Tuesday newspaper round-up: Bank bonuses, Regal Petroleum, Lloyds Banking

Bankers who are not prepared to forgo controversial contracts that flout new rules on bonuses should get out of the mainstream industry, Lord Myners has declared.The City Minister fired a warning shot ahead of the Queen's Speech tomorrow, which will outline plans to forbid guaranteed bonuses and other pay deals. Lord Myners, in an interview with The Times, said: "People who are not willing to subordinate their own egos to the stability of their companies or the financial system probably shouldn't carry out activities in deposit-taking banks."Meanwhile, banks will face having chunks of their future profits seized by the state if they do not fund a deposit insurance scheme, the Bank of England's deputy governor has warned. In a veiled threat, Paul Tucker, the man in charge of the Bank's financial stability function, said that the state had a legal right to extract cash off the banking sector if one of their number collapses and its depositors' savings protected, the Telegraph reports.Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland, the state-backed lenders, are among a raft of large European companies underestimating the size of their pension deficits by a combined €300bn (£268bn). Lloyds' stated pension obligations are €14.2bn shy of the real size of the deficit, while RBS's are €13.3bn behind, according to research from equity research house AlphaValue, the Telegraph reports.Attorneys representing the estate of Lehman Brothers filed a lawsuit on Monday against Barclays Capital, seeking to claw back as much as $10bn (£5.9bn) that it claims was transferred to the UK bank last year in the frenzied days following Lehman's bankruptcy, the FT reports.The London-based chief executive of one of Asia's leading banks has launched a caustic attack on the direction of global regulation and warned there will be a "real cost ... borne by the economy" if current regulatory reforms are implemented. Peter Sands, chief executive of Standard Chartered, the emerging markets bank, said in an interview that policymakers were "kidding themselves" if they thought higher capital and liquidity requirements would be absorbed by banks and their shareholders, the FT reports.The Federal Reserve is monitoring currency markets "closely" and will conduct policy in a way that will "help ensure that the dollar is strong", Ben Bernanke said on Monday in rare comments on the US currency. In remarks apparently aimed at reassuring markets and foreign governments that the central bank is not indifferent to the fate of the US currency, the Fed chairman said "we are attentive to the implications of changes in the value of the dollar," the FT reports.City regulators have fined Regal Petroleum a record £600,000 after a damning report covering two years when the oil explorer was controlled by Frank Timis, the controversial businessman, The Times has learnt. The report, expected to be published today, found that the AIM-listed Regal had issued a string of misleading stock market announcements that drove up the share price more than 500% but ultimately led to investors losing hundreds of millions of pounds.The battle for Christmas shoppers is hotting up as the deadline for VAT to return to 17.5% approaches. The amount that shoppers spend at Christmas is set to fall by £535m this year, the first drop in two decades, according to Verdict, the retail market research company, the Times reports. Britain's shopkeepers have joined forces with the Government to urge European Union countries to vote against extending punitive tariffs on leather shoes from Asia at a crucial meeting on Thursday. They have warned that extending the tariffs would "deal a hammer blow" to hard-pressed retailers and damage Europe's trade interests with Asia, the Independent reports.The Royal Mail strike has thwarted sales growth at Asos, the online fashion retailer, in spite of the company making alternative delivery arrangements. In a sign of how the strikes have eroded confidence in home shopping companies and online retailers, Asos said that the threat of a national strike by 121,000 postal workers and a series of smaller local disruptions was one of the leading factors behind dragging sales growth in Britain to 23% in the seven weeks to November 15, the Times reports.A member of the Bank of England's rate-setting committee said last night that the economy had emerged from recession in the quarter between July and September, contradicting initial figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Andrew Sentance said that a wide body of evidence "suggests the UK economy has moved on to a recovery track and growth has resumed in the second half of this year," the Times reports.General Motors, the American car giant driven to bankruptcy by the global recession, will begin paying back bailout money from the US government as early as next month. The company said it lost $1.2bn in the period from July, when it emerged from bankruptcy protection, to the end of September - but it was a figure that delighted investors and prompted some fighting talk from management, the Independent reports.