Thursday Papers: Oil groups form $1bn spill response unit - other news

Financial Times

* ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron and ConocoPhillips announced on Wednesday that they were pooling $1bn to form a joint venture to develop a deepwater Gulf of Mexico oil spill response and containment system.

* Santander is gearing up to list its UK operations on the LSE as soon as this autumn in a deal that could raise an estimated £3bn; the group, which is on the verge of buying a portfolio of 318 UK branches from RBS, needs the money to fund that deal.

* Land Securities said on Wednesday that the £350m ($532m) Trinity Leeds shopping scheme would be finished by 2013.

* Irving Picard, Madoff trustee, has sued 43 affiliates and executives of Fairfield Greenwich Group seeking to recoup more than $3.6bn in compensation and damages.

* The Swiss National Bank has revealed it had lost more than SFr14bn in trying to keep down the value of the franc through currency interventions in the first half of this year.

* Obama signs bill to overhaul Wall Street.

* The Federal Reserve would act to boost the US economy if needed, chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Wednesday, saying that the US recovery was proceeding but the outlook was “unusually uncertain”.

* The FTSE All-World equity index was down 0.4 per cent; the FTSE 100 in London rose 1.5 per cent; the FTSE Asia-Pacific index is up 0.4 per cent, with Sydney higher by 0.2 per cent, Shanghai up 0.3 per cent and Hong Kong climbing 1.1 per cent.

* Guan Jianzhong, chairman of Dagong Global Credit Rating, has slammed his western counterparts for causing the global financial crisis and said that as the world’s largest creditor nation China should have a bigger say in how governments and their debt are rated.

* Lord Black walked free from a Florida jail on Wednesday having served more than two years behind bars, after a judge in Chicago granted the former publishing magnate $2m bail.

The Daily Telegraph