Wednesday newspaper round-up: Pensions, Vodafone, BHS, Port Talbot

There was something different about David Cameron’s last EU supper. The mood was good-tempered, the jibes few and far between, the atmosphere sober but for the occasional laugh. Emerging from the British prime minister’s three-hour summit farewell on Tuesday, one northern European leader remarked that given the circumstances it could have been far worse — “but only nice things can be said about the dead”. – Financial Times

Six months ago, most City of London bankers had a long list of regulations they wanted to scrap. But the Brexit vote has changed all that. As the banks recover from the shock of the referendum, they are drawing up plans to lobby politicians to keep financial regulation intact and to ensure the sector suffers as little disruption as possible from leaving the EU. – Financial Times

The travails of Britain’s private pensions industry may seem like a sideshow amid the turmoil of the last week, but in case you missed it, they just got a whole lot worse. And as it happens, these difficulties are an almost perfect example of what’s going wrong more widely in financial markets. It’s all about falling interest rates. Having been in slow decline for twenty years or more, they took a dramatic lurch down during the financial crisis, when the unconventional monetary policy of zero rates and quantitative easing became the order of the day. - Telegraph

Vodafone, one of Britain’s biggest companies, has warned that it could relocate its head office outside the UK if the negotiations for a post-Brexit Britain do not give it freedom of movement across the EU for people, capital and goods. The telecoms company, which employs nearly 110,000 people around the world and some 13,000 in the UK, said it would take “whatever decisions are appropriate” once the outcome of the negotiations was known. – Guardian

The man who introduced Dominic Chappell to Sir Philip Green, thereby facilitating the controversial takeover of BHS for £1, has said he “never thought in a million years” that Chappell would end up running the department store chain. Paul Sutton, who has a spent conviction for fraud in France, revealed to MPs in a committee session on Tuesday that Chappell had initially been his driver when he was working on his own deal to buy BHS. - Guardian

Lord Blunkett has been appointed Heathrow’s new “employment tsar” as the airport pledges to create thousands of “British jobs for British workers”. The former cabinet minister will lead an 18-month taskforce established by Heathrow to make sure that most of the 77,000 jobs directly created by an expanded airport go to “home-grown” talent, The Times has learnt. – The Times

Edmund Truell, the pension scheme rescuer and private equity investor, has emerged as the latest potential saviour of the British steel industry. The outspoken City figure has opened talks with Tata Steel, the Pensions Regulator and the Treasury over a plan aimed at saving the Port Talbot steelworks in south Wales and a dozen other steel processing facilities around the UK. – The Times