Sunday Times
Alistair Darling acts on bank bonuses: The Chanceller of the Exchequer will be summoning the remuneration committee chairmen of the big four banks to a meeting this week to warn them they must adhere to guidelines established agreed by world leaders at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last week.
New Look listing: High street retailer New Look’s private equity backers, Apax and Permira, are said to be readying the the 40-year-old clothing chain for an early 2010, £1.7bn float.The equity firms acquired New Look five years ago for £699m and tried unsuccessfully to auction it off for £1.8bn to £2bn a couple of years ago.Other retailers (and New Look itself) have struggled post-flotation — steady earnings expectations and City short-termism seem to abut against the seasonal nature of high-street fashion chains. Still, New Look has bounced in and out of private ownership, but is considered one of private equity’s success stories.
Is Twitter over-valued? Is Twitter’s $1bn valuation a “throwback to the 1990s fantasy era of internet start-ups” or a legitimate valuation of a company that has yet to find
its money-making mojo? Twitter’s own users are sceptical, but investors are keeping the faith.
Judge demand government scrap compulsory retirement age: Mr Justice Blake has said he did not see how 65 can stay the compulsory retirement age during a test case brought by charities Age Concern and Help the Aged, together with the Equality and Human Rights Commission
Sunday Telegraph
Labour pledges cash for industry: The Business Secretary Lord Mandelson is expected bankroll a number of British industries he sees as the bedrock for the future of the economy. Rolls-Royce is in line to receive £45m of funding to build three new aerospace engineering plants and one civil nuclear plant that are expected to create around 800 jobs.
How not to run a board. More trouble at the top for ITV, where the Sunday Telegraph reports that large shareholders are less than enthused with the idea of Sir Crispin Davis stepping into the vacant chairman’s seat. One shareholder is said to have characterised Sir Crispin’s time at his former company, Reed Elsevier, as a “disaster”. Activist shareholders aren’t new, but is this a sign of greater board-level scrutiny? Or is the nominations committee, led by former HBOS chief executive Sir James Crosby missing something in the judgement department. Why is ITV’s board so far away from its shareholders on these senior appointments?
The spirit of Concorde is revived. BA may be charging some for seat selection, but it is also launching a new transatlantic service out of London City Airport called BA001 (famously Concorde’s Heathrow to New York’s JFK route). Apparently, two ’specially configured’ carriers will ferry City high-flyers (sorry) in considerable style to JFK — with one little stop along the way. It seems City Airport doesn’t have the requisite runway length for a packed A318 aircraft, so the service will touch down at Shannon to re-fuel. BA is, it says, turning this into a virtue by using the time to pre-clear passengers through US customs.
Observer
Britain is in danger of becoming an “aircraft carrier” for overseas business owners. Ownership is “not merely emotional,” argues Ruth Sunderland. “it is important for the UK to hold on to strategic industries, to retain skills and patents, and to
protect jobs and pensions.” As if to prove the point, a story in sister paper the Guardian today claims cult car-maker Aston Martin’s in dire straits as its Kuwaiti backers struggle to refinance its debt.
Kraft ready to offer £11bn for Cadbury: City sources say Kraft could bid 800p a share in a hostile bid, which could rise to 850p as the bid battle reaches its climax over the 60-day limit set by the panel for takeovers.This is a substantial increase to the informal offer made by the company for Cadbury of 745p a share three weeks ago.
Where City suits strip off for some very brutal business: City suits find a way to wind down as popularity for Mixed Martial Arts, or cage fighting, has taken hold amongst City professionals. The sport provides an outlet for macho posturing and the competitive spirit so necessary in their day jobs.
Greg Hutchings, the former boss of conglomerate Tomkins, whose name became synonymous with big business excess, could never be accused of being a Luddite. He’s embraced the Web in his bid to be reinstated at Lupus, from which he was bounced in July. He is using his website, www.gregegm.com, as a platform for his campaign to wrest his job back from the turnaround team brought in salvage industrial investment firm Lupus.
Mail on Sunday
Are you paid a pretty penny? Good looks really DO boost wages, researchers say: A study of 4,000 young men and women found that beauty boosted pay cheques more than intelligence. Researcher Jason Fletcher, of Yale University in the U.S found being of above-average looks boosted pay by 5 to 10 per cent.
For a plain person to be paid the same as a very attractive one, they would have to be 40 per cent brighter.
News of the World
What a right M&S: Marks & Spencer has quietly axed its no quibble three-month returns policy. Angry customers have bombarded online message boards to complain. The retailer insisted that the reduced returns policy of 35 days is still the best quarantee on the high street.
Saturday FT
Return Northern Rock to mutual status for the good of consumers, recommends a report from the Centre for Mutual and Employee-owned Business at the University of Oxford.
”We must not allow the UK’s financial services sector to return to the ’business as usual’
model that has proved so costly to the economy and public finances,” one of the report’s author Jonathan Michie says in an FT article.#
Indira Nooyi of PepsiCo takes the top slot in the FT’s top 50 women in world business, with Kraft’s Irene Rosenfeld in fourth. There are no Brits in the top 25.
