CBI calls for EU reform – papers 24th Oct

BRITAIN is being urged by business to use its leadership role as president of the European Union to push for reform and free trade at this week’s heads of government summit at Hampton Court, according to this morning's papers.

Sir Digby Jones, Director-General of the Confederation of British Imdustry (CBI), says Tony Blair, who is to chair the summit, must stick to his principles rather than allowing the EU to retreat into its old ways for the sake of an easier agreement, reports the Times.

In a speech to the CBI’s manufacturing dinner in Birmingham today, Jones is expected to say: “The ideologies of Old Europe have condemned hundreds of millions of people to the economic slow track, while the United States has accelerated into the distance, with India and China coming up on the rails.

“The only way for Europe to get into the globalisation game is through radical surgery on the policies and ideas that have dominated for too long.”

The summit is likely to concentrate on a critical discussion of the EU’s stance in negotiations for further freeing of international trade in the Doha round.

The United States and the most powerful developing countries have blamed the EU for the most recent breakdown of talks, claiming that Europe has not gone far enough in offering to reduce tariffs on food products.

AEGON ASSET Management, the Edinburgh-based finance arm of Aegon UK, has won a £185m mandate to run a pension fund for Lloyd's of London, pushing AAM's UK funds under management over £35bn for the first time, says the Scotsman.

A FORMER insurance broker who made millions when his company merged with a rival earlier this year will today call on the financial services industry and the government to create a national network of advice centres to help lower-paid families make better financial decisions, according to the Guardian.

Clive Cowdery, chairman of Resolution, one of a new breed of companies which makes money from the run-off of closed life insurance funds, will make the appeal when he launches his Resolution Foundation alongside Stephen Timms, the minister for pensions, at the House of Commons this afternoon.

"Intelligent thinkers in the financial services industry are concerned that it is losing contact with its roots in society and the generation of customers who in the 1970s and 80s provided much of its current capital," he is qouted by the paper as saying yesterday.

BLEMAIN FINANCE, an associate of Ocean Finance, Britain’s biggest loans broker, has agreed to not punish borrowers with a costly lending tactic after the intervention of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), says Times.

The lending group, which offers secured loans, came under scrutiny from the FSA after it emerged a minority of agreements on its lending book contained an onerous lending charge.

FSA officials discovered loans taken out before 1997 applied the “Rule Of 78”, an arcane mathematical formula used to calculate the fee borrowers pay for repaying a loan early. Blemain enforced the penalty fee, plus six months of interest-rate charges, on loans of between £15,000 and £60,000 — a borrower repaying a £60,000 loan could be hit with a £2,500 charge.

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