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Tuesday paper round-up: British Airways, Lloyds Banking, Toyota

Tue, 23rd Feb 2010 06:28

British Airways crew have voted to strike and could throw the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers' into chaos as early as next week.Union workers at the country's national air carrier voted 81% in favour of industrial action over pay and conditions. As many as 700,000 travellers could be affected if a strike, which is expected to last as long as ten days, goes ahead. A strike would be the first national walk out of BA cabin crew for a decade, the Telegraph reports.Stephen Thomas is today expected to announce that he is stepping down from the board of Luminar, the company that he founded 22 years ago, and handing control to an outsider. The Times understands that Mr Thomas, 57, will be replaced by Simon Douglas, the former chief executive of Zavvi, the music retailer that went bust in December 2008 less than 18 months after he created it through a buyout of Virgin Megastores.European banks need to roll over €1trn (£877bn) of debt over the next two years at a much higher cost and in direct competition with hungry sovereign states, according to a report by Morgan Stanley. Roughly €560bn of EU bank debt matures in 2010 and €540bn in 2011. The banks will have to roll over loans at a time when unprecedented bond issuance by governments worldwide risks saturating the debt markets. European states alone must raise €1.6 trillion this year, the Telegraph reports.Eric Daniels, Lloyds' chief executive, has become the latest banking boss to waive his bonus in an attempt to defuse the political row about remuneration. Mr Daniels yesterday told the board that he would not take a £2.3m payout, marking the second year in a row that he has turned down a bonus. Mr Daniels will receive his £1.035m base salary, the Times reports.Industry leaders have reacted with exasperation to a new Government tax code designed to stem the exodus of businesses from Britain. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, who unveiled a new "Tax Framework for Business" at a global trade and investment conference in London, have been blasted for making empty promises and "ignoring" business fears over the UK tax system, the Telegraph reports.Toyota is under criminal investigation in the United States after a federal grand jury issued a subpoena to force the car group to give up documents relating to its recall crisis. Last night the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote to Jim Lentz, Toyota's head of US sales, accusing the company of making misleading public statements about recent recalls and saying that it had resisted the possibility that defects could cause sudden acceleration in its vehicles, the Times reports.Morgan Stanley is nearing the sale of its stake in China International Capital Corp to two US private equity firms - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and TPG - for about $1bn, ending a strained relationship. A deal would produce a tidy profit for Morgan Stanley, which invested $37m in the Chinese investment bank almost 15 years ago, and free the company to pursue a new joint venture with China Fortune Securities, a Chinese brokerage, the FT reports.GlaxoSmithKline is to create 1,000 jobs in Britain in response to a plan to cut tax to 10% on revenues from patents developed in the UK. At least 600 of the new jobs will be in the biopharmaceutical sector with the remaining 400 elsewhere in the company, GSK said. It did not give a timescale for the new jobs, the Times reports.The public should have been given more details of the currency deals that allowed Greece to hide the extent of its government debt, according to a senior executive at Goldman Sachs, the bank that arranged many of them. Seeking to deflect some of the popular and political anger directed at its derivatives dealings with the Greek government, Gerald Corrigan, Goldman's managing director told a UK parliamentary committee that it had helped shave only a modest amount from Greece's official debt ratios, the Independent reports.

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