Wednesday Papers: Osborne poised for bleak Budget

Top stories

• Financial Times: British Chancellor George Osborne ordered ministers to come up with £2.5 billion of extra spending cuts, as he scrambled for money in what was expected to be one of the bleakest British Budgets in years.
• Financial Times: Cyprus’s finance minister arrived in Moscow on Tuesday night to try to wrest vital economic assistance from the Kremlin as his country’s parliament rejected a €10 billion EU-led bailout that requires €5.8 billion to be seized from Cypriot bank accounts.
• Financial Times: Billions of dollars in Russian business transactions via Cyprus are on hold because of the shutdown of the country’s financial system as bankers and lawyers work feverishly to salvage the deals.
• Daily Mail: George Osborne could on Wednesday signal that corporation tax will be cut to 20% as he burnishes his pro-business credentials.
• The Daily Telegraph: Plans for Britain's first new nuclear plant in decades will only become a "reality" if ministers "swiftly" agree on subsidies for the £14 billion project, EDF Energy warned on Tuesday.
• Financial Times: Online investigators have exposed a network of hijacked computers that defrauded advertisers by generating billions of fake ad views; the so-called botnet scheme, which hijacked 120,000 residential PCs in the US, cost advertisers millions of dollars a month.
• Financial Times: Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, founders of Blackberry maker Research in Motion, have invested $100 million in a private fund designed to commercialise breakthroughs made in the quest to develop a next generation quantum computer.
• The Guardian: Ryanair handed Boeing its largest European order on Tuesday in a deal worth $16 billion at list prices to buy 175 passenger jets.
• Financial Times: John Malone, once known as the king of US cable, has made a $2.6 billion bet that the “pipes” owned by cable companies will increase in value as they make the switch from TV distributors to broadband providers.
• Financial Times: FCC, the Spanish construction group, will on Wednesday announce a plan to sell more than €2 billion of assets as it girds itself for a further three to four years of contraction in Spain’s crisis-hit building sector.
• The Independent: Shares in the controversial Indonesian coal miner Bumi fell 25.4 pence to 308.1 pence on Tuesday as the company shocked investors by delaying its annual results announcement by a month.
• The Guardian: Suntech, one of the world's biggest solar panel manufacturers, has defaulted on a $541 million bond payment in the latest sign of the financial squeeze on the struggling global solar industry.
• Financial Times: Freddie Mac has sued more than a dozen banks and the British Bankers Association, alleging it suffered “substantial losses” as a result of the manipulation of the Libor benchmark interest rate.
• The Daily Telegraph: US authorities are reportedly investigating whether Microsoft bribed Chinese officials to win business in the world's fastest-growing major economy.
• Financial Times: Apple has poached Adobe’s chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, an expert in cloud computing and long-time champion of the Flash software that Steve Jobs blocked from the iPhone, stoking a row between the two companies.
• The Independent: BAE Systems' chairman, Dick Olver, and its chief executive, Ian King, made £745,000 and £2.2 million, respectively, in 2012 – a year in which the aerospace giant failed in its audacious merger attempt with EADS and profits fell by 6%.
• Financial Times: Warren East, chief executive of chip designer Arm Holdings, will stand down in the summer to be replaced a company insider, Simon Segars.

Business and economics

• The Guardian: The British Office for National Statistics said inflation as measured by the consumer prices index stood at 2.8% last month, up from 2.7% and the highest for nine months.
• Financial Times: More US bond investors are seeking new ways to hedge against the risk of a sharp rise in interest rates in case growth in the world’s largest economy picks up and the Federal Reserve starts to wind up its current stimulus policies.
• Financial Times: The world’s biggest banks made significant progress in boosting their capital ratios last year and are now collectively short €208 billion of the capital they will need to meet tougher Basel III requirements.
• The Daily Telegraph: The BBC's governing body has ordered an internal investigation into the corporation's sale of Lonely Planet, after the travel guide business was disposed at a "significant financial loss" of £80 million.
• The Guardian: Sainsbury's boss Justin King has warned he will report rival supermarket Tesco to the Advertising Standards Authority over its new price promise if he believes comparisons between own brand products are inaccurate.
• Financial Times: Bharti Airtel’s chairman has been ordered to appear in front of an Indian court investigating telecoms corruption next month, sending shares in the country’s largest telecoms company by revenue down about 5%.
• The Independent: Sir Mike Rake, the chairman of BT, is to become president of the employers' organisation the CBI, taking over from Sir Roger Carr.
• The Guardian: Wolfgang Schreiber, Bentley's chairman and chief executive, said the company's new sports utility vehicle may be built in the Slovak capital rather than in Bentley's Crewe workshops in the UK.
• Financial Times: Lululemon Athletica said it had recalled some of its tighter-fitting yoga pants over the weekend – accounting for about 17% of all its women’s pants - after realising that they were made with a fabric that was too sheer.
• Financial Times: Calpers, the largest US public pension fund, has endorsed commodities as a safeguard against inflation despite recent moves to pull money from the asset class.
• The Independent: The Office of Fair Trading has shut down online payday lender MCO Capital, sending a warning to rival lenders that they face tough action from the regulator if they don't improve their business practices.
• Financial Times: BMW said pre-tax profit would stagnate in 2013 because of continued sales pressure in Europe and increased investments in new vehicles such as its futuristic electric i3 city car.
• The Independent: The son of the founding family of the footwear retailer Hotter Shoes and its investors are exploring strategic options for the business, including a potential sale for up to £150 million.
• Financial Times: Shore Capital reported a 1% rise in pre-tax profits from equity and capital markets at £5.1 million in the year to December 2012.
• The Independent: Northern Irish broadcaster Talksport has posted pre-tax profits for 2012 of £21 million as revenues at its parent company, UTV Media, fell 1% to £120 million.
• The Independent: Johnston Press, which publishes the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, saw pre-tax profits drop to £12.6 million in 2012, from £28.4 million a year ago.
• Financial Times: Elena Ambrosiadou, one of the hedge fund industry’s wealthiest women, has dropped claims against her estranged husband, Martin Coward, alleging a rival fund he runs uses proprietary software from the company they co-founded, Ikos.

Share tips, comment and bids

• The Daily Telegraph: Yahoo! is in talks to acquire a controlling stake in Dailymotion, one of the world's most popular online video websites, in what would be Yahoo! chief executive Marissa Mayer's largest deal since taking the reins in July.
• The Independent: Cairn Energy has signed a deal to acquire an interest in Senegal; on Tuesday, it posted profit after tax for 2012 of $73 million.
• The Daily Telegraph: The City of London's flotation market has been given another boost with Countrywide Holdings, Britain's biggest estate agent, pricing its initial public offering at 350 pence per share, at the top end of its initial range, giving the company a value of £750 million.
• The Independent: Filtrona has acquired the pharmaceutical packaging business Contego Healthcare for £160 million.
• The Independent: The owners of Insider Publishing, a specialist information company for the insurance industry, are celebrating after selling the business for £16.8 million to Euromoney Institutional Investor.
• The Guardian (Comment): The troika plan presented to Cyprus would ruin the economy, and start a run on banks that may spread elsewhere.
• The Guardian (Comment): Wednesday's budget measures could be directed to revolutionise the economy with growth that's smart, inclusive, and sustainable.
• The Daily Telegraph (Comment): There is quite a lot of basically innocent Russian wealth, both corporate, banking and private, caught up in Cyprus. The good are going to get punished alongside the bad whatever the eventual solution.
• The Daily Telegraph (Comment): Budget 2013: Will George Osborne make his mark or show himself as unambitious?
• Daily Mail (Comment – Alex Brummer): It happens to savers every day. The busybodies at HMRC dive directly into our savings (unless they are held in an ISA) and by withholding taxes immediately diminish the returns.
• Financial Times (Lex): Cypriot banks: one-off levy proposal could yet return but depositors are unlikely to be assuaged by the offer of shares in either Laiki or Bank of Cyprus.
• Financial Times (Lex): Ryanair: low-cost carrier puts competitors on notice with move to increase fleet size, as it aims to push its EU market share from 15% to 20%.
• Financial Times (Lex): Arm Holdings: new boss of the UK mobile chipmaker has his work cut out if he is to replicate the exceptional performance of his predecessor Warren East.
• Financial Times (Lex): ThyssenKrupp: potential €1 billion capital raising at German steelmaker would take pressure off its Americas asset sales and free up funds to invest in capital goods.