Iran said on Thursday it was close to reaching an interim nuclear deal with the US and other world powers, but the prospect of such an agreement was immediately criticised by Israel and faced new obstacles in the US Congress. Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s new foreign minister, said the two sides in the nuclear talks in Geneva would begin drafting a joint statement on Friday for a preliminary agreement. This would buy time for a longer, final negotiation about Iran’s nuclear programme, the Financial Times says.

Rating agency Standard & Poor’s has cut France’s sovereign credit rating by one notch to “AA”, citing high unemployment and recent reforms to the tax system. “The downgrade reflects our view that the French government’s current approach to budgetary and structural reforms to taxation, as well as to product, services, and labour markets, is unlikely to substantially raise France’s medium-term growth prospects,” S&P said in a statement on Friday, the Financial Times reports.

George Osborne is receiving an unexpected windfall worth hundreds of millions of pounds thanks to a super-tax on wealthy people who buy property through a foreign company. The windfall suggests that foreign holders of British property have a greater willingness than expected to pay tax, potentially stoking the Chancellor’s appetite to squeeze the group further in his Autumn Statement, The Times writes.

The embattled energy industry was given a lift on Thursday when a 12-month investigation by regulators into alleged rigging of the wholesale gas market ended with a clean bill of health. The dual inquiry by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Ofgem concentrated on six suspicious trades at the end of the gas market trading year in 2012. It concluded there was no evidence of market manipulation, according to The Guardian.

Shares in Twitter took flight on its stock market debut yesterday, becoming the biggest technology IPO since the Facebook flotation last year. Within seconds the microblogging service’s shares soared from $26 to $44.90, valuing the seven-year-old business that is yet to make a profit at $31bn. Its stock continued to trade strongly through the first day as a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange, The Times reports.

The head of Nissan has warned the car maker would reconsider its future in the UK if a push to leave the European Union succeeds, The Guardian says. Carlos Ghosn, Chief Executive of the Japanese motoring company, told the BBC his company would re-evaluate its position if the UK were to leave the EU. Speaking at the launch of Nissan’s new Qashqai model, he said: “If anything has to change we [would] need to reconsider our strategy and our investments for the future.”