Sunday newspaper round-up: Pearson, 40p tax, BAE

News Corporation has joined the race for Penguin with a last-minute overture to the directors of Pearson, the media conglomerate that owns the book publisher. Glen Moreno, Pearson's chairman, will put the approach to directors in the next few days. Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp, parent company of The Sunday Times, is understood to have indicated he will make a substantial cash offer ? thought to be about 1bn pounds ? for Penguin, subject to due diligence. A bid by News Corp, which owns one of Penguin's big rivals, Harper Collins, could torpedo the planned merger of Penguin and Random House, owned by Germany's Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann would own 60 per cent of the combined group, which would have nearly 30 per cent of English-language book sales. A union of Penguin and HarperCollins would have a market share of 20 per cent, according to The Sunday Times. In a statement on Sunday, Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) said: "In response to media speculation, DMGT confirms that it is currently in talks regarding the future of Northcliffe Media. "No deal or transaction has been agreed, but if these talks move to the point where agreement is reached, an announcement will be made to the market." The statement comes after reports this weekend that DMGT was in talks with David Montgomery, the former chief executive of Mirror Group, over a sale of its regional titles, valuing them at £110m. Mr Montgomery is thought to have secured private equity backing for the deal, which would see DMGT retain a substantial stake in the new venture, The Sunday Telegraph reports. There is ''reason for some optimism'' for the British economy over the coming period, according to Charlie Bean, Deputy Governor at the Bank of England. The economy has been ''bumping along the bottom'' for two years but there are now signs of progress in dealing with problems in the Eurozone and the banking system and expectations of lower inflation, he said. For his part, Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander rejected suggestions that austerity is to blame for sluggish growth and said that he would still have backed cuts on the same scale, even if he knew at the time of the 2010 comprehensive spending review that growth over the subsequent two-and-a-half years would be just 0.6%, rather than the 6% that was forecast at the time, The Sunday Telegraph says. Telecoms giant BT, which shocked rivals in June with a £738m gamble on Premier League football, has struck deals for "hundreds" of live matches from Serie A in Italy, Ligue 1 in France and Brasileirao in Brazil. BT will use the matches to help beef up a new sports channel that will be launched next summer. In addition to the Premier League deal, which hands BT the rights to broadcast 38 live matches a year for three years from 2013, it has also signed a £152m deal to show Premiership Rugby for four years from next year. The outlay is thought to be close to £1bn. It is not known how much BT paid for its latest tranche of football rights. The move will put fresh pressure on rival BSkyB, which has built its empire on top-tier football rights and was caught off-guard by BT's entry into the market, The Sunday Telegraph assures.The 40p tax threshold should be raised to £50,000 to stop 1.3m people falling into the higher rate net, a report claims. A dramatic rise in the level at which people pay 40% tax should be brought in to reverse years of dragging more people into paying it, Conservative MPs Kwasi Kwarteng and Priti Patel argue. The 40p tax threshold is due to fall again to £41,450 next year, for most earners, from its current £42,475 level. But in a paper called Motivating The Middle, to be published tomorrow, Mr Kwarteng and Ms Patel will argue for a dramatic turnaround on the fiscal drag that has pulled more people into the 40p tax net. This drag has happened through the threshold rising slower than earnings under New Labour and the level at which 40p tax falls has then been lowered by Chancellor George Osborne as he raises the tax-free personal allowance, says The Financial Mail on Sunday. The Financial Mail on Sunday has established that the mobile phones of three executives at Citigate - one of the leading financial public relations advisers - may have been hacked in 2005 and 2006. A senior Citigate source said he was told by his phone company, O2, that his mobile had been hacked over an extended period from 2005 and advised to contact the police. Several other senior personnel at the firm were told that their phones had also been hacked. 'It is something which could have damaged my professional reputation if word of a deal got out,' he said. A spokesman for Citigate said: 'We were told by our mobile provider around 18 months ago that police were investigating allegations that between 2005 to 2006 attempts by unauthorised parties may have been made to hack into three of our company mobile phones.'The chairman of BAE Systems has rebuffed suggestions that he will stand down as early as next May in the wake of the failed £28bn merger with EADS, the owner of Airbus. However, Dick Olver is expected to come under more pressure from shareholders in the coming weeks, City sources said. Olver, chairman of BAE for eight years, has come in for particular criticism from Invesco Perpetual, BAE's biggest shareholder with a 13.4% stake. Neil Woodford, head of investment at Invesco, also wants Sir Peter Mason, the senior independent director, to go. He is due to stand down in January. Invesco has been backed by Artemis and Henderson, which own a further 2% between them. Woodford is angry that BAE's management, led by Olver and Ian King, chief executive, pursued a risky merger instead of sticking to cutting costs and returning money to shareholders, The Sunday Times says. Britain's faltering nuclear renaissance will receive a boost this week when Hitachi, the Japanese engineering giant, unveils a £700m takeover of Horizon Nuclear Power. The blockbuster deal values Horizon, which has rights to build reactors at Wylfa, on Anglesey, and Oldbury, near Bristol, well beyond what analysts expected it to fetch. Ed Davey, the energy secretary, is expected to herald the deal as an endorsement of the government's policy of enticing developers with the tens of billions in subsidies. Hitachi is expected to provide lucrative roles for British suppliers. Eon and RWE, Horizon's German owners, put the joint venture up for sale in March, citing soaring costs. The plan to build up to six reactors ? three on each site ? was expected to cost at least £20bn. The Germans' withdrawal threw Whitehall's controversial low-carbon energy overhaul into chaos. The government has put the construction of atomic reactors at the heart of its plans to replace fossil-fuelled plants, The Sunday Times reports. Sir Christopher Gent is to stand down as chairman of Glaxo Smith Kline. The pharmaceutical giant has appointed headhunters to search for a successor to Gent, who has held the role since January 2005. He is unlikely to go soon, with City sources indicating one option would be for him to leave at the 2014 shareholder meeting. The exact timing will depend on the choice of replacement. Glaxo declined to comment. Gent, 64, is one of Britain's best-known businessmen. As chief executive of Vodafone, he helped to turn the group into a mobile phone powerhouse, engineering the £112bn purchase of its German rival Mannesmann ? the biggest overseas takeover by a British firm, The Sunday Times writes.AB