LONDON (ShareCast) - Marks & Spencer plans to slash the redundancy benefits for its 60,000 staff by up to 25% in a move that has infuriated employees and triggered fears of a middle management cull.

In an internal memo seen by The Times, the high street retailer is proposing to reduce the maximum payout that employees can receive in relation to their length of service from 70 weeks to 52 weeks.

The world's largest resources companies will be forced into a new wave of mega-mergers as it becomes harder to find new assets, the head of the biggest mining group has predicted. Marius Kloppers, chief executive of BHP Billiton, said yesterday that production volumes at several big resources companies had fallen and the only way they could overcome this was to seek deals with rivals, reports the Times.

Helphire has taken court action in an attempt to track down the author of a malicious email sent to its clients and business partners. A former employee of Helphire - which rents replacement vehicles to motorists involved in accidents while their own cars are repaired - is believed to be the author of the email, which was sent to dozens of clients from a Google email account in July, reports the Telegraph.

Nationwide, the UK’s biggest building society, plans to open a savings operation in Ireland – allowing it access to funding from the European Central Bank. The mutual wants to attract retail savings by post, phone and online in the Republic, subject to approval by the Financial Services Authority and the Irish Financial Services Regulatory Authority, writes the FT.

BAA has finalised the much-delayed £13.3bn refinancing of its UK airports more than two years after the highly leveraged takeover of the group by a consortium led by Spain’s Ferrovial. The deal, which was plunged into uncertainty for many months by the rapid worsening of conditions in world financial markets, is the largest refinancing ever completed for a regulated utility, reports the FT.

British Airways' planned flights to New York from London City airport will stop in Ireland to refuel and passengers will be allowed to go through US immigration checks in advance, the company said yesterday. The immigration scheme is central to BA's plans to cut travelling time, alongside allowing fliers to arrive at the airport just 15 minutes before departure. If all goes according to plan, the new service will be up and running next autumn reports the Independent.

Housing rental demand has soared to a ten-year high in the past three months and the number of properties to let has also hit record levels, figures from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) show. The balance of surveyors reporting a rise in business from new landlords soared to a record high of 43% in the three months to the end of July, up from 30 per cent in the three months to the end of April, RICS said, reports the Times.

The Telegraph reports, though, that beleaguered buy-to-let investors are set to pull £18bn out of the property market in the coming years, according to new research that underlines the problems facing the UK housing sector. Residential investors will sell around two thirds of their properties in the face of falling prices, according to a new study by Skandia.

The Pensions Regulator is accused of threatening a young trade journalist with imprisonment, raising fears it is secretive and unaccountable.
The regulator - whose powers over British business were dramatically and controversially extended this spring - is said to have contacted Professional Pensions journalist Jenna Towler last Thursday with a draconian warning that a factually accurate story about one of its investigations could land her in jail, reports the Telegraph.

HBOS shares fell following a report in Australia suggesting the Edinburgh-based bank is about to sell its Australian subsidiary BankWest to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA). The reported suggested that HBOS had appointed bankers at Morgan Stanley to investigate the sale of BankWest and that CBA is preparing to bid around A$6bn (£2.7bn) after pulling out of a deal at the eleventh hour last week to acquire Royal Bank of Scotland's ABN Amro Australian division, writes the Telegraph.

US money supply has experienced the sharpest contraction in modern history, heightening the risk of a Wall Street crunch and a severe economic slowdown in coming months. Data compiled by Lombard Street Research shows that the M3 ''broad money" aggregates fell by almost $50bn (£26.8bn) in July, the biggest one-month fall since modern records began in 1959, reports the Telegraph.

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