Sunday newspaper round-up: British Steel, BP, BoE
The government has passed a bill that allows it to force companies to keep operations going at loss-making steel businesses in England. That or their executives will face criminal penalties. The bill was approved in what was just the sixth Saturday sitting of parliament since the second world war. The move was made necessary by the apparent breakdown of talks with British Steel's Chinese owners, which threatened to provoke the works' furnaces going out and the loss of thousands of jobs. - Guardian
BP
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17:09 23/04/25
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Oil & Gas Producers
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US activist investor, Elliott Management, may oppose the re-election this week of Murray Auchincloss as BP's boss. A revolt would follow BP chairman Helge Lund's decision earlier during the same month to step down in 2026. Panmure Liberum analyst, Ashley Kelly, is of the opinion that in markets there was a growing sense that the oil major needed to replace both its chief executive and chairman.- The Financial Mail on Sunday
Google is asking the Competition and Markets Authority to move with haste to avoid Microsoft dominating the cloud storage space in the UK. The move follows an independent inquiry that provisionally found that Microsoft had leveraged its position in software to make it more difficult for competitors to compete for cloud customers. Google backed those findings, but Microsoft said that they were flawed. - The Sunday Times
Former Monetary Policy Committee member, Andrew Sentance, thinks that inflation in the UK may be headed back above 5.0% by autumn. Last summer it was running at 2.0% and more recently at 2.8%. Signs of potentially higher prices were there already before Trump, but now the US President's tariffs had added a layer of uncertainty, he said. Yet should trade conflicts become too extreme, then central banks the world over may yet be called on to lower rates in order to buttress growth. So for now his advice to the Bank of England is to hold its fire and wait for greater clarity. - The Financial Mail on Sunday