s August peak holiday season, sunny and a Saturday, you would expect to pay more than if it was a rainy Tuesday in March.

Airlines have pushed up prices when demand peaks for decades, but the promise of newly “dynamic” prices can still cause uproar, such as when fast food chain Wendy’s last month said it would introduce the practice for burgers. The chain insisted that its plans were “misconstrued”, and that its new digital menu boards would only be used to offer discounts or change the menu at different times of day.

Merlin was previously a member of the UK’s FTSE 100 index before it was taken private in 2019 – just before the coronavirus pandemic caused a huge depression for theme parks.

The FT reported that Merlin made record revenues of £2.1bn in 2023, but that visitor numbers are still below pre-pandemic levels. Its other attractions include Sea Life, the London Dungeons, the London Eye, Alton Towers and Sydney Zoo.

Kingfisher’s share price has taken a further step down since the early trades: it is now the biggest faller on the FTSE 100. It is down 2.1%.

Insurer Direct Line is another notable mover: its shares, listed on the FTSE 250 index of mid-sized companies, are down 12% after Belgian company Ageas on Friday said it would not make any offer after its initial approaches were rejected.

It is a fairly quiet open on European stock markets on Monday morning.

On the FTSE 100 Kingfisher is one of the bigger fallers, but even so it is only down by 0.6%.

Here are the opening snaps via Reuters:

• EUROPE’S STOXX 600 FLAT

• BRITAIN’S FTSE 100 FLAT

• FRANCE’S CAC 40 FLAT, SPAIN’S IBEX DIPS 0.2%

• EURO STOXX INDEX AND EURO ZONE BLUE CHIPS FLAT

• GERMANY’S DAX UP 0.1%