BP Share News (BP.)

The oil company formerly run by imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky has fired off a warning to BP shareholders, saying their deal with the Kremlin is founded on "illegal auctions, bogus bankruptcy fire sales and expropriations".Yukos, formerly Russia's biggest oil producer, said last night that BP's investors "should be concerned" about their agreement to issue £5bn in shares to Rosneft, the Telegraph reports.BP's landmark deal with Rosneft, the Russian state oil company, was on Sunday night facing a backlash from the billionaire shareholders in its other main venture in the country. AAR, the consortium through which the shareholders hold their stake in TNK-BP, said it was examining whether the deal breaches their agreement which stipulates that BP can only pursue new opportunities in Russia via the venture, the FT reports.Three of the City's most powerful investors have called for a root-and-branch overhaul of the audit market, amid growing concerns about the dominance of the "Big Four". Standard Life Investments, Aviva Investors and Hermes have demanded radical action to allow smaller firms to compete with Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PwC for big company audits, the Times reports.Important members of Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition in Germany are resisting plans for an increase in the EU's bail-out fund to protect Spain from contagion, complicating a crucial meeting of EU finance ministers on Monday. Guido Westerwelle, the vice-Chancellor and head of the FDP Free Democrats, said there was no justification for last week's call by Brussels for an urgent boost in the size and powers of the €440bn (£371bn) fund, the Telegraph reports.The price of steel has risen more than a third in two months, adding to global inflationary pressures as food and energy costs are also soaring. Floods in Queensland have severely disrupted global supplies of coking coal, a major steelmaking ingredient, prompting a scramble among manufacturers to stock up on steel. That has pushed the price of benchmark US hot-rolled coil steel 37 per cent higher since early November to a two-year high of $783 a tonne, said CRU, a consultancy, the FT reports.The British passion for plastic has cooled with credit card borrowing falling to £97bn - its lowest level since 2005 - and the number of cards falling by 1.5m to a seven-year low of 60m. Today's Consumer Credit Confidence survey by the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers will also show a sharp fall in unsecured borrowing generally. Household borrowing has tumbled by £500 per household over the past year. And the survey will say that borrowing should fall by a further £200 per household in 2011 - a contraction of between 2 to 3%- as consumers continue to pay back loans and those seeking new borrowing find it hard to get approval from banks, the Independent reports.The group behind the Mappin & Webb, Goldsmiths and Watches of Switzerland retail jewellery chains defied the dire weather to achieve sparkling Christmas sales. Aurum Holdings said that, based on its "outstanding" performance, it expected to deliver a "substantial" increase in underlying earnings for the year to 30 January. Despite the heavy snowfall last month, Aurum's like-for-like sales jumped by 14.5% over the five weeks to 9 January. Online sales rose by 53%, boosted by relaunched transactional websites for Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths, the Independent reports.Four hundred jobs are to go at the Insolvency Service as the regulator faces budget cuts and falling income as a result of the decline in bankruptcies. The cuts will stoke fears that the service, a division of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, is letting too many crooked company directors off the hook because it does not have the resources to pursue them. The Times revealed last month that practitioners are concerned that warnings about potential fraud are often not followed up, allowing shady bosses to escape disqualification and continue trading.Housing affordability is at near-record levels, new figures show, However first-time buyers will find it increasingly hard to join the property ladder this year. The latest housing affordability index, published by Lombard Street Research (LSR) in conjunction with The Daily Telegraph, shows house prices are at their most undervalued level since the mid-1990s. In the third quarter of 2010, the index reached 116.7, up 0.2 from the previous quarter, on a scale where 100 represents average affordability since the 1960s.Irish banks are running out of collateral they can use to borrow from the European Central Bank, turning instead for emergency support from their own central bank on an unprecedented scale. The latest data shows that Anglo Irish Bank and other lenders had borrowed €51bn (£43bn) from the Irish central bank by the end of December, under an obscure progamme listed in the balance sheet as "other assets". This comes on top of €132bn in loans from the ECB itself, the figure normally tracked by analysts and itself 24% of all ECB lending, the Telegraph reports.