Tuesday newspaper round-up: Arm Holdings, New Look, pension funds

The government is under pressure to intervene in the $40bn (£31bn) takeover of the UK’s biggest tech company, Arm Holdings, after Labour, trade unions and the company’s co-founder voiced concerns about the deal. The US software firm Nvidia said on Monday it had agreed to buy Cambridge-based Arm, a global leader in designing chips for smartphones, computers and tablets, from Japan’s SoftBank. - Guardian

Renters are swapping inner London transport hubs for homes further afield as the need to commute has become less important than a desire for space, data on searches on property website Rightmove suggests. Analysis of 60m searches in August showed steep falls in the number of searches for rental homes in commuter hubs such as Earl’s Court in west London, and New Cross in the south, while areas in outer London and beyond registered big increases.- Guardian

Airlines and airports delivered a double dose of bad news as Emirates prepared to swing the axe on its UK workforce and London City airport announced plans to cull up to a third of its staff. Emirates warned its almost 600 of its employees based in Britain of the need to "consider reducing the size of the UK workforce". Quarantines, border controls and other travel restrictions has left passenger demand for air travel "extremely subdued", according to an internal email seen by The Telegraph. - Telegraph

A vote today on a vital restructuring for New Look is on a knife-edge as a host of the retailer’s biggest landlords plan to object to the proposals. British Land, owner of the Meadowhall shopping centre in Sheffield, and Newriver Reit are among the property owners intending to oppose the proposed company voluntary arrangement. Hammerson, the owner of Birmingham’s Bullring, and Land Securities are also intending to vote against the restructuring, Sky News reported. Together the landlords own about 55 of New Look’s 490 UK store sites. - The Times

Britain’s traditional pension funds would need fantastically improbable returns from shares to erode their huge deficits over the next ten years, according to a warning yesterday from one of the pension industry’s leading consultants. Share markets over the past three centuries have delivered an average of 3.1 percentage points a year in excess of cash returns, yet pension funds would on average need excess returns of 9 percentage points to clear their shortfalls, Willis Towers Watson said. - The Times