Wednesday Papers: Sir Fred’s honour shredded

Top stories

• Financial Times: Fred Goodwin, the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, is being stripped of his knighthood, in the latest political concession to public anger in Britain over the perceived arrogance of some senior bankers.
• The Guardian: Ravi Sinha, former chief executive of the London arm of JC Flowers, has been banned from working in the Square Mile and fined £2.9 million by the Financial Services Authority after dishonestly obtaining more than £1 million to cover his debts.
• The Daily Telegraph: Eurozone unemployment rose to 10.4% in December, its highest level since the euro single currency was introduced.
• The Guardian: Greek Prime Minister Lucas Papademos told aides that a crisis meeting of party leaders would be called as early as Thursday to thrash out a response to an increasingly intransigent negotiating team sent by Brussels, which is demanding severe austerity measures before sanctioning a further €130 billion of bailout funds.
• The Daily Telegraph: British companies are advertising thousands of jobs in Romania at a time when UK unemployment has hit a 17-year high of 2.69 million.
• The Guardian: The Bank of England may announce fresh round of quantitative easing to boost growth as figures showed a contraction in the money supply and weak borrowing by both companies and households.
• Financial Times: Portuguese 10-year bond yields fell 149 basis points on Tuesday – the biggest daily fall this year – as the European Central Bbank bought the country’s debt for the second day in a row.
• The Daily Telegraph: Germany is enjoying the greatest jobs boom in 20 years as jobless rate dropped to 5.5% in December, the lowest since reunification in 1990.
• Financial Times: British employers would need nearly £500 billion – almost half the national debt – to bring pension scheme funding levels to the point where they could be fully confident that all pension promises would be paid on time and in full.
• Financial Times: Mexico has bought protection against the effects of an economic downturn, in effect insuring its oil exports at $85 a barrel for 2012.
• The Guardian: Tesco saw its market share dip below 30% for the first time in seven years in the 12 weeks to 12 January from 30.5% a year earlier.
• Financial Times: The British defence ministry will no longer give UK companies priority over their foreign competitors when buying equipment and weapons for the armed forces.

Business and economics

• The Daily Telegraph: BP suffered another setback in its attempts to share the costs of the Gulf of Mexico disaster, as a US court ruled it must shield its contractor Halliburton from some damage claims.
• Financial Times: Net profit at Santander, the eurozone’s biggest bank by market capitalisation and one of the top 10 by assets, fell 35% last year to €5.35 billion after it set aside €3.18 billion of net extraordinary provisions for bad loans in Spain and writedowns elsewhere.
• Financial Times: ExxonMobil’s post-tax earnings were up just 2% at $9.4 billion in the fourth quarter, although due to the company’s share buy-back programme, earnings a share rose 6% to $1.97, roughly in line with analysts’ expectations.
• The Daily Telegraph: BP expects its Foinaven oilfield off northern Scotland, which accounts for 15% of its UK production, to remain shut for weeks while it investigates a "small" oil leak.
• Financial Times: Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase are intensifying their battle to pick up middle-market banking clients, with revenues between $20 million and $500 million, from a diminished Bank of America in what one analyst calls an “an all-out market share war for creditworthy companies”.
• The Guardian: Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg owns the biggest stake in Facebook – almost a quarter of the company worth up to $24 billion.
• Financial Times: Vedanta Resources saw its profits slip to $848 million in its third quarter to December, down from $890 million in the same period the previous year.
• Financial Times: Apple has appointed John Browett, chief executive of British electronics retailer Dixons, as head of its retail store operation.
• The Guardian: British computer chip designer Arm Holdings beat forecasts with a 45% increase in fourth-quarter profits to £69 million as it gained market share in sales of smartphones and mobile computers.
• The Independent: Standard Life is cutting the bonus rates by up to 40%; the move will affect around three-quarters of a million policyholders.
• Financial Times: Net income at Pfizer fell by 50% to $1.44 billion, or 19 cents a share, from $2.9 billion, or 36 cents, in the fourth quarter of 2010, hit by the loss of exclusive rights to sell Lipitor, its top-selling drug.
• Financial Times: For the full year 2012, UPS expects to earn between $4.75 and $5 per share, an increase of between 9% and 15% over the company’s 2011 earnings.
• The Guardian: Carpetright, Britain's biggest seller of flooring materials, has issued another profit warning, its sixth in a year, after its UK sales fell by 4.5% in the three months to 21 January.
• Financial Times: Samsung Electronics is to be investigated by the EU to assess whether it breached antitrust rules by refusing to provide rivals access to its technology at reasonable prices.
• The Independent: BSkyB on Tuesday underlined its financial strength with a 28% surge in profits to £597 million, thanks to improved margins.
• Financial Times: France’s Dassault has been awarded frontrunner status in the hotly contested $20 billion race to supply 126 fighter jets to India.
• Financial Times: The world’s largest cocoa traders have boycotted the Ivory Coast government’s first cocoa auction, a move that raised concerns about reforms in the biggest producer of the commodity.
• Financial Times: Fourth quarter sales of Amazon rose 35% to $17.4 billion, but fell short of its growth rate earlier in the year.
• Financial Times: NWF Group's operating profit fell by a quarter to £2.4 million in the six months to 30 November, mirroring the decline in demand in the heating fuel market during the same period.
• The Guardian: Full year sales of Ocado, the online grocer, went up 16.6% and pretax loss stood at £2.4 million, down from £12.2 million.
• Financial Times: McGraw-Hill is exploring the possibility of selling its $2.5 billion-plus education business.

Share tips, comment and bids

• Financial Times: The NYSE Euronext and Deutsche Börse tie-up on Wednesday faces its day of reckoning in Brussels, as EU commissioners are expected to sign-off a recommendation to block a merger that allegedly stifles competition.
• The Independent: BP threw a lifeline to Coryton on Tuesday, striking a deal that allowed the bankrupt oil refinery to buy a fresh cargo of crude that will keep it running for a few more days.
• Financial Times (Lombard): To get where he is today, Sir Fred Goodwin, ex-chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, had to run a once proud bank into the ground, help trigger a recession and then fight like a cornered polecat to keep a chunk of his pension.
• The Guardian (Comment): Mark Zuckerberg is likely to stay tight-lipped about Facebook's stock market flotation – unlike other Silicon Valley CEOs recently.
• The Daily Telegraph (Comment): It's official: Britain is closed for business.
• The Daily Telegraph (Comment): It was without the slightest hint of irony that Boris Johnson and David Cameron on Monday urged French bankers to leave Paris, and the guillotine of a financial transaction tax, and relocate to libertarian London.
• Daily Mail (Comment – Alex Brummer): The speed with which the establishment has moved to deprive Fred Goodwin of his knighthood is impressive. The final insult is that he is still receiving a taxpayer-funded pension of £342,500 a year from RBS.
• Financial Times (The Lex Column): Amazon: there will always be those who believe that Amazon is destined for vast profits simply by virtue of being the leader in a growing market.
• Financial Times (The Lex Column): Santander: the bank still delivers solid pre-provision profit but investors should wait a bit longer to find out in which direction it is facing.
• Financial Times (The Lex Column): Arm Holdings: the British chip designer is a successful business, but investors have been gradually turned off by the stock.
• Financial Times (The Lex Column): French transaction tax: President Sarkozy’s proposed transaction tax will not punish French banks as intended, but will hit savers and pensioners.