Monday newspaper round-up: Cadbury, RBS/Lloyds, Vodafone

Kraft, the American food company, is poised to initiate a hostile takeover bid for Cadbury today at or slightly above the offer it made in September, which valued the British confectioner at £10.2bn, according to a person familiar with the deal.Last night Kraft was finalising plans to go directly to shareholders of Cadbury before the UK Takeover Panel's "put up or shut up" deadline expires at 5pm, the Times reports.Three of the City's leading stockbrokers have written to Lord Myners, the City Minister, accusing Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group of "corporate bullying" by forcing companies that owe money to the banks to use their investment banking services.In an unprecedented act of solidarity, three of the Square Mile's fiercest rivals ? Tim Linacre, chief executive of Panmure Gordon; Oliver Hemsley, chief executive of Numis; and Alex Snow, chairman of Evolution ? allege that when a company holds a rights issue to reorganise its debt, the banks will continue to lend to it only if it uses their brokerage and capital markets units for the deal, the Times reports.Insurance giant Axa Group is readying a €2bn (£1.8bn) rights issue that could be launched as early as Monday. France's biggest insurer is plotting the capital-raising to fund potential acquisitions in a sector that has been ravaged by the financial crisis. Bankers at BNP Paribas and HSBC have been appointed to work on the capital-raising, the Telegraph reports.Meanwhile, Axa Asia Pacific, the Australian-listed asset manager, has rejected an A$11bn (US$10.2bn) takeover bid from Australia's AMP, saying on Monday the cash and shares proposal undervalued its business. The offer is one of the largest in the global financial services industry since the onset of the financial crisis, excluding transactions involving government bail-outs, and is also among the biggest in Asia this year, the FT reports.Vittorio Colao, Vodafone's chief executive, is preparing a fresh round of cost cutting as he tries to offset falling revenue at the mobile phone operator. Vodafone's shares have underperformed the FTSE 100 by 16 per cent this year, partly because of concern at how the UK company's underlying revenue at most of its core European businesses is falling, the FT reports.Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, rapidly backpedalled from his proposal for a financial transactions tax on Sunday after a chorus of criticism of his plan set out in a speech on Saturday to a meeting of global finance ministers. The US led a backlash against the "Tobin tax" on financial transactions after Mr Brown took a Group of 20 finance ministers' meeting by surprise with his proposal at the gathering in St Andrews, Scotland, the FT says.Britain's employers plan to continue shedding jobs during the final three months of 2009, confirming the widely held view that unemployment will continue to rise for the foreseeable future even if the UK economy comes out of recession. The outlook for UK employment prospects is now deteriorating more slowly than at any time since recession took hold in the middle of 2008, but it is still deteriorating, according to KPMG's quarterly labour market outlook, which it publishes with the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the Independent reports.Wal-Mart has sold Asda for £6.9bn to a Leeds-based investment vehicle called Corinth Services Limited for only £200m more than it paid for the UK supermarket chain in 1999. In the previously undisclosed group restructuring that took place in August, the world's largest retailer let its subsidiary Wal-Mart Stores (UK) sell 3.1bn ordinary shares in Asda in return for a £5.7bn cash payment from Corinth, a fellow Wal-Mart group company, and £1.24bn in shares, the Telegraph reports.Radioactive waste from a new generation of British nuclear power stations will be buried deep underground in a storage facility that could cost up to £18bn to build, under plans to be announced by the Government today, the Times reports.Long-dated oil prices have risen to within a whisker of $100 a barrel, in a sign that investors are expecting high prices to return after the recession. The furthest forward oil contract traded on exchanges - the December 2017 futures - rose last week to $99.97 a barrel for the Brent benchmark and to $99.43 for the West Texas Intermediate, the highest since last October. The prices have risen by 10 % in the past month, the FT reports.