Image: Catholic Church (England & Wales)

Following the archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s announcement that he wants the Church of England to help non-profit credit unions to compete with payday loan company Wonga, it has emerged that the Church invested over £1m in one of the controversial lender’s main financial backers.

A spokesman for Lambeth Palace, the archbishop’s official residence, was forced to admit that the Church’s £5bn pension fund holds an investment in Accel Partners, an American venture capital firm that happens to be one of Wonga’s biggest investors. This is in direct contravention of the Church’s own policy that forbids it from investing in payday lenders.

Egypt is bracing itself for further violence as rival mass rallies are planned for today, one side encouraged by the military, who ousted the country’s first democratically elected leader.

Meanwhile, in Tunisia a nationwide general strike has been staged to protest the killing of an opposition leader. The governing Islamist Ennahda party denies accusations from relatives of Mohamed Brahmi that they were complicit in his killing. Brahmi, who led the Movement of the People party, was shot in his car by gunmen on motorbikes yesterday morning.

In the US, oilfield services giant Halliburton has agreed to plead guilty to destroying evidence related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. The US department of justice said the firm’s guilty plea was the third by a company over the spill and would require them to pay a maximum fine of US$200,000.

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