Thursday Papers: Osborne looks to corporate tax cuts to drive recovery

Top stories

• Financial Times: British Chancellor George Osborne has used his Budget to try to spur Britain’s recovery through tax cuts for companies, support for the housing market and more aggressive monetary policy against a backdrop of bleak economic forecasts; the chancellor reduced the main corporation tax rate to 20% by April 2015, down from 28% when the coalition government came to power.
• Daily Mail: Osborne yesterday cleared the way for Mark Carney to preside over the biggest shake-up at the Bank of England for more than two decades as he handed the incoming central bank governor sweeping new powers to target jobs and growth as well as inflation in a bid to kick-start Britain’s ailing economy.
• Financial Times: Sterling climbed and UK borrowing costs were subdued on Wednesday as the chancellor’s proposed reforms of the Bank of England calmed investors, and reduced expectations of plans to ease monetary policy further.
• Financial Times (Lex): For all the hoo-ha over the annual UK Budget speech by the chancellor, should stock investors care?
• Daily Mail (Comment): Businesses will benefit from some eye-catching measures in the Budget including a cut in corporation tax. But the big question is whether the Chancellor has pulled out the stops enough.
• The Guardian (Editorial): No matter how cunningly British Chancellor George Osborne selects who he wants to protect, large parts of the population are going to get hurt.
• The Guardian (Comment): Judging by this budget George Osborne hopes to win the next election like vintage Arsenal, playing ugly and nicking late winners.
• The Daily Telegraph (Comment): The downgraded Chancellor was downgraded once again. But this time he came out fighting as he made a last-ditch bid for growth before the next election.
• Financial Times: Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has lambasted the EU’s handling of the Cyprus debt crisis, comparing a plan for a levy on bank deposits to measures that hurt savers under the Soviet Union.
• Financial Times: New EU rules to limit bank bonuses were give a final seal of approval on Wednesday night by member states and the European parliament with only minor tweaks to appease the UK, home to the bloc’s biggest financial industry.

Business and economics

• The Independent: Visa Europe's owners are considering selling the credit-card company and setting up a rival system across the Continent; a consortium of 3,700 banks own the business and are understood to be keen to sell it to US-based Visa for about $3 billion.
• Financial Times: Rich Ricci, Barclays head of investment banking, collected nearly £18 million this week after cashing in previously awarded bonuses.
• The Guardian: Barclays has been accused of trying to bury news that it paid its top bankers an "extraordinarily greedy" £39.5 million in bonuses by sneaking out the pay details when most of the City was distracted by the budget.
• The Independent: ENRC's founding trio of major shareholders-- Alexander Machkevitch, Patokh Chodiev and Alijan Ibragimov--are collectively about $100 million out of pocket after a $1.5 billion charge plunged the Kazakh-focused miner into the red last year.
• Financial Times: Suntech Power Holdings, which was until recently the world’s largest producer of solar panels, has said its main subsidiary in China is bankrupt, in a further stark illustration of the declining fortunes of the global solar industry.
• Financial Times: Deutsche Bank has had to cut its reported profits for last year after having to set aside more money to cover potential mortgage-related lawsuits in the US, adding to the legal burden for Germany’s flagship lender.
• Financial Times: Autonomy’s former chief executive has asked investors in Hewlett-Packard to seek more detail on the company’s $8.8 billion writedown of its acquisition of the software company at its annual meeting on Wednesday.
• The Daily Telegraph: Hewlett-Packard said that it has established a committee to investigate its $10.3 billion acquisition of UK software maker Autonomy, as it sought to assuage anger at its annual shareholder meeting.
• The Independent: InterContinental Hotels handed its chief executive, Richard Solomons, a £1.26 million pay package last year.
• Financial Times: BP decided not to bid for new drilling rights in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday because of uncertainty over the US government’s ban on it signing new contracts.
• Financial Times: Cyprus’s finance minister was holding talks in Moscow on Wednesday to secure economic assistance from the Kremlin after his country’s parliament rejected a €10billion EU-led bailout.
• Financial Times: French investigators have raided the Paris home of Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, in a probe into allegations that she acted illegally in approving a €400 million compensation payment made to a prominent supporter of Nicolas Sarkozy when she was French finance minister.
• The Guardian: The US economy is still too weak for the Federal Reserve to pull back from its $85 billion-a-month stimulus package, the central bank said on Wednesday.
• Financial Times: The future of European industry is in danger as the difficulty of winning equity financing threatens the development of new big businesses, according to Anders Nyrén and Börje Ekholm, the chief executives of Sweden’s two largest holding companies, Industrivärden and Investor.
• Financial Times: The International Air Transport Association has upgraded its closely watched industry performance forecast, saying it expected airlines to record a combined net profit of $10.6 billion this year, up from a previous estimate of $8.4 billion.
• The Daily Telegraph: Controversial "fracking" has won backing from the Government after Chancellor George Osborne used his Budget to promise a generous new tax regime for extracting shale gas.
• Financial Times: Demetrios Marantis, acting US trade representative, has vowed to battle for US farmers in trade talks with the EU and Japan.
• The Guardian: Alex Salmond's predictions that Scotland will soon enjoy an oil boom have been rejected after the Office for Budget Responsibility stuck to its downbeat predictions about future oil revenues.
• The Independent: Sir Stelios Haji-Loannou, founder of easyJet, is expanding his orange hotel brand to Africa, with a budget property in Johannesburg developed with the FTSE-listed conglomerate Lonrho.
• The Daily Telegraph: Security giant G4S's ability to fulfil its £122 million contract to provide housing for asylum seekers has been called into question by a leaked memo from its immigration executive Stephen Small.
• Financial Times: Volkswagen, one of China’s top two foreign carmakers by sales, is to recall more than 380,000 vehicles after an expose by Chinese state television.
• Financial Times: FedEx reported net income of $361 million for the quarter to Feb 28, on revenue up 4% to $11 billion; earnings per share fell 32% to $1.13.
• Financial Times: Shares in Asos jumped 7.8% to £33.55 on Wednesday after the online fashion store credited rising demand for trends such as metallic and monochrome clothing for lifting sales a third in the second quarter.
• The Guardian: Greggs, the bakery chain, reported 2.2% fall in profits to £52 million in the year to 29 December; the company’s underlying sales slid 2.7%.
• The Independent: The Soil Association said organic sales in the UK fell by 1.5% to £1.64 billion in 2012, after a 3.7% decline in 2011.
• The Guardian: A number of US supermarket chains pledged on Wednesday not to sell genetically modified salmon, in a sign of growing public concern about engineered foods on the dinner table.

Share tips, comment and bids

• Financial Times: American Realty Capital Properties made an unsolicited $5.7 billion offer for Cole Credit Property Trust III on Wednesday, a move that would scuttle Cole Credit’s bid to go public and sets up a complicated tussle between the two real estate investment trusts.
• The Guardian: Countrywide, Britain's largest estate agency by revenue, enjoyed a strong return to the stock market on Wednesday after a six-year absence, completing a listing which valued it at £750 million.
• Daily Mail (Comment – Alex Brummer): Barclays pours scorn over age of austerity as Rich Ricci collects £17.6 million in share awards.
• Financial Times (Lex): Oracle: company cites execution failure for disappointing results and predicts swift return to growth but market will keep its eye on core database business.
• Financial Times (Lex): Adobe: software group is pushing its monthly-fee package and hopes to have 1.25 million subscribers by year end but is still reliant on its old licence model.
• Financial Times (Lex): Iron ore: problem appears to be on supply side as miners prepare to increase capacity, with China likely to benefit from any substantial price fall.