Friday newspaper round-up: British Airways, Lloyds Banking, Tesco

British Airways and Iberia, the Spanish flag carrier, have announced a deal to create Europe's largest airline. The merger by the two loss-making companies is expected to set off another round of cost-cutting at both to save £360m a year. Jobs are likely to be lost at head offices in London and Madrid, in maintenance facilities and in the sales forces, the Times writes.Lloyds Banking was chasing debts and investments of more than £700m last night after the collapse of a property developer that it has been bankrolling. Administrators at Grant Thornton were appointed to salvage what they could of Kenmore Property Group, a £1.8bn collection of funds and companies in which John Kennedy, once said to be one of Scotland's wealthiest men, is the main shareholder, the Times reports.Brussels has delayed the introduction in the European Union of a radical overhaul of accounting rules for banks and insurers which on Thursday came into force across most of the rest of the world outside the US. Analysts say some French, German and Italian banks with large investment banking activities would be hit disproportionately by the changes, forcing them to book losses on large holdings of derivatives, the FT reports.The $50bn video games industry received a shot in the arm on Thursday, with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 selling almost 5m copies on its opening day on sale in what its backers claimed was the biggest entertainment launch of all time. The blockbuster sold 4.7m copies on its first day in North America and the UK, generating revenues of $310m (£187m), according to internal estimates at the games industry's largest publisher, the FT reports.Supermarket group Asda has predicted the most cut-throat Christmas in a decade after sales growth fell by 1.6%. The increase in like-for-like sales, excluding petrol and VAT, slipped to 5.6% in the three months to September 30 from 7.2% the previous quarter, the Telegraph reports.The National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) has told Britain's biggest companies to keep the lid on executive pay and bonuses or risk shareholder revolts, as it steps up its campaign to improve corporate governance in UK boardrooms. The NAPF, whose members own about 13 per cent of the stock market, has written to all FTSE 350 chairmen urging them to exercise "pay restraint" for their highest earners, the Times reports. Taxpayers and businesses could be getting a raw deal from the high fees charged by accountants and administrators put in charge of bust companies, according to the Office of Fair Trading. The competition watchdog has launched an investigation into the corporate insolvency market which is dominated by the big four accountancy firms - PwC, KPMG, Deloitte and Ernst & Young - earning the industry as a whole nearly £1.2bn a year, the Telegraph reports.O2, the mobile phone company spun-out of BT in 2001, has leapfrogged its former parent to become Britain's biggest telecoms provider. Now owned by Spain's Telefonica, O2 has 21m British mobile phone customers compared with BT which has 19.4m landline customers, the Telegraph reports.British Gas is on course for soaring returns from its 15m household energy customers this winter, with profits expected to rise by 43% to £541m, its owner Centrica told investors yesterday, the Independent reports.National Express could be saddled with a bill of up to £32m to cover losses made by Eurostar, the cross-Channel rail service. The indebted transport group, which gives up its lossmaking East Coast rail franchise on Friday night, is the leading shareholder in a consortium that manages the UK end of Eurostar. London & Continental Railways, the state-owned body that owns the UK arm of Eurostar, has proposed terminating this management contract before it was scheduled to conclude at the end of 2010, the FT reports.The UK's Serious Fraud Office has opened an investigation into the $550m (£332m) London hedge fund manager, Dynamic Decisions Capital Management.The firm's flagship Dynamic Decisions Growth Premium Master Fund - domiciled offshore in the Cayman Islands - was put into liquidation earlier this year, the FT reports.At least 37 BBC executives earn more than the Prime Minister, it was revealed yesterday, as the corporation disclosed the scale of its senior salaries for the first time. The broadcaster said that its 107 "most senior decision makers" earn £22m a year and said that the disclosures made it the nation's most transparent public body. This claim was undermined when it emerged that hundreds of its highest earners were hidden from the published figures, the Times reports.Tesco, the supermarket group, announced plans to significantly expand its presence its China by opening three huge shopping centres, while Apple said that it would open two new stores in Shanghai. The openings demonstrate increasing confidence that the Chinese economy is recovering. Tesco, which already serves four million customers a week in China, plans to open three new shopping malls in the first half of 2010, the Times reports.