Thursday newspaper round-up: Fat cat pay, Poundland, Tesla, Petrobras
Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by lunchtime on Thursday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year, according to an independent analysis of the vast gap in pay between chief executives and everyone else. The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average. – Guardian
Poundland has secured up to £180m of independent financing that will reduce its reliance on its troubled South African owner Steinhoff International after bumper Christmas trading. Pepkor Europe, the European owner of Poundland, the Pep&Co clothing business and two other chains, has arranged a two-year loan facility from US investment firm Davidson Kempner Capital Management. Pepkor is owned by Steinhoff. – Guardian
Tesla pushed back its production targets for Model 3 electric cars once again, after delivering just 1,550 of the vehicles in the last three months of the year. The delivery figures came in well below the 4,100 Model 3 sedans analysts had been expecting Tesla to deliver in the three months to Dec 31, according to data compiled by FactSet. – Telegraph
Italian food chain Strada has moved to close more than a third of its restaurants after blaming the rising costs of running its eateries. The company said it had conducted a comprehensive review of its 26-strong estate and that it was closing 10 sites which were "no longer viable as Stradas in the increasingly competitive market", pointing to rising rents, wages and business rates as cost burdens which had become difficult to overcome. – Telegraph
Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company mired in a corruption scandal since 2014, is to pay nearly $3 billion to American investors in one of the largest class action settlements of its kind. The state-owned company said yesterday that it had agreed to settle an action brought by investors in the United States, who claimed that they had lost money as a result of the corruption. – The Times
The Serious Fraud Office has been accused of ignoring and “grossly misrepresenting” evidence and failing to carry out a proper investigation of an alleged fraud at Tesco, the supermarket group. Ian Winter, QC, defending John Scouler, a former Tesco executive alleged to have helped artificially inflate Tesco’s 2014 profit forecast by nearly £250 million, told a jury yesterday that they should not “feel confident about the nature of this prosecution”. He claimed that the SFO had not proven a single allegation against Mr Scouler because it had either “misunderstood” or “ignored” its own evidence. – The Times