Thursday newspaper round-up: RBS, Vauxhall, Channel 4

5th Nov 2009 06:05

Senior managers at the Royal Bank of Scotland are scrambling to prevent widespread resignations following the publication of the bank's stringent bonus policy. City headhunters said they have been inundated with CVs from RBS bankers following the news that there would be no cash bonuses for 2009, says the Telegraph.The Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, has indicated that he is ready to provide financial support for GM's restructuring of Vauxhall and Opel after emergency talks with the boss of the American car maker, writes the Telegraph.The Independent adds that Mandelson, called GM's U-turn over the fate of its European arm "a pleasant surprise for workers" at Vauxhall in the UK.Terry Burns, the veteran economist and City stalwart, is set to assume the chairmanship of Channel 4 as the troubled broadcaster struggles to emerge from the financial doldrums, according to the FT.Bids go in today for the British Army's first front-line battle tank contract for more than 15 years as the Ministry of Defence's much-delayed "FRES" programme makes a second attempt to get rolling. Rivals BAE Systems and General Dynamics are submitting bids today, reports the Independent.The property company redeveloping the area around Wembley Arena will on Thursday launch a £180m rights issue. Quintain Estates & Development, which also owns Greenwich Peninsula, has received support from institutional shareholders for the cash call, which will be used to pay down debt and fund developments, says the Telegraph.Rupert Murdoch's adventures in cyberspace have suffered a number of setbacks, the media mogul admitted to investors last night. Three months after declaring that all his newspapers would start to charge for their websites, the owner of The Sun, The Times and The Wall Street Journal sounded a retreat, saying that a June deadline for imposing fees was not now likely to be met, writes the Independent.The UK is "skint" and the next Government could be forced to raise VAT beyond 17.5pc as it sets about "refilling the coffers", Sir Stuart Rose, the executive chairman of Marks & Spencer, has warned, according to the TelegraphThe Office for National Statistics said yesterday that men in part-time work are paid less than women, suggesting that at least one of the traditional imbalances between men and women is reversing, says the Independent.The Federal Reserve reiterated its desire to keep American interest rates "exceptionally low" for an extended period, but gradually reduce some of its quantitative easing as the US economy begins to recover, writes the Telegraph. Finance ministers from the world's leading economies will come under renewed pressure at their meeting in St Andrews this weekend to ensure that no nation will bring its fiscal and monetary stimulus to an end before "a durable recovery is secured", in the words of the G20 leaders' summit in Pittsburgh in September, reports the Independent.Costa, the coffee shop chain owned by Whitbread, could find itself in hot water over its claim in its advertising campaign that "7 out of 10 coffee lovers prefer Costa", according to the Times.