Jeremy Hunt's defence, against charges that he did not act as an impartial judge when exercising his powers to decide on whether News Corp should have been allowed to buy all of BSkyB, rests on a particular plank. His colleagues say that he decided nothing without getting the thumbs-up from the media regulator, Ofcom. So although the Enterprise Act gives him discretionary powers to adjudicate on whether a media...

The interrogation of Rupert Murdoch at the Leveson Inquiry, for more than a day, is a historic event. Never has the 81-year-old, still regarded as among the most powerful media moguls in the world, been questioned so extensively, in public and under oath. If yesterday's session with his son, James Murdoch, is anything to go by, there will be at least three broad areas of examination....

The emails from Fred Michel, News Corporation's director of public affairs, to James Murdoch are deeply embarrassing for the government. They appear to be evidence that Jeremy Hunt, the culture secretary, wanted News Corp to succeed with its controversial bid for BSkyB and that he did not act with the impartiality he was supposed to show in his quasi judicial role in respect of media deals. Email after email...

James Murdoch's evidence to Leveson started off slowly and not very revealingly about phone hacking. But it is becoming explosive over how News Corp pursued its ambition to buy the 61% of British Sky Broadasting it does not own. What we have seen is emails from Fred Michel, News Corp's public affairs director, showing how he was garnering remarkable amounts of highly valuable information from government advisers...

Although Francois Hollande began his campaign to be president of France by declaring that his true enemy is "the world of finance", the socialist victor in the first-round of voting is also - to an extent - a prisoner of that world. The point is that the French government and French economy is disproportionately dependent on the goodwill of overseas investors and banks. Here are the statistics....

Big British pension funds and insurance companies are still planning to vote against Barclays' remuneration policy and the re-election of the chair of the remuneration committee, in spite of pay reforms offered yesterday by the bank. According to well-placed sources, leading institutional shareholders believe that the concessions unexpectedly offered by Barclays do not address their fundamental concern - which is that the bank rewards its top executives...

Tesco's results are a story in two parts. There remains momentum behind the group's overseas businesses and group sales in total rose more than 7% to a mind-boggling £72bn. But the core of the group in the UK is in the doldrums, with trading profit falling 1% to £2.5bn. There will be worse to come, because this year's profits will be reduced by the £600m of increased overheads to revitalise the UK stores, which...

A behind-the-scenes battle to acquire Cable & Wireless Worldwide, owner of one of the UK's largest fibre-optic cable networks, is coming to a head. By teatime on Thursday at the latest, and probably earlier, we should learn whether the board of C&WW, has chosen Vodafone or India's Tata Communications as its new owner. So what? A big multinational will buy a...

When Labour was in power, it was a nightmare trying to obtain reliable data on the real tax burden for those on very high incomes (there's a big chunk of the last book wot I wrote about whether the super-rich pay their fair share: the word "blood" and "stone" come to mind). So I was fascinated and somewhat amused that a coalition government of Tories and Lib Dems is volunteering this information....

When Lloyds announced in December that it had chosen the Co-operative Group as its preferred bidder for more than 600 branches and £47bn of loans and investments, the government was delighted. A senior government figure hailed the potential deal as a significant boost to competition and added that: "The projected combined current-account market share is around 7.6%, significantly above the threshold for a viable new challenger recommended by Vickers...