Monday newspaper round-up: GKN, Carillion, JPM, open banking
Political efforts to force the business secretary, Greg Clark , to intervene in the hostile takeover bid for industrial giant GKN have intensified with an accusation by Britain’s largest trade union that bosses of bidder Melrose support a hard Brexit that will damage manufacturing jobs. Research by Unite shows Melrose’s executive chair, Christopher Miller, and his wife, Monica, donated £37,500 to Vote Leave in the runup to the EU referendum while the vice-chair, David Roper, donated £20,000 – a pro-leave stance that the union says justifies blocking the£7.4bn deal unveiled last month. – Guardian
Carillion’s former finance director sold nearly £800,000 of shares after retiring last year shortly before the firm’s collapse, according to evidence published by MPs. Richard Adam, who had managed Carillion’s finances for a decade, offloaded £534,000 of shares on 1 March last year, three months after stepping down from the company, before selling a further £242,000 of stock handed to him in May as part of a bonus scheme. – Guardian
The "Queen's broker" JP Morgan Cazenove now has one of the worst records for keeping UK stock market clients as smaller players snap at its heels, fresh analysis shows. The blue-blooded City broker and Canadian bank Canaccord suffered the most stock market losses in the five years to November 2017, according to an analysis of Adviser Rankings data, with JP Morgan losing 30 UK clients during the period, and Canaccord 60 after clients moved elsewhere following its acuisition of Collin Stewart in 2011. – Telegraph
A digital revolution in banking services could contribute more than £1bn annually to the UK economy, research has claimed. Under the so-called “Open Banking” reforms, which came into force in the UK last month, customers are given the keys to their own financial data, enabling them to change providers in minutes online with a few clicks. – Telegraph
More than 4.5 million borrowers who are not on fixed rates face an average annual increase of £930 in repayments if interest rates rise by 1 per cent, according to analysis which suggests that first-time buyers would be hardest hit. Research by Savills suggests that the cost of borrowing for people with variable or tracker-rate mortgages — about 41 per cent of borrowers — would rise by a total of £4.3 billion if the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee was to vote for the rise. – The Times
Rolls-Royce was in a battle for survival during the depths of its financial crisis in 2015 and 2016 with revelations about long-running corruption that led to record fines leaving the workforce believing that bribery was how the company did business, Warren East, the chief executive, has admitted. In his most candid interview since taking over at the FTSE 100 engineer 30 months ago, Mr East revealed that he was unaware of just how bad things were. He said that he had found the job difficult because he is not a natural cost-cutting turnaround executive. – The Times