Monday Papers: UK finance chiefs aim to raise debt - money news

Financial Times

* Finance directors of Britain’s biggest companies are increasingly aiming to raise debt levels relative to equity, in spite of declining optimism for the future, according to a survey by Deloitte.

* Driss Ben-Brahim, a high profile former trader at Goldman Sachs, will run GLG Partners’ new Newcits fund.

* The wholesale roll-out of so-called “absolute return” funds threatens to lead to “mis-buying” by retail investors, Standard & Poor’s has warned.

* Rewards for long-term investors and penalties for short-term traders are ideas being considered by the National Association of Pension Funds.

* Barclays has launched a fund to invest almost £650 million in the upkeep of schools, hospitals and prisons.

* Hans Blommestein, a senior official at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, accused investors in eurozone bond markets of letting “animal spirits” affect their judgment on the risk of a European debt default.

* China is sitting on a profit of nearly $1.5 billion from a bold trading strategy in copper based on expectations of an emerging markets-led boom.

* QR National, Australia’s biggest rail freight operator, hopes to raise as much as A$5 billion.

* Sally Tennant, chief executive of the UK arm of Swiss private bank Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, will join Kleinwort Benson early next year as chief executive, the bank will announce on Monday.

* The Financial Services Authority is now taking three times as long to approve new financial businesses as it did before the crisis.

* Erste Bank, one of the biggest banks in eastern Europe, has warned Hungary’s government that its banks will be starved of investment if it persists with its bank tax policy.