Vodafone Share News (VOD)

Morgan Sindall will today announce the acquisition of the bulk of Connaught's social housing repairs operations in a deal that will save thousands of jobs across the country.While the deal, believed to be worth between £20m and £40m, will secure the future of about 2,500 jobs, thousands more remain at risk, with the first bout of redundancies at Connaught's head office and troubled social housing arm also expected to be revealed today, the Times reports.Vodafone announced a significant reorganisation yesterday in a clear sign that it plans to offload its minority stakes in other mobile operators. The company said it planned to simplify its structure by moving from three operating regions ? Europe and Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific ? to two. The first will comprise Vodafone's operations in Europe and the second its operations in Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, the Times reports.Deutsche Bank is preparing to unveil a rights issue worth up to €9bn (£7.4bn) in a move aimed at softening the impact of new capital rules set to govern the international banking industry. The fund raising, which will be the largest undertaken in Europe this year, is expected to be announced as early as Monday. It will come shortly after global regulatory chiefs meet in Basel, Switzerland, to approve the new capital and liquidity measures drawn up by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, the international watchdog, the Telegraph reports. Eurozone members that break the region's rules on public finances should be excluded temporarily from Europe's political decision-making, the president of the European Central Bank has proposed. The controversial suggestion by Jean-Claude Trichet, in an interview with the Financial Times, would be part of a "quantum leap" in the governance of Europe's 11-year old monetary union, needed to prevent a future Greece-style economic crisis.Britain's housing market is poised for a wave of repossessions as the Coalition Government's fiscal austerity package starts to bite, Standard & Poor's warned yesterday. In a bleak assessment of the market's prospects, the ratings agency also said that prices are still over-valued when compared to household incomes and that the budgetary squeeze planned by the Chancellor George Osborne could "significantly test some borrowers' ability to make their mortgage payments, in our opinion" particularly if interest rates start to rise, the Independent reports.Lloyds Banking Group has far too much capital and if it were not for European Union restrictions could be returning billions of pounds to shareholders, according to analysts at UBS. For every £1 that Lloyds is currently making, it could easily afford to return far more to investors. However, because of EU rules on state-aid, the partially government-owned bank is barred from making any payments to shareholders, the Telegraph reports.George Osborne is to cut a further £4bn from the benefits bill for the jobless, in a hard-talking clampdown on those whose "lifestyle choice" is to "just sit on out-of-work benefits". The savings identified by the chancellor are a glimpse at one aspect of sweeping reforms of the entire welfare system that Treasury officials are designing in order to cut £10bn or more from benefit spending by 2014/15, the FT reports.The number of job losses at BAE Systems in the UK over the past 18 months is set to top 3,700 after the defence giant again wielded the axe at its North of England manufacturing plants. The company's workforce in the UK will now fall below 38,500. BAE announced yesterday that it will cut 740 engineering and manufacturing jobs across five sites working on its Tornado, Hawk and Harrier aircraft and confirmed that another 206 workers would go in its radar and battle systems technology division, the Times reports.The deceptively quiet Phoney War between Brussels and Anglo-Saxon finance is coming to an end. Life is about to change for hedge funds, commodity traders, and the 'prop desks' of global banks in the City of London. "We want to know who is doing what with short-selling," said Michel Barnier, the European single market commissioner and the Frenchman in charge of the EU's new machinery of regulation, the Telegraph reports.Growth in the UK will outpace all other G7 nations in the third quarter, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The OECD upgraded its UK forecast to 0.7% growth in the third quarter, compared with the second, from an earlier forecast in May of 0.5%. That would be slower than the 1.2% growth achieved in the UK in the second quarter, according to Office for National Statistics figures, but stronger compared with the OECD's forecasts for the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada. The OECD downgraded its forecast for UK growth in the fourth quarter, to 0.4%from 0.5%, the Telegraph reports.David Montgomery, the former News of the World editor, has bowed to shareholder pressure and pledged to quit Mecom, the European publishing group he founded, early next year. The company's three largest shareholders, Aviva Investors, Invesco and Legal & General Investment Management, which collectively hold over 50% of the company, have held a series of meetings with Mecom's board to demand Mr Montgomery's resignation, the Independent reports.Apple capitulated to pressure from US antitrust authorities, saying it will give greater freedom to outside developers by letting them ally with competing advertising networks and use programming tools from other companies. The twin reversals revealed on Thursday came amid a probe by the US Federal Trade Commission, which people familiar with the inquiry said had been heading toward filing a lawsuit, the FT reports.