Monday newspaper round-up: Banks, Fuel duty, Amlin...

14th Feb 2011 06:48

Britain's banks, which are preparing to announce multi-million pound annual bonuses to senior staff, are pocketing hidden subsidies worth more than £32.5bn a year from the taxpayer, it was disclosed last night. Research by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) think-tank calculated that the banks are receiving substantial extra support on top of the estimated £1trn direct and indirect aid already pumped into the financial system to keep it afloat, the Independent reports.Barclays pulled out of a key area of small business lending last week, even as it was promising the Chancellor that it would boost loans to small firms this year. The bank told customers with turnovers of less than £5m a year that it would no longer provide them with asset finance, potentially withdrawing credit to tens of thousands of business clients. Barclays confirmed that it was withdrawing from small scale asset finance. "Changes have been made," a spokeswoman said, the Times reports.Solar power companies are considering a legal challenge to Government plans for a review of the "feed-in tariff" (FIT) scheme, set up last year to boost investment in green energy schemes. After months of uncertainty, the announcement by the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne last week of a fast-track review has created "pandemonium" in the industry, critics claim, leaving all but the smallest domestic projects "impossible to finance" and costing Britain's stuttering economy anything up to 18,000 new jobs, the Independent reports. Employment is likely to fall over the next few months as private sector jobs growth fails to keep pace with public sector redundancies, according to a survey by a leading professional body. Manufacturing and private sector services will generate the majority of new jobs in the first quarter of the year, according to the survey of 750 employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and KPMG, the professional services firm, the FT reports. Record high levels of fuel duty could be costing the Exchequer up to £1.2bn because lorry drivers are filling up with diesel on the other side of the Channel. According to the Independent Petrol Retailers Association, drivers are avoiding British filling stations and taking advantage of the significantly cheaper fuel available on the Continent. After the latest duty and VAT rise and rising crude prices, the price of diesel has this month touched 133.38p a litre, the Times reports.Special offers in supermarkets are so bamboozling that up to two thirds of shoppers are unable to work out which deal represents the best value. Research using actual supermarket promotions has found that, when presented with competing offers, as few as 34% of consumers correctly identified the best deals. The findings, by the polling company Lightspeed Research, are timely because the amount of special offers in stores recently hit record levels, with nearly 40% of supermarket sales on offer, the Times reports.The chief executive of Amlin, Charles Philipps, has warned that the Lloyd's of London insurer could relocate overseas if regulatory requirements to be introduced in 2013 are too aggressive. Mr Philipps used an interview with The Daily Telegraph to warn UK regulators that any "gold plating" of Europe's Solvency II capital requirements could force the insurer to reconsider its position in the UK, the Telegraph reports.The world's biggest farm has put up the for-sale sign, after being hit by a collapse in grain prices during the world financial crisis, and then by the droughts and the fires that raged across its territories last summer. Ivolga, a farming conglomerate which controls 1.5m hectares of land across Russia and Kazakhstan, is presently negotiating with Royal Bank of Scotland, which leads its creditors, to restructure a $300m loan it arranged in 2007, the Telegraph reports. China is in talks to build an alternative to the Panama Canal that would link Colombia's Atlantic and Pacific coasts by rail - a move that Bogotá also hopes will spur Washington to push for Congressional approval of a US-Colombia free-trade pact. "It's a real proposal? ... and it is quite advanced," Juan Manuel Santos, Colombia's president, told the Financial Times. "The studies [the Chinese] have made on the costs of transporting per tonne, the cost of investment, they all work out."