Friday newspaper round-up: Airlines, Oil, Nord Gold...

11th Feb 2011 06:33

Budget airlines could face an official inquiry into "rip-off" credit and debit card charges after the Which? consumer group lodges a "super-complaint" next month.The charity is using its statutory powers to ask the Office of Fair Trading to investigate the fees, which can reach hundreds of pounds for some transactions. Which? said that low-cost airlines were among the worst offenders: a family of four booking a return flight with Ryanair could be charged £40 for using plastic for a transaction that would cost the airline as little as 20p, the Times reports.Spain has imposed draconian rules on its saving banks and is preparing for part-nationalisation of the industry to restore confidence and boost the country's defences against contagion from the debt crisis in Portugal. The weaker banks, or "cajas", must raise Tier 1 core capital to 10% by September if they depend on wholesale capital markets for more than a fifth of their funding or if less than a fifth of their shares are in private hands. If they fail to do so, the government will seize control through the state bailout fund (FROB), the Telegraph reports.Oil prices above $100 (£62) per barrel have finally forced the world's cartel of energy producers to raise their output, as demand looks set to hit a world record this year. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), whose members include Iran and Saudi Arabia, raised production by 400,000 barrels per day to 29.7m barrels. Demand for Opec crude was revised up by around 400,000 barrels per day to 29.8m but the group said higher prices would dampen this in the coming weeks, the Telegraph reports.The price difference between the world's top oil benchmarks reached an intraday record of more than $16 a barrel, doubling in three weeks, as West Texas Intermediate oil disconnects from top global oil references Brent and Dubai. The spread fell back to just above $14. The divergence, which is wreaking havoc among energy investors and traders, prompted Saudi Arabia two years ago to drop WTI as its benchmark for pricing oil to US customers, the FT reports.China has ushered in the Year of the Rabbit with a $5.4bn (£3.4bn) shale gas acquisition in Canada. PetroChina has bought into a 50-50 joint venture with Encana as part of Beijing's planet-wide grab for energy assets. It is China's biggest overseas investment in a natural gas project, the Times reports.Nord Gold, the gold mining unit of London-listed Severstal, is to pull its £441m ($709m) London flotation after investors spurned its high valuation, making it the fourth Russian offering in the City to be hit by emerging market outflows in less than a week. The gold mining unit cancelled plans for the offering just hours after Chelpipe, a Russian pipe manufacturer, said it was withdrawing its $688m flotation, the FT reports.Kraft reported a 24% fall in fourth quarter profit, with earnings dragged down by the costs of integrating Cadbury, which it bought last year after a bitterly fought battle. Irene Rosenfield, the company's chairman and chief executive, warned that surging commodity costs as well as "persistent consumer weakness in many markets" would act as a drag this year. The company lowered its full year earnings forecast to between 11 and 13% from a previous projection in the "mid teens", the Times reports.The International Monetary Fund said the use of its own hybrid currency should be dramatically expanded to quell global economic instability. Managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that "special drawing rights", a type of international reserve asset, could help reduce the impact of exchange-rate volatility. SDRs represent a basket of four key currencies: the dollar, yen, euro and sterling. They were created by the IMF in 1969 to support the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system, but their use diminished, the Times reports.Two former directors of the British engineering company Mabey & Johnson (M&J) were found guilty yesterday of making illegal kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's government in Iraq to secure a €4.2m (£3.6m) bridge contract. Charles Forsyth and David Mabey were convicted at Southwark Crown Court, south London, of handing €420,000 in illegal payments to the Iraqi government between 2001 and 2002 in breach of United Nations sanctions, the Independent reports.