Sunday newspaper round-up: ITV, Water companies, Lloyds Banking

New ITV chairman Archie Norman is expected to charge millions of viewers to watch all but the broadcaster's main channel, the Mail on Sunday reports. The ending of ITV's days as a free-to-air broadcaster is likely to happen soon after the former Asda boss joins as non-executive chairman in January to replace Michael Grade. As well as being likely to introduce pay-TV for digital channels ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4, Norman is set to cut costs, which could mean big job losses, said City sources close to him.Five disgraced former directors of MG Rover, the failed Midlands car maker, are to receive an early Christmas present with an £11m-plus payout from the wreckage of the firm. Their windfall will bring to £42m the total they have extracted from the collapsed company in one of Britain's biggest business scandals. The five ? John Towers, Nick Stephenson, John Edwards, Peter Beale and Kevin Howe ? will share the payout from the winding up of MGR Capital, a car finance operation kept separate from the rest of the group, the Sunday Times reports.Ofwat is expected to deliver a blow to the water companies this week with tough restrictions on customer price rises - making only small concessions to compensate them for increasing bad debts and higher business rates. The big utilities are braced for the possibility of rights issues and dividend cuts to bolster their cash positions, in the expectation that the regulator's imminent "final determination" on prices for the next five years will be only slightly more generous than draft proposals earlier this year. Sunday Telegraph.Banks will this week be ordered to disclose for the first time the pay and bonuses of their high-rolling employees in a far-reaching overhaul of how the boards of financial companies are run. The measure, expected to affect at least 1,000 top earners, is a key recommendation in the final report by City grandee Sir David Walker into the corporate governance of banks in the wake of the financial collapse. He will also hand non-executive directors greater power to police risk-taking and give remuneration committees the ability to set and revise pay policy right across the bank, the Sunday Times reports.Meanwhile, Sir David Walker has sounded out four of the City's biggest fund managers on his tough recommendations for corporate governance of the UK banking industry ahead of presenting his final review on Thursday. In a series of high-level meetings last week, Sir David met with the top executives at Schroders, M&G, Standard Life and L&G, to go through some of the proposals in his report, which was commissioned by the Government after the financial crash, the Sunday Independent reports.Waitrose boss Mark Price has emerged as a leading contender to replace Marc Bolland as the new chief executive of FTSE 100 supermarket giant Wm Morrison. City sources said that the man nicknamed the Chubby Grocer could be tempted into swapping his role as managing director at Waitrose for an estimated £2m-a-year pay package at the Bradford-based chain, the Sunday Times reports.Meanhwile, Pressure is mounting for Morrisons' chief executive, Marc Bolland, to leave the company as soon as possible following the news that he has landed the top job at Marks & Spencer, adds the Sunday Independent.Lloyds Banking Group is this week expected to announce the terms of its record-breaking £13.5bn cash call on investors. The share issue will require the taxpayer to pump an extra £5.8bn into the bank. The bank, which has more private investors - 2.8m - than any other stock market-listed company, will face its shareholders on Thursday at a specially convened meeting in Birmingham to ratify the cash call and additional fundraising of more than £7bn coming from bond investors, the Observer reports.British banks are drawing up plans to stop accepting cheques and instead demand payment by plastic or electronic transfer. Consumer groups and businesses have attacked the proposals, raising the prospect of a "Save the cheque" campaign to protect a 300-year-old method of payment. Although the number of cheques written each day has fallen by nearly two-thirds in the past 20 years, to 3.8m a day, many small traders and older people still rely on cheque books to pay bills, the Sunday Times reports.The Defence Secretary, Bob Ainsworth, is expected to announce a £3.5bn helicopter building programme early this week. The Vision 2020 document will detail plans for 120 aircraft to be ordered over a 10-year period. A long-delayed plan to purchase medium-lift helicopters, which can carry up to 25 people, is expected to be scrapped. Instead, the Ministry of Defence will order up to 30 Chinooks, the helicopter that has been heavily deployed in Afghanistan, from Boeing, the Sunday Independent reports.The campaign for Heathrow Hub, a proposed transport interchange at the world's second-busiest airport, is set to gather pace next month. Arup, the engineer that first proposed the hub, is understood to be meeting with representatives from interested parties, including Crossrail and Network Rail, in early December, the Sunday Independent reports.Millions of bank customers will be in line for payouts totalling up to £6 billion if a Supreme Court judgment on current account charges goes against the banks this week.The government is putting pressure on the banks to settle quickly, rather than appeal and drag the case through the courts for several years, should they lose the test case on Wednesday.The court will rule on whether the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) can investigate the legality of unauthorised overdraft charges. These are penalties levied when customers bounce cheques or go into overdraft without authorisation, reports the Sunday Times.House prices will fall by up to 10% year and won't return to their peak of two years ago until 2014, leading economists say. A backdrop of rising unemployment and home loan rationing by the banks is behind the gloomy forecast from a survey of 14 major economists and estate agent groups. The average estimate suggests it will take five years for the market to recover. One group, Capital Economics, claimed it could take until 2019, while others said it would be any time between 2012 and 2016, the Mail on Sunday reports.