Easyjet passenger numbers up, Homeserve appoints news CFO

London’s FTSE 100 was set to open unchanged at 7,188.

Stocks to watch

National Grid on Monday said it was spending £35m to buy back up to 3.5m shares.

The company said the sole purpose of the exercise was to reduce its share capital as part of its management of the dilution resulting from the take-up of its scrip dividend offer for the interim dividend paid in January 2017.

The buy-back programme will be managed by Merrill Lynch International and will run until February 17. The purchased shares will be held as treasury shares, National Grid said.

Budget airline easyJet posted a rise in traffic and the load factor in January.

Passenger numbers were up 11% from the same month last year to 4.75m as the load factor – which gauges how full the flights are – edged up to 86.2% from 85%.

On a rolling 12-month basis, traffic grew 6.9% to 74.9m, while the load factor nudged down to 91.5% from 91.6%.

Emergency repairs business Homeserve has appointed David Bower as chief financial officer with immediate effect and will he also join the board and executive committee.

Bower, who joined HomeServe in 2005, was previously interim chief financial officer and held a number of senior divisional and group finance roles including six years as group finance director.

In the press

Civil servants are carrying out an internal inquiry to establish whether the engineering giant Rolls-Royce fraudulently obtained financial support worth hundreds of millions of pounds from the government. The inquiry was launched after the multinational manufacturer admitted last month it had used multimillion-pound bribes to secure export orders across the world over four decades. – Guardian

The organisation that provides warranties for most of the new homes in Britain is paying millions of pounds to the leading housebuilders every year, raising questions about its independence and credibility amid a wave of complaints about the quality of new-build properties. NHBC, the standard-setting body and main home construction warranty provider for new builds in the UK, is paying around £10m to £15m every year to housebuilders through what is effectively a profit-share agreement. The largest firms can receive as much as £2m from the scheme, because it rewards the developers who registered the most homes with NHBC. - Guardian

Booker bosses will launch a charm offensive this week in an attempt to convince Britain’s shopkeepers of the merits of its shock £3.7bn Tesco merger, amid rising concerns that the deal will strangle competition in the convenience store market. Booker chief executive Charles Wilson and managing director Steve Fox will begin by addressing thousands of Premier convenience franchise owners at Newbury Racecourse next Wednesday as part of a tour of the UK. - Telegraph

Deutsche Bank has taken the unusual step of apologising to the German public for the damage caused by its ongoing legal problems, which last week helped to push the bank to its second consecutive annual loss. Germany’s biggest bank took out full-page adverts in 10 of the country’s national newspapers over the weekend, in which it admitted that its past misconduct “not only cost us a lot of money; they have also cost us dearly in terms of reputation and trust”. - Telegraph

A hard Brexit could boost the pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors by more than £200 million, according to a study that reveals a surprise silver lining to leaving the single market. Drug companies and aeroplane parts groups represent two of Britain's most thriving export sectors and executives in both industries had issued stark warnings about leaving the EU. – The Times

US close

Wall Street staged a broad advance at the end of the week despite a mixed January jobs report, led by transport and financial stocks.

The latter were boosted by the new US president´s decision to sign an executive order setting the stage for a roll-back of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulations act.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.94% or 186.55 points to 20,071.46, the S&P 500 was up 0.73% or 16.57 points to 2,297.42 and the Nasdaq was 0.54% or 30.57 points higher to 5,666.77.