Wednesday newspaper round-up: Jaguar, Wm Morrison, Gold...

2nd Mar 2011 06:35

The manufacturing recovery was in full swing yesterday as four leading exporters reported booming profits, while confidence in the sector remained at record high levels.However, one of Britain's leading industrialists has warned that the Government must do more to boost the sector or risk stifling future growth. Sir Kevin Smith, chief executive of GKN, said there was a lack of vision in Government and stronger leadership was needed to revitalise the British economy, the Times reports.Britain's biggest motor manufacturer will take on 2,500 new workers to build the new baby Range Rover and design and engineer a new generation of Jaguars. Speaking at the Geneva Motor Show, the chief executive of Jaguar Land Rover said that the beginning of production of the £29,995 Evoque, the new baby Range Rover, at its Halewood plant, would mean 1,500 new assembly jobs on Merseyside, the Times reports.The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, has expressed "surprise" that the public is not more angry with the bankers who caused the recession. In some of his strongest language yet, Mervyn King today claimed the fall in households' living standards was the fault of the financial services sector and he expressed sympathy that innocent families paying the price. "The people whose jobs were destroyed were in no way responsible for the excesses of the financial sector and the crisis that followed," he told MPs on the Treasury Select Committee, the Telegraph reports.Gold hit an all-time high and oil surged higher after the US said it was moving military resources to the Mediterranean heightening fears of a full-blown war in the Middle East. The US said it was moving marines and two warships into the Mediterranean on Tuesday night amid growing international pressure on Muammer Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, to stand aside. Spot bullion rose 1.5% to a record $1,432.10 a troy ounce, surpassing the peak of $1,430.95 hit in December, the FT reports.A Procter & Gamble director stepped down abruptly yesterday after being charged in connection with one of America's biggest insider trading cases. Rajat Gupta, a former Goldman Sachs board member who also once ran the McKinsey & Co management consultancy, is accused of passing on share tips to Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund billionaire at the centre of a far-reaching investigation by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC said that Mr Gupta used his position on the Goldman and P&G boards to give Mr Rajaratnam, a friend and business associate, illegal tips about upcoming profit announcements by both companies, the Times reports.Wm Morrison is preparing to announce next week that it is returning about £1bn to shareholders in full-year results that are also expected to outline a pick-up in trading at the retailer over the past month, according to people familiar with the matter. It also emerged on Tuesday that Sir Ken Morrison had sold most of his remaining individual stake in the retailer he spent 50 years building, although his family retains a substantial holding, the FT reports.PPL, the US utility, has reached a deal to buy Central Networks, the UK electricity networks business of Eon, Germany's largest utility, for more than $5.6bn (£3.7bn) in cash and $800m (£500m) of existing public debt to be assumed through consolidation. The Pennsylvania-based power company is snapping up the UK's second-biggest electricity network, which provides power to more than 5m customers in the Midlands. PPL and Eon expect to close the transaction in early April, the FT reports.India's biggest shopkeepers have stopped ordering Dettol and Harpic after a bitter dispute over Reckitt Benckiser's prices ? and Unilever has swooped to capitalise on the boycott by offering discounts on its rival cleaning products. The two British-listed groups are fighting to control a booming consumer goods market, in which sales are growing at nearly 13% a year and are expected to exceed £10bn in 2011, the Times reports.The top 10 hedge funds made $28bn for clients in the second half of last year, $2bn more than the net profits of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and HSBC combined, according to new data. Even the biggest of the hedge funds have only a few hundred employees, while the six banks employ 1m between them. According to the data, the top 10 funds have earned a total of $182bn for investors since they were founded, with George Soros making $35bn for clients - after all fees - since he set up his Quantum Fund in 1973, the FT reportsBailed-out lender Citigroup handed pay and bonuses totalling more than $40m (£25m) to four senior executives last year as the bank returned to profit for the first time since the financial crisis. Though the decision of chief executive Vikram Pandit to take an annual salary of just $1 has been well-publicised, Citi significantly increased rewards for his key lieutenants, the Telegraph reports.Broadband customers of some of the UK's largest providers may only be getting a quarter of the speeds they are paying for, according to "shocking" new research from the communications watchdog. Ofcom's fourth broadband survey found that speeds across a range of packages were on average 45% lower than the headline speed advertised, even worse than six months ago. Where delivery involved copper wires the discrepancy was even greater, the Independent reports. Very large companies pay lower rates of corporation tax than smaller businesses, according to research by Oxford University that will fuel debate about whether big business pays enough tax. The finding that the 100 largest companies paid a lower rate of corporation tax than smaller companies in all but two sectors is likely to be seized upon by critics who have mounted protests against avoidance by big companies. But the research also highlighted the contribution of big business, showing that 81% of all corporation tax is paid by the largest 1% of companies, the FT reports