Wednesday newspaper round-up: BP, Vedanta, Energy bills

BP's new chief executive began his reign over Britain's largest industrial company by delivering a snub to the US Senate. Bob Dudley said that neither he nor his predecessor Tony Hayward would accept an invitation from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for Mr Hayward to testify at a hearing to determine BP's role in the release of Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber. Mr Dudley said that BP would instead send Peter Mather, who runs BP's UK business but is not a main board director, the Times reports. BP's new chief executive has promised to shake up the company's culture to improve safety and reliability following the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Bob Dudley, who will take over on October 1, also said that the company's planned $30bn disposal programme could position it for higher growth in the future, the FT reports. A band of celebrities, human rights organisations and concerned investors plans to swamp Wednesday's annual meeting of Vedanta to voice long-escalating complaints about what they see as the Indian miner's persecution of a nature-worshipping tribe in India. Bianca Jagger will read a letter on behalf of tribal elders from the Dongria Kondh, a tribe that allegedly opposes the FTSE?100 group's plans to build a bauxite mine on their homeland in the Niyamgiri Hills of Orissa state. Vedanta disputes this claim, the FT reports. Householders face a £300-a-year rise in their gas and electricity bills and significant cuts in how much energy they use if Britain is to "keep the lights on" and meet its climate change targets, the Government has said. In the Coalition's first annual energy statement to the Commons, Chris Huhne, the Energy Secretary, outlined plans to transform Britain's power system and cut carbon emissions by 80% within the next 40 years, the Telegraph reports. George Osborne's emergency Budget has increased the chances of the British economy experiencing a second recession next year. The country's longest-established economic think tank, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, says today that the chances of output falling next year have risen from about one in seven to a fifth, as result of the tough measures the Chancellor announced on 22 June, the Independent reports. The man who led Northern Rock into the financial abyss has escaped any censure over accounting irregularities that kept shareholders in the dark about the level of defaults by the bank's borrowers. The decision not to pursue Adam Applegarth or the former finance director Bob Bennett came as a third former Rock employee was fined and banned from the financial services industry yesterday. David Jones, who was finance director-designate in January 2007, was judged by the Financial Services Authority to have allowed false mortgage arrears figures to be given to shareholders over a long period, the Times reports. China is likely to overtake America as the world's largest economy in only nine years as Western nations struggle to recover from the banking crisis, according to the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. The impact of the credit crunch on American output means that the People's Republic will overtake the United States in 2019, a year earlier than previously forecast, the British think-tank said in a report, the Times reports. India has raised interest rates and issued a stark warning on inflation dangers, joining China, Brazil, and other tiger economies in concerted moves to tighten policy. The central bank raised its reverse repo rate a half point to 4.5%, still far below the level of inflation. Food prices have been rising at 16%, the Telegraph reports. Thousands of civil servants in Whitehall are "treading water" with nothing to do because it is too expensive to make them redundant, a minister claimed yesterday. Francis Maude, the Cabinet Office minister, sparked a furious row by suggesting that officials who were not up to their jobs were twiddling their thumbs at a cost to the taxpayer of tens of millions of pounds a year, the Times reports. The government is "minded" to scrap an informal code guaranteeing public sector benefits for thousands of outsourced private sector jobs, threatening a confrontation with unions. The proposal, aimed at reducing the cost of outsourcing swaths of government business from cleaning and catering to information technology, health and waste management, provoked opposition from union representatives on Tuesday, the FT reports. The government has urged Ofcom to forge ahead with a potential £5bn auction of the airwaves to alleviate the pressure on the country's 3G networks as more people use smartphones and iPads to access the internet. The plan to sell two new frequency bands, known as spectrum, should take place by the end of next year and will reap a substantial windfall for the Treasury, the Times reports. The reckoning for rampant corruption under the United Nation's "oil-for-food" programme in Iraq under Saddam Hussein reached the icon of American capitalism, General Electric, which agreed to pay $23.4m to settle charges - without admitting or denying them - under US bribery laws. The scandal, in which the SEC says some $3.6m was paid in kickbacks to win medical equipment contracts with the Iraqi health and oil ministries, involved not just divisions of GE but also two healthcare companies it has since acquired, including the British company Amersham, the Independent reports.