Monday newspaper round-up: FTSE 100 CEOs, Barclays, business fears

(Sharecast News) - The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies will have made more money in 2025 by midday on Monday than their average worker does in a whole year, according to the latest measure of inequality between bosses and their employees. Median pay for FTSE 100 chief executives is £4.22m, 113 times the median full-time worker's pay of £37,430, according to the High Pay Centre, a campaign group. That means UK bosses will exceed their workers' annual pay within 29 hours - or at about 11:30am on Monday, if they started work straight after the new year holiday. - Guardian Labour must offer extra support to working parents, including with childcare and commuting, if it is to fulfil its promise of cutting child poverty, the Resolution Foundation thinktank has argued. The government's manifesto promised an "ambitious strategy" on child poverty, and ministers have said they will publish a 10-year plan in the spring. - Guardian

Barclays has been criticised for paying mystery shoppers to pretend to be blind or deaf in an attempt to test the response of branch staff. The National Federation of the Blind of the UK (NFBUK), which campaigns for blind and partially sighted people, said the bank's stunt was an "insult" to blind people and "totally inappropriate". - Telegraph

Business fears over taxation have hit a record high in the wake of Rachel Reeves's "devastating" Budget, according to a new survey by the British Chambers of Commerce (BCC). Almost 63pc of businesses said they were concerned about the tax burden, findings show, up from 48pc three months ago and a higher proportion than ever before. - Telegraph

The competition between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the billionaire technology tycoons, is set to intensify after Amazon signalled it could start a satellite-based high-speed broadband service in the UK as early as this year. The move by Amazon, which was disclosed in filings by the American tech company with Ofcom, Britain's communications regulator, would help Bezos make up ground against Musk's Starlink service, which started launching satellites in 2019 and now has more than 6,700 in orbit. - The Times