Sunday Papers: Investors fight for powers to block 'rewards for failure'

Top stories

• The Sunday Telegraph: Britain's leading investors are to push for new powers to block "rewards for failure" termination payments to chief executives and remove remuneration committee chairmen who refuse to rein in excessive pay awards.
• The Independent on Sunday: The number of profit warnings among UK-listed companies showed the sharpest increase for a decade in the last three months of 2011.
• The Independent on Sunday: George Osborne will face renewed scrutiny over his deficit-slashing strategy this week with official figures set to show that the country is on the verge of a double-dip recession; forecasters are pencilling in a 0.1% dip in output between October and December.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder and largest shareholder of easyJet, is to vote against the airline's remuneration report at its AGM in a move which will put him on a collision course with the company's board.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Crucial talks over a debt deal between lenders and the Greek government were suspended over the weekend as the representative of bondholders flew out of Athens empty handed.

Business and economics

• The Independent on Sunday: Allen Stanford, the one-time billionaire financier, will finally go to court this week accused of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Apple is forecast to have chalked up $9.5 billion of profits in the final three months of last year, a 58pc increase from the same quarter in 2010.
• The Independent on Sunday: Ian Powell is on course to be re-elected unopposed as chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has been awarded a $23 million pay and bonus package despite continued trans-Atlantic focus on executive remuneration.
• The Sunday Telegraph: The Ministry of Defence has paid out £75 million to civil servants made redundant over the past three months.
• The Independent on Sunday: All of the directors at Mitchells & Butlers are up for re-election at the pub group's AGM this week.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Virgin Media's chief executive Neil Berkett has called on the Government to rip up the rules on licensing film and television content and disband the BBC Trust.
• Mail on Sunday: Annuity rates have plummeted by almost four per cent in the past three months, tearing a huge hole in future pensioners' incomes.

Share tips, comment and bids

• The Sunday Telegraph: Private equity firms KKR, Permira and Sun European Partners are all separately poised to bid for Peacocks after Sun European secured a £10 million deal to buy the retailer's Bonmarche arm in a pre-pack administration.
• The Independent on Sunday: Morrisons and private equity firms are among the groups that are this weekend considering making a bid of as much as £1.5 billion for Iceland Foods, the up-for-sale frozen food specialist.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Virgin Money is in pole position to buy a key part of MBNA's UK and Irish credit card business after a joint approach by Goldman Sachs and Apollo Management for the whole business appeared to have fallen by the wayside.
• The Independent on Sunday: The proposed merger of the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission will finally be confirmed around the time of the Budget in March.
• The Sunday Telegraph: Decathlon, the world's biggest sportswear retailer, has entered the fray in the battle for some of the Best Buy stores as it attempts to open 100 shops in Britain.
• The Sunday Telegraph: US investment bank Jefferies is preparing to make an offer for the state-backed lender Royal Bank of Scotland's Hoare Govett corporate broking business.
• The Independent on Sunday: London City owner Global Infrastructure Partners is preparing for sale of the Square Mile's favourite airport, in hope of eventually fetching £1.25 billion.
• The Independent on Sunday: The family behind 99p Stores is considering a sale of the single-price retailer to a private equity firm for up to £60 million.
• The Observer (Comment): David Cameron's speech on reform was a clever one. But if he is serious about change, there are more profound ways of changing the economy than share schemes and votes on pay.
• The Observer (Comment): Behind the rhetoric of crisis, the demise of the pension era is as much a product of economic ideology as circumstance.
• The Observer (Comment): When even successful companies such as Shell and Unilever are taking an axe to staff retirement packages, is the outlook bleak for everyone?
• The Observer (Comment): Carrefour shows Tesco what a real retail crash looks like - the British chain had a bad Christmas; the French hypermarket is facing an existential crisis.
• The Sunday Telegraph (Comment): This eurozone crisis is less about Greek pensions or Italian welfare payments than it is about the region's Gordian knot of entwined bank and sovereign debt.
• The Sunday Telegraph (Comment): Peacocks' structure doomed it to failure - when companies fail, it is often the case that many of those involved spend the weeks that follow playing a drawn-out blame game.
• Mail on Sunday (Midas share tip): Galliford Try shares should move higher