Monday newspaper round-up: BHP Billiton, Ireland, eBay...

15th Nov 2010 06:23

BHP Billiton has abandoned its $39bn bid for Canadian fertilizer company Potash and agreed to return $4.2bn to shareholders through a previously suspended buyback programme.Announcing its decision to drop the takeover bid, Australian-based BHP had said that the concessions demanded by the Canadian authorities would have "conflicted with BHP Billiton's business strategy and been counter to creating shareholder value", the Times reports.British taxpayers could be asked to guarantee up to £6bn of Irish debt as part of an emergency pan-European deal to save the country's economy from collapse. The Treasury made clear last night that Britain would, if needed, play its part to restore market confidence in Ireland, stressing the taxpayer's interest in protecting an ailing ally. "This is not like Greece ? they are close trading partners," an official said, the Times reports.Britain's leading management consultants are being forced to reshape their practices as fees from government work plummet, prompting fears of job losses in the industry. Consulting firms built large practices geared toward advising public sector clients during the past decade but their revenues have "fallen off a cliff" this year as the Treasury tightens the screws on government spending, industry insiders told The Times.The mining giant Anglo American has agreed to sell its steel-grinding media unit to the Australian producer One Steel for US$932m (£580m). The Sydney-based One Steel beat competition from foreign rivals to acquire Anglo American's grinding media and steel products businesses in North and South America, Moly-Cop and AltaSteel, including joint-venture interests in Australia and Canada, the Independent reports.The UK government's decision to abolish the Financial Services Authority, the financial regulator, has damaged London's ability to withstand punitive regulation from Europe, according to one of the City's leading figures. Peter Clarke, chief executive of Man Group, the FTSE 100-listed hedge fund, said the UK's bargaining position in Europe had been "impaired" by the decision to shut the FSA down, the FT reports.The private equity arm of Lloyds Banking Group has for the first time outlined plans for the UK's most prolific buy-out investor to spin off from its banking parent. Darryl Eales, chief executive of Lloyds TSB Development Capital, said it was expected to start raising money from third-party investors by 2013. LDC invests about £250m each year from Lloyds's balance sheet into 15-20 companies, the FT reports.The full impact of cost cutting on thousands of UK businesses can be revealed this weekend after internal documents showed that Carillion, the £1.4bn construction and support services group, is reducing its supplier base from 25,000 companies to just 5,000 as part of a drive to save £140m a year by 2013, the Telegraph reports.eBay has sparked a furious row with banks after claiming that one in three small and medium-sized enterprises is unable to secure financing from them. In its Online Business Index, designed as a barometer of the attitudes and performance of internet firms that use it, eBay, the internet marketplace, said it was "naming and shaming" the big four banks as part of an "investigation of the relationship between banks and businesses", the Independent reports.The head of John Lewis declared the department store group to be "on track for a good Christmas" yesterday after starting the build-up to the festive season with a surge in sales. Andy Street, the managing director, said that the key Christmas trading period, which accounts for about a quarter of its annual sales, had "begun in earnest last week" with sales up 11.5% on the previous week, the Times reports.The average asking price for a house this month has fallen by 3.2% to £229,379, according to Rightmove, which claims to advertise 90% of homes for sale in Britain. This is the biggest drop since December 2007,the Times reports.Four in 10 public-sector employers have begun to make workers redundant, new data will reveal today, just a month after the Government spelled out its plans for cuts in the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR). The figures from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) will alarm labour- market analysts, who had expected the public sector to phase in job cuts more slowly, the Independent reports.