Friday newspaper round-up: Cable & Wireless, Aviva,

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Date: Friday 12 Aug 2005

LONDON (ShareCast) - Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley were accused of holding Cable & Wireless to ransom last night after refusing to back the telecoms group’s planned £780m takeover of its smaller rival Energis, says the Times.

The investment banks, which hold about 25% of one class of Energis’s debt on behalf of clients, including hedge funds, are said to be determined to use their blocking power to squeeze a higher price out of C&W.

Brent crude, the main benchmark for the world’s oil supplies, surged to more than $65 a barrel yesterday for the first time, bringing the era of £1 a litre petrol closer. Brent was up $1.67 a barrel in trading on London’s International Petroleum Exchange, reaching $65.66. In New York, US light sweet crude reached $66, the Times reports.

Aviva vowed to hold on to its £3bn closed life book despite a growing market for the “zombie” funds, as Britain’s biggest insurer unveiled strong interim results yesterday, the Times reports.

The Telegraph also quotes Aviva's chief executive who says Britain will quit its addiction to the high street and become a nation of savers again next year.

In a move that will mark the end of its association with BMB Apparel, supermarket chain J Sainsbury is appointing 40 staff to run its buying and merchandising operation for its clothing range in-house. This is a bid to improve its clothing on offer and increase margins, writes the FT.

The cost of dismantling and cleaning up Britain's civil nuclear power stations and infrastructure has escalated by £8bn to at least £56bn, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority said yesterday, reports the Independent.

Rick Haythornthwaite, the former chief executive of the engineering group Invensys, has been appointed to head up the government body charged with tackling red tape and excessive regulation, the Independent reports.

Mortgage providers were threatened with fines or bans yesterday after a covert operation by the Financial Services Authority revealed failings in sales practices, the Times says.

FSA agents posing as mortgage applicants were treated wrongly in more than half the 82 visits they paid to 62 banks, building societies and brokers.

Companies would be more willing to plug their pension fund deficits if they were able to benefit from tax relief more quickly, says the Society of Pension Consultants, writes the Telegraph.

Taxpayers should contribute to the government's occupational pensions lifeboat and benefits to pensioners should be cut to curb the cost to business, the CBI has urged, adds the FT.

The Children's Investment Fund, the hedge fund that led the successful revolt against Deutsche Börse's bid for the London Stock Exchange earlier this year, is to form a long-only investment fund led by David Baverez, a fund manager from Fidelity International, the FT reports.

The board of Abraxus, an Aim-listed property company, has courted controversy by awarding a lucrative contract to a private company owned by one of its directors, the Telegraph reports.

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