Thursday newspaper round-up: Scotland, GSK, BG, Stagecoach

Scottish MPs will be entitled to vote on UK budgets even though control over income tax will soon be transferred over to the Edinburgh parliament, Labour has revealed shortly before the publication of a cross-party devolution deal on Thursday, the Financial Times found.

The Smith Commission, charged with getting agreement following an independence referendum by David Cameron, will uncover proposals to allot the Scottish Parliament a bunch of new tax and welfare powers. Labour insiders have let slip that a deal has been made to ensure Scottish MPs can vote on finance Bills at Westminster regardless of the fact that income tax rates south of the Border will no longer apply in their constituencies

Thousands of health care workers in Sierra Leone and Liberia may receive an experimental Ebola vaccine in early 2015 now that GlaxoSmithKline has confirmed that drug-trials have so far been "encouraging", reports the Telegraph.

The British pharmaceutical firm is developing the vaccine in partnership with the US National Institutes of Health and said each of the 20 healthy adult volunteers who took part in the trial showed an “immunological response”.

Over a million low-income households have been overcharged by an average of £50 by their energy supplier because of faulty gas meters, says the Times.

British Gas, the largest energy supplier, is understood to be the worst offender as its customers use about half of the 1.5m pre-payment meters in question. The billing errors go back to 2007, when the first meters were installed and energy suppliers have begun contacting affected customers, promising to pay full refunds.

According to the Guardian, oil and gas group BG faces an uphill struggle with its shareholders after ISS, the biggest investor advisory group, rejected a £25m, pay deal for the firm’s new chief executive.

ISS claimed the company’s pay committee had not done its job properly and invited investors to vote against Helge Lund’s package at an extraordinary general meeting called to approve the pay package in December.

The oil price tumbled below $78 a barrel on the eve of Thursday's Opec meeting after Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates hinted that they had no intention of cutting production levels to prop up prices, the Times says.

With oil prices down by a third since June and producers mothballing now-unviable projects, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries meets in Vienna for one of its most closely watched gatherings in years.

Stagecoach and Virgin Trains have won an eight-year contract to run the London-to-Scotland East Coast Main Line. The line, which has been operated by a British-taxpayer-owned rail company since 2009, will be re-privatised on March 1 next year, reports the Telegraph.

The decision to hand the contract to Stagecoach and Virgin means that both of the UK's main rail arteries between London and Scotland will be operated by the same two companies. Stagecoach and Virgin have been running the West Coast Main Line between London and Scotland for almost two decades.