Wednesday newspaper round-up: Bank bonuses, Rio Tinto, Dividends

The City watchdog may come under fire today for softening its proposals on bankers' bonuses. The Financial Services Authority will say it has abandoned some of the more draconian proposals it suggested in its March consultation paper, on the grounds that it could hurt the City's competitiveness.Publishing its code on pay and bonuses, the FSA's chief executive, Hector Sants, will say that it is not possible to push through all of the measures it suggested in March because the US and European Union have not taken similar steps to crack down on pay, the Times writes.Rio Tinto executive Stern Hu faces seven years in a Chinese prison after prosecutors formally charged him today with bribery and violating commercial secrets. Mr Hu, an Australian citizen and three Chinese colleagues at the Anglo-American mining giant are accused of "using improper means to obtain commercial secrets about our country's steel businesses", the official Xinhua news agency reported, the Times writes.Britain's bigger listed companies are forecast to pay out £8bn ($13bn) less in dividends this year as many seek to repair balance sheets that became overstretched before the credit crunch. The dividends received by shareholders in these groups fell 9$ to £28bn in the first half of 2009, according to Capita Registrars. For the year as a whole, it said it expected payments to fall by 13% to £52bn, the FT writes.Legal & General and the life assurance businesses of the Lloyds Banking Group are two high-profile targets on the hit list of Clive Cowdery, the entrepreneur who got his acquisition ball rolling yesterday with Resolution's agreed purchase of insurer Friends Provident. Cowdery said: "There are around nine life companies that are suitable candidates for consolidation. We believe that within 18 months there will be three life companies that will have come together," reports the Telegraph.The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, called yesterday for Sir David Walker's inquiry into banking governance to be extended in the wake of Friends Provident's capitulation to Clive Cowdery's Guernsey-based investment company Resolution under pressure from its institutional shareholders, adds the Independent.Richard Alderman, the director of the Serious Fraud Office, has said Lord Mandelson was "absolutely right" to refer the collapse of MG Rover to his organisation, despite rejecting the chance to launch a criminal investigation. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Mr Alderman said that after taking time "mastering a complex report" it "wasn't a difficult decision" to conclude there were no grounds to pursue an inquiry.Frank DiPascali, a senior lieutenant to Bernard Madoff, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to 10 criminal charges and provided extensive new details about the $65bn Ponzi scheme orchestrated by his long-time boss, saying: "It was all fake. It was all fictitious." DiPascali told the court how he, Madoff and unnamed others manufactured millions of pages of fake documents, regularly lied to investors and regulators, and moved money to London and back to throw watchdogs off the scent of the decades-long scheme, the FT reports.A long-running legal battle for a bankrupt US copper company has led Vedanta, the London-listed Indian miner, to enter a Texas courtroom this week with a raised cash offer. Vedanta, which produces copper and zinc in India, confirmed yesterday that its subsidiary Sterlite Industries had raised the cash portion of its bid for Asarco, the US copper miner, from $1.1bn to $1.59bn in a court-mediated auction, the FT writes.Atticus Capital, the hedge fund manager co-chaired by Nathaniel Rothschild, scion of the famous banking family, will be reduced to bare bones after announcing plans to return $4bn (£2.4bn) to investors. Timothy Barakett, 44, the Canadian who founded Atticus with $6m in start-up cash in 1995, wrote to investors yesterday to tell them that he would close two of his funds, Atticus Global, worth $3.4bn, and the $600m Atticus Trading, the Times writes.