Friday newspaper round-up: Oil, BSkyB, RBS...

Saudi Arabia moved to calm mounting global fears of an oil supply crisis after panic buying sent crude prices to a 2½-year peak of almost $120 a barrel.Indicating that Opec's biggest producer is prepared to increase supplies, the kingdom entered "active talks" with European oil companies on how to meet the shortfall caused by the turmoil in Libya. Brent crude futures, the global benchmark, have risen as much as $17 since violence broke out in Libya last week. Saudi Arabia has asked "what quantity and what quality of oil" European refiners want, a senior Saudi oil official told the Financial Times.Ministers have identified billions of pounds that Col Muammar Gaddafi and the Libyan regime have deposited in London. The funds are expected to be seized within days. The Treasury is understood to have set up a unit to trace Col Gaddafi's assets in Britain, which are thought to include billions of dollars in bank accounts, commercial property and a £10m mansion in London, the Telegraph reports. News Corp is close to an agreement with UK regulators over a remedy for concerns about its £13.2bn ($21.3bn) bid for satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting, according to people familiar with the process.After a series of discussions with the Office of Fair Trading, the main UK merger regulator, Rupert Murdoch's media group is much nearer than previously reported to satisfying objections that combining full ownership of BSkyB with its other assets would reduce the diversity of news provision in the country, the FT reports.The US airforce has awarded to Boeing a fiercely contested $35bn (£22bn) contract to supply refuelling aircraft, beating rival EADS, the European aerospace and defence company. Drama has surrounded the closely fought battle for the contract to build a new fleet of "flying petrol stations" for the US military. In the end Pentagon officials said the decision was based solely on price. Boeing's bid was more than 1% below that of its rival, the Guardian reports.More than 100 employees of the state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland each scooped a bonus of £1m or more, while about a quarter of its 19,000 investment bankers got nothing from this year's £950 million bonus bonanza. RBS's chairman Sir Philip Hampton revealed the stark carve-up of rewards yesterday as he reported a higher-than-expected loss at the bank. Heavy writedowns on loans to Irish property developers and the cost of the government-written insurance policy that protects RBS against excessive losses on billions of toxic loans meant the bank posted a pre-tax loss of £1.13bn in 2010, the Times reports.Vodafone and O2 will reintroduce 12-month contracts allowing customers to upgrade their handset every year if they pay a fee starting at about £100 for a new model. The 12-month contract was once the standard tariff for mobiles but was phased out with the launch of Apple's iPhone in 2007, as networks tied customers down to longer contracts, the Times reports.General Motors scored its most profitable year since the Nineties in 2010, according to the first annual results since it emerged from a government-sponsored bankruptcy reorganisation. The company posted a $4.7bn (£2.9bn) profit, after increasing production to 8.7 million vehicles worldwide, in a result that its chief executive said proved that GM could stay in the black even in the toughest economic times, the Independent reports.