Tuesday newspaper round-up: British Airways, Bonus tax, Google

15th Dec 2009 06:28

Almost one million air passengers face travel chaos over Christmas after British Airways cabin crew voted for a 12-day strike starting on December 22. The dispute, which will cost the loss-making BA hundreds of millions of pounds, threatens to intensify, with unions planning more mass walkouts. Unite won overwhelming support for the strike over changes it says have been imposed, including the reduction of one crew member on all flights, the Times reports.The European Union yesterday gave the green light to the Government's bail-out of the Royal Bank of Scotland, described as Europe's biggest ever state handout to a private company. European Commission officials said that the support and restructuring plan for RBS, which it calculated at £60bn to £100bn, was the largest government subsidy in 52 years of EU competition policy, the Telegraph reports.The Government is expected to extend the scope of its controversial banker bonus tax to ensure that the City house of N M Rothschild and other banks with non-standard year-ends do not slip through the net, The Times has learnt. Rothschild, which has operated in the heart of the City for two centuries, had been set to avoid the tax because, unusually among UK investment banks, it pays its annual bonuses in June, two months after the temporary tax is due to end on April 5 next year.Alistair Darling has warned banks that he will not water down his 50 % supertax on bonuses or offer special deals in a standoff in which brokers and banks have threatened to move key staff out of the UK. The chancellor has been deluged with claims by banks that the tax would raise far more than the £550m he predicted. They have demanded that he make the levy less onerous, the FT reports.The fallout from the Government's controversial bonus tax was felt in earnest yesterday as one of the Square Mile's biggest trading companies paved the way for its staff to move abroad to more attractive tax regimes. Tullett Prebon, an interdealer broker, has offered employees the chance to move to one of its overseas offices days after Alistair Darling announced the 50 per cent "supertax" on bank bonuses in his pre-Budget report, the Independent reports.Google has secretly developed a new mobile phone that it hopes will challenge the iPhone's dominance of the lucrative smartphone market. The phone, code-named Nexus One, is already being tested by external mobile phone experts and it is expected to go on sale early next year. A person who has seen the phone told The Daily Telegraph said it was a "huge leap forward" from current crop of smartphones including the iPhone. Meanwhile, the introduction of next generation mobile phones into the UK has hit a "significant" hitch after it emerged that people who use the state-of-the-art devices at home may stop their televisions working, or even those next door. The Government is in the process of switching the country from analogue television signals to digital by 2012, the Independent reports.Unilever was expected last night to announce within hours the appointment of Jean-Marc Huet as its chief financial officer. Mr Huet yesterday announced his resignation as finance chief at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), the pharmaceutical company. He is expected to replace James Lawrence, who announced last Thursday that he was leaving Unilever. He had lost out on the chief executive's job to Paul Polman, and will leave the maker of Dove and Persil at the end of the year ? the same time that Mr Huet will depart BMS, the Times reports.Support for a global tax or emissions trading scheme for shipping and aviation is growing at the Copenhagen climate change talks, according to two sources close to European Union negotiators. If agreed at the tense Copenhagen summit, the money is likely to go towards a £100bn "climate aid" fund to help poorer states deal with global warming. Either a tax or emissions trading system specifically for these industries could provide up to a quarter of this amount, the Telegraph reports.The seemingly inexhaustible demand for property meant that house prices continued to rise last month, despite a fresh supply of stock coming on to the housing market. The proportion of estate agents reporting an increase rather than a decrease in house prices was at its highest for three years, according to figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). The figures show that 35% of surveyors reported rising rather than falling prices in the past three months, up from 34% in October and the highest quarterly reading since November 2006, the Times reports.Participants in the auction that led to Terra Firma's disastrous £4bn acquisition of EMI are challenging the account of events set out in a lawsuit filed by the private equity firm against Citigroup. Guy Hands, Terra Firma's chairman, has alleged that the bank fraudulently misrepresented the position of other bidders on the eve of the bid deadline in the 2007 auction, knowing that they had dropped out but still encouraging him to make a 265p binding bid, the Times reports.The Greek prime minister announced a crackdown on corruption and tight controls on spending on Monday but disappointed market-watchers expecting more decisive measures to reduce the budget deficit. George Papandreou told trade unionists and business groups that public sector workers would receive real wage rises next year in spite of Greece's deteriorating public finances, the FT reports.BAE Systems has welcomed a decision by the Government Accountability Office, the US watchdog, in favour of the UK-based arms manufacturer after it protested against the award of a lucrative contract to a US competitor. The $3bn (£2.7bn) defence contract for the production of FMTVs, or Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, was awarded to Oshkosh by the US Department of Army in a surprise decision in August, the FT reports.