Friday Papers: Tax office to soften stance on avoidance - other news

Financial Times

* Revenue & Customs will adopt a less combative approach to resolving tax disputes with businesses in a move designed to cut a mounting legal logjam and unlock billions of pounds tied up in court battles over avoidance.

* Under a proposal from the Basel Committee of global banking regulators, some bank bondholders would be forced to take losses or convert their investments into equity in order to improve banks’ capital and to shield taxpayers from further bail-outs.

* Bank of Scotland on Thursday became the latest foreign bank to quit the Irish market.

* Two Norwegian day traders have been indicted on charges of market manipulation after allegedly tricking the electronic trading system of a big US broker into raising the price of shares on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

* Germany’s economy will grow by 3 per cent this year, according to a sharply upward revised Bundesbank forecast.

* Greece will receive a €9bn tranche of eurozone loans.

* The S&P 500 index is down 1.7%; the FTSE All-World stock index is down 1.1%; the Nikkei 225 average jumped 1.3%; the mainland Shanghai Composite rose 0.8% and the Hong Kong Hang Seng index added 0.9%.

* Bill Doyle, the chief executive of PotashCorp, stands to make at least $370m if BHP Billiton succeeds in taking over the company for $130 a share.

* Pakistan is to ask the International Monetary Fund to ease restrictions on a $10bn loan it received in 2008 after concluding that the recent devastating floods had made the conditions attached to the lending programme impossible to meet.

* Scientists say they have discovered a huge plume of oil below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, a remnant of the catastrophic BP spill that gushed nearly 5m barrels of oil into the sea.

* Public borrowing rose less in July than a year earlier, thanks to stronger corporate tax receipts.