Tuesday newspaper round-up: Darling threatens banks over lending

28th Jul 2009 06:16

Alistair Darling has effectively threatened Britain's biggest banks with a competition inquiry should they fail to increase cheap lending to mortgage borrowers and small businesses.The Chancellor met the chief executives of seven of the country's biggest banks in the Treasury yesterday along with Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, Baroness Vadera, Minister for Competitiveness, Small Business and Enterprise, Lord Myners, the City Minister, and senior officials from the Bank of England, the Times reports.Sir Win Bischoff was last night named chairman of Lloyds Banking Group and immediately threw his weight behind Eric Daniels, the state-backed lender's embattled chief executive. He takes over on September 15 from Sir Victor Blank, who is stepping down in the wake of shareholder disquiet following the bank's disastrous acquisition HBOS, the Telegraph reports.Tiscali and AOL have the slowest broadband connections of Britain's leading internet service providers, the first authoritative study of download speeds has found. A report published on Tuesday by Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, highlights the gap between the broadband speeds that internet companies advertise and the online experiences of their customers. Ofcom found that Tiscali and AOL, both owned by Carphone Warehouse, supplied average download speeds of 3.2-3.7Mbps and 3.3-3.9Mbps respectively in April to customers on the packages offering up to 8Mbps, the FT reports.Royal Bank of Scotland is considering backing out of a government scheme to lend up to £1bn to cash-starved companies. The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) announced proposals yesterday for RBS and Lloyds to boost lending to stricken wind-farm developers, which have been hit hard by the credit crunch, which has dried up the flow of funding just as the Government has called for a vast expansion of renewable electricity, the Times writes.Resolution, the acquisitions vehicle of Clive Cowdery, threatened to drop its bid interest in Friends Provident last night after the insurer rejected its takeover advances for a third time. Resolution said that it would consider the "relative attraction" of Friends Provident, the UK's fourth-biggest life and pensions provider, against other opportunities in the sector before deciding on its next move, the Times reports.Doubts over the future of Bay Restaurant Group, the company behind the La Tasca and Slug and Lettuce chains, will be allayed today when the company announces a financial restructuring involving a debt-for-equity swap. The group, formerly part of Robert Tchenguiz's leisure and property empire, has agreed terms with Kaupthing, the Icelandic bank, and Commerzbank of Germany on a refinancing that will reduce its debt burden by an estimated £100m to £150m,the Times writes.National Express, the transport group, is understood to have asked the Takeover Panel to impose a "put up or shut up" deadline on the takeover approach from CVC, the private equity group, and the Cosmen family from Spain.The order would force the prospective bidders into making a firm offer within four weeks or walking away, the Times reports.The US housing market is showing further tentative green shoots after new house sales rose 11% in June - the biggest monthly increase in eight years - albeit on the back of a sharp fall in prices. The rise was the biggest monthly increase since December 2000, reaching the highest level on an annualised basis since November 2008, leading some to predict the bottoming out of the two-year glut in the market, the Telegraph reports.Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group is set to inject A$80m (£40m) into the Australian budget airline Virgin Blue after the carrier warned of looming full-year losses. Virgin Blue Holdings is carrying out a deeply discounted A$231m rights issue and cancelling its dividend in an effort to shore up a balance sheet, the Independent reports.US regulators will share more detailed information on short-selling activity with the public as they move to boost transparency of the trading that was blamed for fuelling market turmoil during the financial crisis. The US Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday that in the coming weeks, aggregate short-selling volumes in shares would be published on a daily basis while information about short-sale transactions in all publicly traded shares would be provided with a one-month delay, the FT reports.