Sunday newspaper round-up: RBS, Shell, Cobham, BT, banks

Royal Bank of Scotland is examining a range of radical options to help speed the long-delayed separation and flotation of its Williams & Glyn subsidiary, including a potential divestment of its NatWest brand. Banking sources have indicated to the Sunday Telegraph that RBS and its advisers have brainstormed ideas to save time and money on the £1.5bn spin-off project, which have been hamstrung by current plans to 'clone' the dual IT system.

Royal Dutch Shell is mulling floating $40bn of non-core assets around the globe in order to help trip the eye-watering $73bn debt pile swollen by the recent BG takeover. Chief financial officer Simon Henry told analysts an initial public offering (IPO) of Shell’s non-core assets is “very much on the agenda”, the Sunday Telegraph reported, with a 'Baby Shell' an option that allows the company to benefit from an oil price recovery in future.

Shell has also established a separate division, New Energies, to invest in renewable and low-carbon power, the Observer reported. The move, which emerges days after experts at Chatham House warned international oil companies they must transform their business or face a “short, brutal” end within 10 years, will bring together existing hydrogen, biofuels and electrical activities but will also be used as a base for a new drive into wind power, with $1.7bn of capital investment and annual capital expenditure of $200m.

Defence supplier Cobham has been hit by problems with its air-to-air refuelling gear on board the US air force’s new KC-46 tankers. In a recent report US Government Accountability Office said one supplier, believed by the Sunday Times to be Cobham, built the systems without following official processes before discovering a design flaw and also that the parts would be three years late.

Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone have joined forces to pile pressure on BT Group, with a call for its network division Openreach to face radical reform and unprecedented independent oversight to deliver improvements to Britain’s broadband infrastructure. A letter from the trio, together with groups representing dozens of smaller broadband operators, to head Ofcom regulator Sharon White, has called for her to implement a 10-point plan that is likely to be fiercely resisted by BT chief executive Gavin Patterson, the Sunday Telegraph wrote.

Despite free global trade's important to economic theory, a growing populism, with Donald Trump a key figurehead, threatens to imperil trade deals that have been years or decades in the making, the Sunday Telegraph said. Dutch, German and French voters have voiced their opposition to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) - a proposed deal between the US and the EU - while the stances of both Trump and potential presidency race opponent Hillary Clinton also threaten to put a nail in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) coffin.

Just three family-owned companies, one of them Dutch-owned, has bought up almost two thirds of the fishing quota for England and Wales, according to an investigation by Greenpeace. "A few large trawler firms are thriving while small-scale fishers, the lifeblood of the UK’s fishing industry, are being elbowed out of business,” Will McCallum, head of oceans at Greenpeace, told the Sunday Times.

Petroceltic chief executive Brian O'Caithan criticised the aggressive takeover waged by activist shareholder Worldview last week as being “unfair” to other investors and calling on regulators to force shadowy foreign bidders to be more transparent. Shareholders in the Dublin and London-listed oil explorer have watched the company’s share price evaporate amid a boardroom feud which reached an end last week when the fund was handed ownership of the company by the Irish courts, after pushing the company into administration, the Sunday Telegraph said.

Just one in eight UK stock market listings over the past two years was offered to the public, according to new research that has emerged a month after the FCA launched a crackdown on anti-competitive behaviour. A study by investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown and reported by the Mail on Sunday showed that only nine out of 72 flotations on the main market over the period included public offerings, and the vast majority were private placings to large institutional investors only.

One of London’s best-known restaurateurs has launched a scathing attack on the business secretary for plans that could make restaurant service charges mandatory, which would be liable for VAT and national insurance. Joel Kissin, who built a multimillion-pound food empire with Sir Terence Conran in the 1980s and 1990s, said the proposals would increase menu prices and could force many restaurants to close.

Britain’s biggest caravan park company is laying plans for a £1bn sale or stock market float. Parkdean, which owns 73 holiday camps across the country, is in talks with investment banks in preparation for a deal later this year, sources told the Sunday Times.

Britain's water regulator has a blunt message for companies that provide our water and sewerage service: they need to get cut prices and get ‘a hell of a lot more efficient’ by reducing the equivalent of 1,250 Olympic-size swimming pools of water leaking per day. Energy companies and telecoms groups are used to taking flak over high prices but it sounds like the water sector is about to come under similar pressure – from Ofwat chief Cathryn Ross, said the Mail on Sunday.

Warren Buffett is backing a multibillion-dollar takeover bid by American mortgage and casino magnate Dan Gilbert for beleaguered internet giant Yahoo. The billionaire investor is understood to have agreed to help finance the takeover of Yahoo’s internet businesses, which are expected to fetch between $4bn (£2.8bn) and $5bn.

European missile giant MBDA is poised to win a £411m contract from the UK Ministry of Defence to develop the Spear 3 weapon. The deal is likely to secure 700 UK jobs, including 350 skilled jobs at MBDA’s sites across the UK with an additional 350 jobs at supplier companies.

Goldman Sachs has been ordered by a parliamentary inquiry to account for its role in Sir Philip Green’s disastrous £1 sale of BHS. Top London banker Anthony Gutman will face questions from MPs on his part in the deal. Such scrutiny will be awkward for Goldman, the Sunday Times said, as the Wall Street giant prides itself on giving discreet advice to blue-chip clients

The taxman has won a £1m VAT stand-off with a fast-growing Mexican restaurant chain over whether burritos are hot or cold snacks. A judge ruled against the chain, which claimed its burritos, tacos and other items were cold food, which would have meant they were zero-rated and avoided the VAT of 20% is due on hot food to go.

Looking ahead

The big four high street banks, Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS will be forced to help customers find cheaper overdrafts and loans as part of a crackdown on the big four lenders by the competition regulator. The Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) is expected to demand this week that banks fund a price-comparison service, to discuss a cap on overdraft fees, but the CMA will not call for a break-up of the top banks or an end to “free” banking, industry sources told the Sunday Times.

Pharmaceutical companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Shire will come under attack on Thursday for their failure to tackle the scourge of drug-resistant superbugs as Lord O’Neill delivers the findings of a two-year government review into antimicrobial resistance. The Sunday Times reported that the former Goldman Sachs chief economist, now a Treasury minister, is expected to target drugs giants that refuse to develop new treatments, which he forecasts if nothing is down will cost the global economy $100trn and potentially send us back to the 'dark ages of medicine' where a scraped knee could prove fatal.

Burberry will reveal a sharp fall in annual profits this week due to declining spending by Chinese consumers, leading boss Christopher Bailey to announced big cloth cutting and maybe an extra cash return. The maker of famous checked scarves and trench coats is expected to report a 7% fall in profits to £415m for the year to the end of March.

The £2.2bn merger of Ladbrokes and Gala Coral is hanging in the balance, the Sunday Times said, as the CMA is poised to force the sale of hundreds of betting shops in order to give the deal clearance later this week. The Sunday Times noted that analysts were predicting the pair of bookmakers will be ordered to sell between 400 and 800 shops to allay the CMA’s fears of a “substantial lessening of competition” on the high street.

The Sunday Telegraph put the number at between 400 and 500 as the CMA reports is delivered by Friday at the latest, with a firm block of the merger unlikely.

Google faces a record-breaking fine for monopoly abuse within weeks, as officials in Brussels put the finishing touches to a seven-year investigation of company’s dominant search engine, the Sunday Telegraph reported. The European Commission is understood to be aiming to slap Google with a €3bn fine, a figure that would easily surpass its previous record €1.1bn fine levied on the microchip giant Intel, although the maximum possible is around €6.6bn.

In October the London Stock Exchange sent a warning to the brokers paid to vouch for companies listed on AIM, known as nomads, after a number of Chinese companies disappeared from the junior market in recent years. Admission rules have since been tightened, but the problem of opaque Chinese companies remains and the LSE is reviewing those floating more closely as AIM plans for a future after the £20bn merger of the London market with Deutsche Börse, said the Sunday Times.

Premier Foods senior management will face some fierce questioning when then they report full-year results on Tuesday, the Sunday Times noted, having rejected three takeover approaches from US giant McCormick. The American maker of Schwartz spices walked away from the proposed deal despite a sizeable premium to the company's share price before and since.