Tuesday Papers: Global investment groups back UK shareholder code - other news

Financial Times

* Some of the world’s largest investment groups have backed the UK’s first formalised code of shareholder responsibility; the UK’s Financial Reporting Council will on Tuesday release a list of 68 leading investment institutions who have submitted to the Stewardship Code.

* Three-quarters of employers polled in a survey back tougher anti-strike laws, according to the survey of 500 employers across private and public sectors by DLA Piper, the law firm.

* City leaders and regulation experts have warned the Treasury that the government’s plans to break up the Financial Services Authority will prove expensive and inefficient and are likely to diminish the UK’s clout in Brussels.

* Private housebuilders have won the lion’s share of government financing to build affordable housing for the first time, the data, disclosed in the journal Social Housing,showed.

* Rockhopper, the Falklands Islands-focused oil explorer, hopes to raise £200 million through an accelerated bookbuilding to extend its drilling programme just days after cutting its resource estimates.

* Shares in Vertu Motors rose 16 per cent after the car dealer reported a 73% increase in interim pre-tax profit.

* SABMiller saw lager volumes fall in Latin America, its biggest driver of profit, in the six months to the end of September compared with the same period last year; it also reported a 5% fall in lager volumes in Europe.

* The London Stock Exchange has opened its data centre to multiple non-trading firms for the first time, meaning that vendors of services to high-frequency and other proprietary traders can sell to trading firms from within the data centre.

* Jochen Zeitz, Puma’s chief executive, is to head a new “sports and lifestyle” division at parent company PPR, the French luxury goods and retail conglomerate.

* George Davies, the designer who has dressed two generations of British women, is poised to close his stand-alone GIVe stores, launched with much fanfare a year ago.

* Alexander and Evgeny Lebedev are poised to launch a “distilled” version of The Independent, the newspaper they acquired in March; the new title, named i, will go on sale nationwide on 26 October for 20p.