Tuesday newspaper round-up: Private healthcare, Corn prices, Bank bonuses...

12th Oct 2010 06:32

Britain's private healthcare sector is under scrutiny from the Office of Fair Trading amid complaints from new players that the market is not sufficiently competitive.The regulator has conducted an initial inquiry and has not decided whether to pursue a full investigation. Circle, a relatively new private hospital company run by a former Goldman Sachs banker, is understood to have submitted a complaint to the OFT. It argues that agreements between the bigger private hospital providers and insurance companies such as Bupa, AXA/PPP and Aviva, which control almost 80% of the market between them, could be anti-competitive, the Times reports.Corn prices surged for a second day on Monday as expectations of a drastic shortfall in crop production raised fears of a repeat of the global food crisis of 2007-2008. Corn gained as much as 8.5% on the Chicago Board of Trade - the biggest rise since 1973 - triggering a limit that halted trading. The move followed a sharp government downgrade of harvest expectations last week, the FT writes.Banks will appear "arrogant and out of touch" if they continue to pay City workers excessive bonuses, warned Richard Lambert, the outgoing CBI head, as he called for a "global ceasefire" on bank pay. Richard Lambert, who will step down as director-general of the business group next year, said it would be "toxic in the extreme" if bankers received large payouts this year with the public sector facing huge cutbacks, the Telegraph reports.More than half of Britain's bankers expect to see substantial rises in their bonus payouts this year, according to a survey by eFinancialCareers, the City recruitment agency. Nearly a fifth think their payments will increase by a fifth or more, while half of UK-based bankers expect to receive at least half their payments in cash, despite calls from regulators and politicians for bonuses to be paid largely in shares, and deferred, the Independent writes.Google is using its vast database of web shopping data to construct the 'Google Price Index' - a daily measure of inflation that could one day provide an alternative to official statistics.The work by Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, highlights how economic data can be gathered far more rapidly using online sources. The official Consumer Price Index data are collected by hand from shops, and only published monthly with a time lag of several weeks, the FT reports.The way New Delhi handles Cairn Energy's proposed $9.6bn sale to Vedanta of a controlling stake in its Indian energy business is a crucial litmus test for foreign investment in India, the UK oil and gas explorer has warned. Sir Bill Gammell, Cairn chairman, said New Delhi's attitude to the "high profile" deal would be a signal to other major international companies of India's approach to its investors, especially those who potentially might wish to disinvest in Indian operations, the FT reports.Microsoft has sought to turn its back on more than decade of faltering performance in the mobile software business, betting heavily that it can use a new focus on design and marketing to recoup lost ground from Apple and Google. The about-turn was on display on Monday as the software company took the wraps off a new family of smartphones based on its latest mobile software, called Windows Phone 7, the FT reports.One of the biggest sellers of contentious Payment Protection Insurance policies is refusing to handle complaints until a legal spat about new standards is resolved, The Times has learnt. Lloyds Banking Group, which received more customer complaints than any other lender in the first half of the year, confirmed yesterday that it would freeze grievances from customers who think they were missold the policies until a review sought by the British Bankers' Association is complete.The US housing market faces a new threat from an escalating row over how banks have been repossessing homes. Bank of America last week halted foreclosures across the country amid allegations that homes are being seized based on data that has not been properly checked and moved too quickly through the process. JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial have suspended foreclosures in 23 states to address similar allegations, the Telegraph reports.Companies increasingly will hide behind bland press releases concealing embarrassing truths if regulators push ahead with a controversial crackdown on leaks, it was claimed yesterday. Three newspaper editors and the head of a financial newswire service accused the Financial Services Authority of a counter-productive policy that risked exacerbating insider dealing, the Times reports.House prices slid again in September as homes continued to flood on to the market, acting as a drag on prices, the latest estate agents' update suggests. Forty-four per cent of agents said that prices fell last month, up from 38 per cent in August, while only 6% said that prices rose. About half said they had remained unchanged. It marks the third monthly fall in the gauge of prices compiled by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the Times said. Students face paying up to £36,000 for a three-year degree course under plans for the most radical reform of universities in 50 years. Virtually all taxpayer funding will be removed from the majority of degrees and students will have to borrow tens of thousands of pounds to cover the doubled cost of courses. Universities will have to charge at least £7,000 a year to cover the loss of central government funding and some elite degrees are expected to cost up to £12,000 a year, the Telegraph reports.Computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) is to cut a further 1,300 jobs in the UK and switch work overseas, unions have claimed. The cuts, which come on top of up to 900 job losses announced in June, were immediately attacked by Unite as "butchery" of the company's UK workforce while the jobs were exported to different locations abroad. Nearly 4,000 jobs have now been shed at HP in the UK over the past two years, with the figure now set to rise to nearly 6,000 by next April, Unite said, the Telegraph reports.