Friday newspaper round-up: JJB Sports, Royal Bank of Scotland, Lloyds

9th Oct 2009 06:14

The government is probing whether Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds are failing to meet officially mandated lending targets by deliberately pricing loans to small and medium-sized businesses at artificially high levels."We don't want them to make uneconomic loans but our research suggests they may be pricing credit at unrealistic levels," said one person close to the government, the FT reports.JJB Sports, which narrowly avoided administration in April, will today announce a share placing and open offer which will raise close to £100m, more than the total market value of the sporting goods retailer. The shares are likely to be priced below 25p, a significant discount to Thursday's close of 34½p. But demand for the new shares has been so high that the company expects to raise significantly more than its current market capitalisation of £86.5m, the FT reports.Marks & Spencer has fallen into third place among Britain's fashion retailers in terms of volume of clothes sold, and now languishes behind George at Asda and Primark. M&S's fashion sales have suffered this year, with consumers switching to cheaper rivals during the recession. But it has also been hit by a longer-term shift to discount rivals, including Primark and Matalan,the Times writes.Lord Mandelson is witholding about £400 million worth of loan guarantees from Magna, the buyer of Vauxhall, because he believes the UK is being shortchanged over jobs. The Government has appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm, to examine business plans for Vauxhall. Under the current plans, Magna is aiming to cut 10,500 workers at GM across Europe, the Times writes.The FT adds that the political row over Magna International's plan to buy Opel escalated on Thursday when UK and Spanish politicians lashed out against the carmaker's restructuring plan, culminating in Madrid boycotting a planned ministerial meeting to discuss the deal on Friday in Berlin.A senior back-office employee at Seymour Pierce stole about £150,000 from the broker and its clients - and the company has been fined a similar amount by the City watchdog for failing to guard against it. Exploiting dormant private client accounts and working in the settlements division, John White was able to commit the fraud without detection over three years before he was dismissed in 2006, the Financial Times has learnt.The United Kingdom has overtaken the United States to take the top spot in a ranking of the world's leading financial centres. The ranking, compiled by the World Economic Forum (WEF), places the UK at the top of a leader board of 55 of the world's largest financially-focussed countries. The US, which had previously held the top spot, slipped to third, behind second-placed Australia, the Telegraph reports.British businesses are preparing to switch from Royal Mail to alternative providers of postal services after being "held to ransom" by threats of strike action. A survey of 250 businesses by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) and Sky News found that 75% plan to look for a more reliable postal service after the Communication Workers Union (CWU) voted overwhelmingly for a national strike over working conditions, the Telegraph reports. The "mega-merger" between Ticketmaster Entertainment and Live Nation was thrown into doubt yesterday when UK regulators blocked the deal on anti-competitive grounds. The Competition Commission provisionally ruled against the proposed $2.5bn (£1.5bn) deal, saying it would "limit the development of competition in the market for live music ticket retailing," the Independent reports. BT is to more than double the number of homes able to use the company's ultra-fast broadband network, in a major revision of its next-generation infrastructure plans. BT's network - offering download speeds of up to 100 megabits per second - will run past at least 2.5m homes by 2012, or 10% of the UK's households, the FT writes.