Wednesday newspaper round-up: Lloyds Banking, Tullow Oil, Barclays

16th Sep 2009 06:15

The European Commission has warned Lloyds Banking Group that it may have to split off Halifax as punishment for the billions of pounds of state aid that it has received.Neelie Kroes, the Competition Commissioner, has yet to make a final decision, but banking sources say it is clear that she is planning to impose draconian penalties on Lloyds. Ms Kroes is understood to have rejected Lloyds' attempt to limit the remedial action it must take to selling Cheltenham & Gloucester and making limited disposals in Scotland, the Times reports.Anadarko, of the US, with partners Woodside, Repsol, and Tullow, the UK-listed oil company, will reveal as early as Wednesday that they have established a new oil frontier that stretches 1,100km along the coast from Ghana to Sierra Leone. The announcement will be made off the back of discoveries made by the Venus well Anadarko has been drilling off Sierra Leone, people close to the US company said, reports the FT.Warren Buffett has admitted that he was contacted by Barclays at the height of last September's financial crisis with a request to provide insurance for the British bank's bid to buy Lehman. He confessed to a Fortune conference that he asked for additional details from the bank to be faxed to him, but didn't hear anything, until 10 months later, when he realised that a Barclays executive, understood to be Bob Diamond, had left him a follow-up voice message on his mobile phone at the time, the Telegraph reports. Meanwhile, representatives of the defunct Lehman Brothers estate asked a US judge to re-open the contract that transferred the bank's North American assets to Barclays Capital a year ago, claiming that up to $8bn in cash and securities was transferred to BarCap without the court's knowledge, the FT reports.ITV, the commercial broadcaster still embroiled in a debate over who should be its next chief executive, was told by the Competition Commission on Tuesday that it should not increase the prices that it charges advertisers. The regulator said that it believed the broadcaster was too powerful for a price control on its advertising sales to be relaxed. ITV executives, battling plunging revenues, had been confident of winning a relaxation of the six-year-old rules, the Times writes.The heads of two central banks signalled yesterday that the US and UK economies have emerged from recession. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, said there were signs that the British economy was growing again ? implying that, by definition, the recession was over. Ben Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, called the end of America's recession but also warned that the country's recovery would be slow, the Times reports.A Conservative election victory would trigger an emergency budget to ensure low interest rates, cut public spending and effect a "programme of reform no less radical than the one that restored the UK's economic competitiveness in the 1980s and 1990", according to George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, the Telegraph reports.The World Bank is spending billions of pounds subsidising new coal-fired power stations in developing countries despite claiming that burning fossil fuels exposes the poor to catastrophic climate change. The bank, which has a goal of reducing poverty and is funded by Britain and other developed countries, calls on all nations in a report today to "act differently on climate change", the Times reports.BT is set to offer customers more competitive fixed-line telephone deals after Ofcom relaxed its pricing rules citing the rise in competition.The communications regulator yesterday announced plans to deregulate the retail telecoms market, in effect loosening ties on BT. The FTSE 100 group can now offer discounts on its bundle of services (such as broadband and digital television) including, for the first time, fixed-line calls, the Independent reports. Ocado will announce on Wednesday that it is appointing an experienced investment banker as a finance director in the clearest signal yet that the online retailer is gearing up for an initial public offering. The appointment enables Jason Gissing, one of the trio of former Goldman Sachs bankers who founded Ocado, to stand down from the role of finance director he has held for the past 10 years, in order to concentrate on other aspects of the business, the FT writes.FTSE?250 companies' pension shortfalls doubled to £12bn in a year by the end of June, a report shows, and would have been much higher had yields on corporate bonds not risen through the credit crunch. The report, by Pension Capital Strategies and Cazenove, concluded that if rates on risk-free gilts had been used to discount liabilities - as used by the Pension Protection Fund insurance scheme - the shortfall would be £80bn, up from £55bn a year earlier, the FT reports.Citigroup, the giant financial conglomerate that was twice bailed out by the US government last year, has floated a plan to raise new money from the stock market to help it repay taxpayers. The company's shares slid more than 8 per cent in early trading yesterday after it emerged that it was working on a plan to sell as much as $5bn in new stock, diluting existing equity investors, the Independent reports.