Wednesday newspaper round-up: Northern Rock, British Airways, Thomas Cook,

10th Jun 2009 06:15

The Treasury has told its investment banking advisers to examine the feasibility of selling Northern Rock, the nationalised lender, back to the City in the autumn, The Times has learnt.A number of senior banking sources said that the Treasury was trying to ascertain whether it should float the state-controlled lender on the stock market, sell the bank to another financial group or remutualise.British Airways is paying its cabin crew and pilots up to twice as much as rival airlines, prompting the carrier to demand significant cuts from its staff. Data from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) shows for the first time how much higher BA's wage costs are than its rivals. The average salary for BA's 14,000 cabin crew, including bonuses and allowances, is £29,900, compared with £14,400 at Virgin Atlantic and £20,200 at easyJet, reports the Times.Leading City investors, who have mounted a spring offensive on boardroom pay, opened a new front in the battle yesterday when two top fund managers blamed consultants for allowing performance-linked pay in financial services to spiral out of control. Mark Burgess, head of active equities at Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM), told an Association of British Insurers (ABI) investor conference: "The compensation arms race that we've had in remuneration, driven by pay consultants, is neither viable, tenable, appropriate nor desirable," the Times reports.A majority stake in Thomas Cook, the FTSE 100 constituent and Britain's second-biggest travel group, is expected to come up for grabs after the collapse of Arcandor, the huge German retailer that has a 52.8 per cent holding. Creditor banks, led by Royal Bank of Scotland, are expected to put the Thomas Cook stake up for sale, with analysts suggesting that the most likely scenario is an orderly placing of the shares, the Times reports.Professional services group PricewaterhouseCoopers has moved to reassure 85,000 savers who hold Keydata Investment Services' capital protected investment plans that their money appears to be safe. But the administrator said that at least a dozen Individual Savings Account (Isa) plans had been found to be non-compliant. This had triggered a tax liability of around £5m which the company was unable to meet, leading to its insolvency, the Telegraph reports.The chairman of the Financial Services Authority (FSA) said yesterday that Europe should establish a single financial regulator that would supervise national watchdogs. Lord Turner said that the FSA was in support of a system where a pan-European regulator did not directly supervise financial companies - which would remain a national responsibility - but had a broad co-ordinating role, the Telegraph reports.The US Supreme Court allowed the sale of Chrysler to Fiat to go ahead, as it rejected on Tuesday an appeal by three Indiana pension funds that requested the deal be put on hold. The decision came after the US government and Fiat issued stark warnings that Chrysler would go out of business by next week if the deal was delayed, the FT writes.Glencore and Credit Suisse have created an index to let investors tap for the first time the views of the world's largest commodities trading house on raw material prices. The index will track about 20 raw materials from copper and oil to coal and sugar, setting the exposure to them in line with the views of Glencore's senior traders, the FT reports.Lloyds Banking Group is working on the basis that it may close up to 400 bank branches, including 164 Cheltenham & Gloucester outlets set to shut in November. The bank has hired Jones Lang de Salle and CB Richard Ellis, the property consultants, to carry out work on a reorganisation of its property portfolio that is thought to include the branch closures and disposals, the FT writes.Broadcaster Setanta could call in the administrators as early as today after the board was locked in an emergency board meeting late last night trying to stave off the group's collapse. As fears for the group's future intensified yesterday, the website subscriber page stopped working, the Independent reports.