Wednesday newspaper round-up: Inflation, 'fat cats', gender pay gap
Ryanair and LastMinute.com been rapped over the knuckles by the advertising watchdog for trying to entice customers into buying flights and holiday deals with “misleading” advertisements. Separate complaints against the two companies have been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority, while the two adverts in question have been banned. – Telegraph
A new burst of inflation is set to hit the British high street, as prices edged up in December and analysts predicted that the shop price deflation seen over the past three years is coming to an end. Figures from the British Retail Consortium revealed prices increased by 0.2pc from November to December, while the annual fall in prices slowed to 1.4pc - the weakest drop since mid-2015. – Telegraph
The UK’s top bosses will have made more money by lunchtime on Wednesday than the typical UK worker will earn all year, according to an analysis that exposes the gulf between executives and the rest of the workforce. On “Fat Cat Wednesday” campaigners say that public anger with elites will intensify unless action is taken to tackle excess among executives at a time when pressures on household budgets are rising. – Guardian
Women in their 20s have seen the pay gap halve to 5%, but just as in previous generations the discrepancy compared with men’s earnings widens when they hit 30 and start a family. In a report highlighting the challenge facing Theresa May in closing the pay gap, the Resolution Foundation said women entering work now would still earn significantly less than their male counterparts over their careers, despite an improvement in pay differentials during the first decade of employment. – Guardian
Richard Cousins, once widely tipped to become chairman of Tesco, stepped down as senior independent director at the supermarket chain yesterday, offering no explanation for the surprise move. The departure of Mr Cousins, chief executive of Compass Group, is deeply embarrassing to Tesco at a time when it is trying to rebuild its relationship with investors after the discovery of a £250 million hole in its accounts that prompted the departure of several senior directors and sent its share price tumbling. – The Times
The collapse of BHS looks set to generate the biggest collection of corporate records and financial data in history. According to a report by FRP Advisory covering its work from July to October, the firm recovered more than 4,000 boxes of hard copy records, plus almost 200 terabytes of data from servers and computers — more than four times the amount of data collected by the Hubble Space Telescope in its first 20 years of observation. – The Times