Date: Monday 17 May 2010 Prudential was poised last night to launch its long-awaited $21bn rights issue, the largest in British corporate history, to fund its controversial $35.5bn takeover bid for AIA in Asia.
Britain’s leading insurer and its advisers were finalising the prospectus for the AIA purchase, the biggest insurance deal to date, with the hope of setting the price of the rights issue and publishing the document before the London market opens this morning, the Times reports.
Britain’s carmakers are accelerating out of the slump in the motor industry and will be producing nearly 50% more vehicles a year within five years. But the extent of the depression among the country’s foreign-owned companies — with factories closed for months last year, shifts cut and short-time working introduced — means that even by 2014 Britain’s carmakers still will not match the number made in 2008, the Times reports.
Airports in parts of the British Isles remained closed until the early hours of Monday as a cloud of volcanic ash from an Icelandic volcano disrupted air passengers for the third time in a month. Manchester, Liverpool, Doncaster, Carlisle, Humberside and East Midlands airports were shut, as were those in Northern Ireland, the National Air Traffic Service said. Dozens of flights were cancelled as the no-fly zone was in operation between noon on Sunday and 1am on Monday – with a possibility that it might be extended. Heathrow and Gatwick were due to be shut down from 1am on Monday, the FT reports.
Fears that economic recovery will fail to stem a tide of rising unemployment are likely to be stoked today by revelations that businesses are reluctant or unable to recruit new staff. The Institute of Chartered Accountants for England and Wales says in a report that although businesses’ confidence stabilised in the second quarter, they plan to increase their workforces by only 1.1% in the coming year,the Times reports.
The pace of recovery in the crucial London retail market slowed last month, data released today shows – although analysts say fears that the bounceback may be coming to an end are overdone. Retail sales in central London rose by 3.6% last month compared to April 2009, according to the British Retail Consortium, down from growth of above 10% in March. Sales across the whole of the UK fell by 2.3%, the Independent reports.
George Osborne will on Monday create an independent fiscal watchdog to rectify what he claims are “fixed” Treasury forecasts, as he prepares public opinion for a painful round of spending cuts and tax rises in next month’s Budget. The chancellor will name Sir Alan Budd as the interim head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, charged with looking into the Treasury books and preparing a “proper set of national accounts”. Sir Alan is a former chief economic adviser to the Treasury, the FT reports.
One of the most comprehensive assessments of executive pay and remuneration of UK companies in the FTSE 100 reveals that chief executive pay increased by an average of 6% in the past year. The results of the Pay Report for The Telegraph highlights the return to health of many of Britain’s biggest companies. Pay has returned to all-time highs powered by a rebound in share prices during the past 12 months.
Government advisers have dampened the likelihood of a break-up of Britain's major banks in favour of internal reforms in a move that will reassure the City that potentially damaging regulatory change is unlikely.New guidelines to govern the interplay between retail banking and investment banking are now more likely than an outright split, according to senior advisers, the Telegraph reports.
Price pressures in Britain are intensifying with annual inflation expected to rise further above the 2% target when the latest figures are published on Monday.Economists predict that higher petrol prices helped to drive the consumer prices index (CPI) – the official measure of inflation – up to 3.5% in April, from 3.4% in March, the Telegraph reports.
BP has finally had a degree of success in its attempt to stem the calamitous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as the Obama administration continues to demand that the UK oil giant commits to paying the full price of the disaster. BP on Sunday succeeded inserting a tube into a broken pipe on the sea bed in order to "capture at least some of the oil escaping". BP had hoped to start siphoning off the oil on Saturday, but the cord to take oil to surface became entangled and the operation was cancelled, the Telegraph reports.
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