Tuesday newspaper round-up: British Land, Northern Rock, LSE

18th Aug 2009 06:09

Blackstone, the American private equity group, is set to buy half of the Broadgate Estate in the City of London from British Land. The deal could be announced as early as today when British Land discloses its results for the three months to June 30, which are expected to show a further fall in asset values, says the Times.Building societies will be unfairly disadvantaged by the Government's plan to split Northern Rock in two, the mortgage lending industry has told European industry regulators. The Treasury's proposal to split the Rock, which was nationalised last year after coming close to collapse, into a "bad bank" containing poorly performing mortgages and a "good bank" with better assets was uncompetitive, the Building Societies Association (BSA) said, according to the Independent.Turquoise, the London-based trading platform launched last year by the world's biggest investment banks as an alternative to traditional stock exchanges, has sent sales documents to potential bidders and hired UBS to find a buyer for its business. The London Stock Exchange Group, Deutsche Boerse and NYSE Euronext are among companies to have received the sales documents, according to Bloomberg, writes the Telegraph.FTSE 100 chief executives still took home bonuses equal to 90 per cent of their basic pay, despite plummeting profits and dividends at top companies. Research by the pay consultancy Hewitt New Bridge Street found that the median salary for a FTSE 100 chief executive was £800,000 last year, meaning the bonus would be £720,000, reports the Independent.The hiring freeze in the City of London is beginning to thaw, according to recruiters, but it is still too soon to crack open the champagne. New figures from Morgan Mckinley recruiting consultants show the momentum gained in the jobs market in June has been maintained through July, once the seasonal summer slowdown is taken into account, writes the FT.Some big companies in the UK are facing unexpected hitches when hiring hand-picked staff from abroad because of the government's flagship points-based immigration system. Those affected by the difficulties, which have prompted fears about London's standing as a global business centre, range from GlaxoSmithKline, the drugmaker, to big investment banks such as Morgan Stanley, says the FT.Ryanair and easyJet have triggered a price war among Britain's regional airports as the site operators fight to keep traffic this coming winter, according to the Times.Barack Obama's "cash for clunkers" car scrappage scheme appears to be behind a dramatic recovery in industrial output in the New York area, reports the Independent.More than a million people who are currently saving for retirement in final salary occupational pension schemes could find themselves switched to less generous defined contribution schemes by their employers in the next three years, according to survey findings from human resources consultancy Watson Wyatt, writes the Telegraph.Montagu Private Equity wants to sell Survitec, the defence group that makes safety equipment for British forces in Afghanistan. Montagu has appointed NM Rothschild to handle the sale for £300 million, a price that will test the market's appetite for leveraged buyouts, says the Times.Pay deals for teams of "plain vanilla" fixed income, commodity and currency (FICC) traders are being "bid up" as a result of the rush by companies for products that avoid the complexity of once-fashionable derivatives according to the Telegraph.Essar, the Indian energy, steel and shipping group, has made a bid for Royal Dutch Shell's Stanlow refinery at Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, part of a £1.2 billion offer for three fuel manufacturing plants. The other two are in Germany, at Heide and Harburg, says the Times.The US brought criminal charges on Monday over the alleged theft of account details linked to 130m credit cards, a case of identity theft that far exceeds anything of its kind that has ever come to light before. Millions of European cardholders are among those whose cards were compromised in the fraud, according to one security expert, with the customers of a single unidentified UK card issuer accounting for one in 10 of the potential victims, writes the FT.Reader's Digest Association, owner of the world's biggest-selling magazine, has announced plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, reports the Times.