Wednesday newspaper round-up: Portugal bailout, BT, North Sea oil

4th May 2011 06:07

José Sócrates, Portugal's caretaker prime minister, said on Tuesday night that he has reached agreement on a bail-out from the EU and the International Monetary Fund. No figure was disclosed regarding the value of the loan. However, it is thought to be valued at around €78bn (£70bn), according to the Telegraph.The UK's communications watchdog yesterday revealed it may have to step in to settle a dispute over how much BT wants to charge rivals to run their superfast broadband cables via its telegraph poles and ducts. BT is currently locked in talks with rivals Virgin Media, Fujitsu, BSkyB, TalkTalk and a host of smaller players over pricing but the two sides are struggling to reach a compromise, according to the Independent.Oil and gas leaders will on Wednesday make a last-ditch effort to persuade the Government to abandon a £10bn tax grab on North Sea energy companies, amid warnings the levy will "utterly destroy" the industry. Chief executives are expected to tell the energy select committee that the tax will close down fields early and mean the majors find it difficult to sell older fields to new owners, reports the Telegraph.EasyJet has increased its booking charge by at least 45 per cent, despite an Office of Fair Trading investigation into unreasonable debit and credit card fees. The budget airline has imposed an £8 charge on passengers paying for their flights using a debit card, up from £5.50. It is the third increase in seven months, the Times reports.An Australian surfer who set up an e-commerce business five years ago with £750,000 has sold it for £70 million. Phillip McGriskin and his partner Paul Townsend started Envoy Services, a cross-border payment processing business, with only three staff. Yesterday WorldPay, the global payment processing group acquired by Advent and Bain Capital from Royal Bank of Scotland last year, said it had bought Envoy for an undisclosed sum. This is understood to be about £70 million, the Times reports.Pierre Cardin boasts that he has never been forced to hold a sale in 60 years as a fashion entrepreneur. But yesterday the French couturier, 88, the inventor of unisex fashions and the first designer to pioneer ready-to-wear clothes, hung out the "Sale" sign on his whole business empire. Roughly €1bn (£900m) would be the right price, he told The Wall Street Journal, so long as he could remain as creative director, the Independent reports.Renren has replaced the head of its audit committee on the eve of its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange, as the Chinese social networking group seeks to protect itself from the fall-out of an accounting controversy at another company. The offering of Renren, which has nothing to do with the other company's accounting problems, is set to raise as much as $743m and has seen unusually strong demand from investors, says the Financial Times.Insurer Standard Life has shut down three controversial funds used by thousands of pension savers to cushion themselves from stock market falls. The funds, Sterling Global Liquidity, Euro Global Liquidity and U.S. Dollar Global Liquidity, hold £3.5?billion between them. They are used by pension funds rather than being sold directly to customers, reports the Daily Mail.