Search Share Prices
Monday newspaper round-up: NHS funding, new car sales, Provident Financial, Carillion, GKN, Melrose
Jeremy Hunt called health funding "crazy" yesterday as he launched a political offensive for a ten-year NHS spending deal and backed moves for a ring fenced tax. The health secretary, who has emerged as one of the cabinet's most powerful figures in recent months, said that GPs and hospitals had been subjected to "feast or famine" in the past two decades. - The Times
Jeremy Corbyn has been accused by Jewish leaders of holding "conspiratorial views" about their community and treating them like a "hostile entity". The Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council, two of the most senior Jewish groups in Britain, will on Monday take the unprecedented step of holding a protest against Mr Corbyn in Parliament Square. - Telegraph
The gender gap in UK retirement incomes has widened dramatically over the last decade, with the average single woman now £85 a week behind her male counterpart, according to new data. The findings come as companies and organisations continue to report the difference between what they pay male and female staff ahead of the 4 April deadline set by the government, and suggest that gender pay inequalities do not stop after people retire. - Guardian
Car sales in Britain are predicted to be the worst in Europe this year as a consumer squeeze weighs on spending decisions. The number of new cars being sold in the UK is expected to drop by 5.5 per cent, in sharp contrast with booming sales in every other country in Western Europe. - Daily Mail
Councils have spent more than £43 million in five years to settle legal claims brought by cyclists and motorists injured on Britain's deteriorating roads. Figures released under the Freedom of Information Act show that cyclists received an average of £11,000 in compensation for each successful claim against councils, 13 times higher than equivalent payouts for motorists. - The Times
As modern cars become festooned with evermore gadgets, the in-built sat nav is now a standard fixture. However, an investigation by Auto Express magazine found that the cost of updating the in-built sat nav system varies by hundreds of pounds, depending on the make, model and age of your car, even though most get the mapping software from the same provider. - Telegraph
A fire at a shopping centre in the Siberian city of Kemerovo has left at least 53 people dead, many of them children. Russian emergency workers were still recovering bodies from Kemerovo's Winter Cherry Shopping Centre a day after the fire and desperately searching for more than a dozen people still reported missing. - Guardian
Nearly 25,000 people who were charged to receive junk text messages from a company flouting the regulator's rules are to get refunds worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Pro Money Holdings Limited - which operated a service called Comphouse Competitions - has been banned from the market for at least five years and fined £50,000 by the Phone-paid Services Authority, which governs premium-rate services charged to phone bills. - Daily Mail
The troubled subprime lender Provident Financial is embroiled in a potentially costly legal dispute with a leading shareholder over alleged delays in disclosing a regulatory investigation into its credit card business. Lawyers acting for Aberdeen Standard Investments have written to Provident seeking compensation for losses suffered by its failure to disclose details of the Financial Conduct Authority investigation into its Vanquis Bank subsidiary. - The Times
Donald Trump's "economic madness" will push the US into a sharp recession that risks dragging the rest of the world down with it, one of Britain's most senior economists has warned. Paul Fisher, a former Bank of England policymaker, fears that slashing taxes and raising spending will cause America's strengthening economy to overheat dramatically. - Telegraph
Carillion bosses have been accused of demonstrating "greed on stilts" by worrying more about "fat pay and bonuses" for bosses than looking out for signs of trouble before the company collapsed. MPs investigating the failure of the government contractor released reams of fresh evidence on Monday showing how Carillion sought to boost and protect the rewards for its top executives despite the dire state of its finances. - Guardian
More than a fifth of Britain's largest financial services firms have confirmed they will move operations out of the UK as a result of Brexit. The latest figures from professional services giant EY's Brexit tracker show 46 banks, insurers and asset managers intend to move either staff or operations to the Continent. - Daily Mail
GKN's chief executive has lashed out at short-term investors with the powers to decide bids as tensions mount before Thursday's deadline for Melrose's planned £7.9 billion hostile takeover. With the bid on a knife-edge, Anne Stevens accused merger arbitrage traders, who aim to profit on marginal swings in share prices, of not giving a "crap" about the engineering group's long-term future. - The Times
Some of the world's biggest mining companies are set to open negotiations with the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday over a new mining code that could impose tough new conditions and higher royalties on the metals they produce. Senior executives from FTSE 100 firms Glencore and Randgold, plus representatives from Ivanhoe Mines of Canada, MMG of Australia and China Molybdenum will meet in Kinshasa in the DRC. - Telegraph
Ride-hailing firm Uber has agreed to sell its south-east Asian business to bigger regional rival Grab, marking the US company's second retreat from an Asian market. The deal is the industry's first big consolidation in south-east Asia, home to about 640 million people, and puts pressure on Indonesia's Go-Jek, which is backed by Alphabet's Google and China's Tencent. - Guardian