Monday newspaper round-up: Centrica, Recession, Royal Dutch Shell

25th Jan 2010 06:35

The cold winter weather this year will deliver a £100m boost to the profits of Britain's Big Six energy companies, according to forecasts by City analysts. Centrica, the owner of British Gas and Britain's largest gas and electricity supplier, with 16m customers, is likely to be the biggest single winner, Peter Atherton, utilities analyst at Citigroup, said. He forecast that Centrica would rake in extra operating profits of between £40m and £50m over the past month. Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) was likely to enjoy a boost to profits of £25m to £30m over the same period, the Times reports.A cashflow crisis that threatened the financial security of the Rocco Forte Collection, the luxury hotel group owned by Sir Rocco Forte, has been averted after HBOS, part of Lloyds Banking Group, agreed to extend a £300m loan pending a long-term solution, The Times has learnt.Gordon Brown will anticipate the end of the deepest recession in Britain since the 1930s by outlining today how the Government will try to lock in the economy's nascent recovery. His comments will come before publication of official data tomorrow that is expected to show that Britain is out of recession. Gross domestic product (GDP) figures for the fourth quarter of 2009, to be released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), are expected to indicate that the economy has grown for the first time in 18 months after a period in which it shrank by 6%, the Times reports.Meanwhile, most Britons believe that house prices will rise this year as the country awaits official confirmation that the worst peacetime recession is finally over. A survey by Rightmove, the property website, found that 53%in the UK believe house prices will rise over the next 12 months, compared with just 10% at the beginning of last year, the Telegraph reports.The 100 most senior employees at Goldman Sachs in London will have their total pay capped at £1m when the Wall Street bank reveals its 2009 bonuses this week, in a nod to the Government's calls for cutbacks in bankers' pay. Less senior British employees who are awarded more than £1m for their work last year will have 60% of any amount over £1m paid in deferred stock, in line with Financial Services Authority guidelines, the Telegraph reports.Senior Wall Street bankers heading to the World Economic Forum will use the meeting in Davos to lobby regulators against a rigorous implementation of Barack Obama's plan to cap the size and trading activity of banks. They will also oppose the break-up of large financial institutions and insist there should be a concerted effort to tackle the "too big to fail" issue by other regulatory means, the FT reports.Alistair Darling has publicly voiced his opposition to Barack Obama's plans to break up the banks, which the US President revealed to a startled financial world last Thursday. Mr Darling said: "If everyone does their own thing it will achieve absolutely nothing. The banks are global. They are quite capable of organising themselves in such a way that if the regime is difficult in one country they will go to another one, and that doesn't do anyone any good," the Independent.Land Securities is preparing to invest in property-based derivative instruments that could help hedge exposure to its largest developments in a first move by the UK's largest property company outside buying and building physical real estate. Land Securities has appointed two of the leading banks in the sector, Royal Bank of Scotland and JPMorgan, to act on its behalf in trading property derivatives, the FT reports.Royal Dutch Shell's expansion in Canada's controversial tar sands will be "very much slower" than in recent years, the company's new chief executive has said, as the group makes a strategic shift away from high-cost "unconventional" oil production. Peter Voser, who took over at Europe's second-largest oil and gas group in July, told the Financial Times that Shell now planned to rely more on conventional oil and gas reserves for its future growth.