Thursday Newspaper round up

The corporate governance crisis at Stobart deepened last night with the resignation of its senior City broker, The Times writes. The paper says that Investec walking away from the transport and logistics firm a week after the ousting of its Chairman, who was only on the job for 71 days.

Marks & Spencer’s position as Britain’s biggest clothing retailer is coming under threat with chief executive Marc Bolland poised to report a sharp drop in sales for the first three months of the year,” according to The Telegraph.

The poor weather this spring will hike average household energy bills by £200 to more than £1,600 a year, according to The Times. The paper said: “With temperatures 3C below the average for March, shivering customers used a third more gas this spring than last year.”

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde has said that the threat from the world’s biggest banks was “more dangerous than ever” and called for urgent reform, says The Telegraph. “In too many cases – from the United States in 2008 to Cyprus today – we have seen what happens when a banking sector chooses the quick buck over the lasting benefit, backing a business model that ultimately destabilizes the economy. We simply cannot have pre-crisis banking in a post-crisis world,” she said.

John Griffith-Jones, the head of the City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is under pressure to resign on the back of his role a accountant KPMG, which gave HBOS a clean bill of health despite large losses which prompted a taxpayer rescue, reports The Guardian.

Three private-equity firms, Blackstone, Carlyle and KRR, have made a joint $11bn bid for Life Technologies, “providing the strongest signal so far that leveraged buyout deal fever is back”, the Financial Times.

According to research group IDC, global shipments of PCs dropped 14% in the first quarter, the steepest fall since the firm started the research in 1994, as consumers turns away from PCs towards smartphones and tablets, writes The Independent.

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