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Friday newspaper round-up: RBS, Land Securities, M&B

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Date: Friday 18 Apr 2008

LONDON (ShareCast) - The Royal Bank of Scotland is considering launching a massive rights issue to rebuild its capital reserves, a sharp reversal of its previous position that could trigger a wave of similar offerings by other lenders, writes the FT.

Land Securities, the UK's biggest listed property company, moved a step closer to its planned break-up by receiving indicative bids for its outsourcing arm Trillium, reveals the Telegraph.

The board of Mitchells & Butlers is set to come under renewed shareholder pressure after Punch Taverns abruptly ended all contacts with its UK pub rival, according to the FT.

Société Générale moved to draw a line under the rogue trader scandal which cost the bank almost €5 billion (£3.2 billion) last night when it announced that Daniel Bouton, its figurehead, would be stripped of his operational role, says the Times.

Inflation is likely to rise above 3pc later this year as a weak pound exacerbates rising commodity prices and labour costs in China pick up, the Bank of England's chief economist has warned, writes the Telegraph.

House prices will fall by 15 per cent in the next two years, pushing one in ten homeowners into negative equity, leading investment bank Morgan Stanley has forecast, says the Times.

A £20bn ($39.9bn) British government contract to supply Saudi Arabia with Typhoon fighter jets could be in jeopardy because of an internal US administration debate over whether to approve the deal, says the FT. BAE is the prime contractor to the UK government on the deal.

The new head of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has pledged to prosecute cases more quickly, confiscate more of fraudsters' assets and restore confidence in his embattled agency in the wake of the BAE affair, according to the Independent.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has launched a broad investigation into the auction rate securities market, a $330bn (£165bn) market that virtually collapsed in February when many banks chose to support the auctions with their own bids,” says the Telegraph.

Josh Birnbaum, a previously obscure employee on a mortgage trading desk inside Goldman Sachs hits the headlines by helping make a $4bn (£2bn) profit betting on a housing market crash, the biggest single windfall ever by a major Wall Street bank, and takes home a bonus for last year estimated at around $10m, says the Independent.