Tuesday newspaper round-up: Tesco, BoE, Cameron

27th Oct 2014 21:35

The newly arrived chief executive of grocer Tesco, Dave Lewis, and his chief financial officer, Alan Stewart, have been handed generous incentives in the form of stock options on the company's shares. The multimillion-pound pay packages are what in the industry are known as "golden hellos". The justification for the aforementioned is the need to compensate them for having changed employers.Said derivatives have a value of £5.5m. In Mr.Lewis's case, he has received 1.66m options, priced at 230.36p a share. That is on top of his £1.25m salary and £525,000 annual payment in lieu of a pension which he will be given each year, The Times reports.The Bank of England has warned of "deep-rooted problems" in the City that are damaging the financial system in the eyes of the public, The Daily Telegraph reported.In her first speech as deputy governor of the Bank of England, Nemat "Minouche" Shafik said the behaviour of traders in foreign exchange, currencies and bonds markets highlighted to a pattern of behaviour that goes beyond "a few bad apples"."Public outrage is based on the fact that rewards in finance are disproportionate and the system is rigged. When people read of malpractice in financial markets, of trading profits being claimed through manipulation, collusion or dishonesty, they naturally wonder if they are one of the people who have been wronged," said Shafik.Several leading investors in Tesco want the company's new chief executive officer and chief financial officer to resign their non-executive positions at BSkyB and Diageo, respectively. In their opinion this is needed so they can focus on turning around the ailing grocer."BskyB and Diageo are both complex companies with unique challenges in their own right that require [and deserve] many days of focus from the non-execs," one top investor remarked, writes The Times.David Cameron has insisted that the UK will not pay "anything" like the £1.7bn demanded by the European Union, the Guardian reported on Tuesday."Britain will not be paying €2bn to anyone on 1 December, and we reject this scale of payment. We will be challenging this in every way possible," the prime minister said on Monday in a statement to the House of Commons."We want to check how the statistics were arrived at and the methodology that was used; we will crawl through this in exhaustive detail."Jaced Dominik, the EU budget commissioner, warned that it would be "extremely difficult" for Cameron to challenge the EU's demand and that the prime minister action could open a "Pandora's box", which could put the future of the UK's £3bn-a-year refund in question.The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended voluntary home quarantine for people at the highest risk for Ebola infection, The Wall Street Journal reported.Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said high risk individuals would include healthcare workers who suffer a needle stick while caring for an Ebola patient or who tend to a patient without protective gear.New rules introduced in April made it harder for people to qualify for loans, with many providers failing to meet their annual lending targets. That has prompted some of the latter to drop their fixed rate mortgages to record lows beneath 1%.Nationwide is now offering its cheapest five-year fix after cutting is rates last week. It is offering 2.84% with a deposit of 40% and a £999 fee, The Daily Express says.