Monday newspaper round-up: BP, Bank lending,House prices

Tony Hayward, the embattled BP chief executive, will collect a pay and pension package worth £11.8 million when he falls on his sword this week. The oil company hopes that his departure will draw a line under its role in the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Five days after The Times revealed that Mr Hayward was to quit, the BP board is due to meet today in London to hammer out the terms and timing of his exit. Many thousands of employees face lower pension payouts if high-ranking executives carry out threats to quit corporate schemes to avoid a punitive new tax measure to take effect in April, The Times has learnt. It is feared that large numbers of senior executives will choose to leave corporate pension schemes to avoid the new levy. That would leave such schemes substantially less well-funded and put future payouts at risk. Bankers are to be forced to lend to businesses or risk losing their bonuses under plans to be outlined by Vince Cable, the Business Secretary. He will propose a "carrot and stick" approach to ensuring that banks maintain lending to struggling enterprises. The plans will be in one of two green papers on the banks and financial services being published by the Coalition today. The second paper, from the Treasury, will outline measures to strengthen regulation of the banking sector, the Telegraph reports. Gloom over the economy will deepen today with evidence stacking up that the recovery is losing momentum. One report will show that consumer confidence fell for the first time in a year between April and June, with a sharp jump in the number of people who are eriously concerned about the economy. The Ernst & Young ITEM club warned that the Government's stringent spending cuts would act as a drag on economic growth over the next two years, the Times reports. Europe's banks face the only test that matters this week as global investors issue their verdict on eurozone lenders following the stress test results published by EU regulators late on Friday. The EU operation has been criticised as a public relations stunt since it ruled out sovereign defaults by Greece or any other EMU state, and exempted most high-risk debt from the test. Jochen Sanio, head of Germany's BaFin regulator, admitted over the weekend that the test was "just an operation to calm the markets", the Telegraph reports. European regulators have accused Germany and its banks of reneging on a deal to publish full details of sovereign debt holdings, as part of the four-month-long stress test exercise of the country's banking sector. In an interview with the Financial Times, Arnoud Vossen, secretary-general of the Committee of European Banking Supervisors, the pan-European banks regulator, said: "We agreed with all supervisory authorities and with the banks in the exercise that there would be a bank-by-bank disclosure of sovereign risks." Britain's offshore wind ambitions will face a £10bn funding gap within five years, energy experts will warn today, and the Government's legally-binding 2020 green targets will not be met unless the deficit can be closed. This comes a day after Energy Minister Chris Huhne revealed plans for a huge expansion of the UK's wind turbines, saying wind power would be an "important part" of meeting the country's energy demands in the future, the Independent reports. Two new reports show that both prices and consumer confidence in the housing market are falling. Hometrack, the property analyst, said that house prices fell by 0.1% in July, the first time it has registered a reduction for 15 months, while Rightmove, the online estate agency, saw a sharp fall in the number of people now expecting the property market to be higher in 12 months' time than today, the Independent reports. Goldman Sachs is facing a threat by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission to bring in outside accountants to comb through the bank's systems for data on its derivatives business, the panel's chairman has said. The commission will not back down from demands for information Goldman's executives have maintained they do not track, Phil Angelides told the Financial Times.