Friday newspaper round-up: Everton, AstraZeneca, Amazon

(Sharecast News) - Everton has paid about £30m in interest charges to an opaque lender associated with a tax exile, corporate records suggest. The charges appear to have reached about £438,000 a week, according to the troubled Premier League club's most recent set of accounts, a figure more than three times the reported wages of the Everton and England goalkeeper Jordan Pickford. - Guardian Aircraft could one day take off on fuel made from human waste under plans revealed by Wizz Air and the British sustainable aviation company Firefly to build a commercial refinery in Essex. Firefly, based in Bristol, said it had developed a process to convert treated sewage into sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF. - Guardian

AstraZeneca has suffered an investor backlash over a £19m pay award for its chief executive, in a vote that will deepen concerns of an exodus of UK companies to the US. Around 35pc of investors voted to reject AstraZeneca's remuneration report and changes to its bonus plan at the company's AGM on Thursday. The changes increase chief executive Pascal Soriot's total reward package to £18.7m. His remuneration was up from £16.9m in the prior year, which already made the French-born executive the highest paid boss on the FTSE 100. - Telegraph

Annual profits at the City fund management firm co-founded by Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Conservative MP, more than halved last year before client withdrawals forced the business to wind itself down. Latest accounts filed by Somerset Capital Management at Companies House show that net profits at the business fell to less than £3.1 million in the 12 months to the end of March last year, from almost £6.5 million in 2022. - The Times

Shares in Amazon closed at a new record high as the stock market value of the world's biggest online retailer edged closer to $2 trillion. At the end of trading on Wall Street, its stock price had risen $3.10, or 1.7 per cent, to $189.05, compared with its previous high of $186.57 on July 8, 2021, giving it a market capitalisation of $1.97 trillion. The rise in Amazon shares yesterday helped the Nasdaq Composite index to close at its sixth record high of the year so far with a gain of 271.84 points, or 1.7 per cent, to 16,442.20. - The Times