Thursday newspaper round-up: RedBird, Meta, WPP

(Sharecast News) - A cross-party group of MPs and peers has called on ministers to investigate how a US private equity company is funding its £500m takeover of the Telegraph. In a letter sent to the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, last week, the MPs said there was a risk of "potential Chinese state influence" in RedBird Capital. They said the firm's chair, John Thornton, sat on the advisory council of China's sovereign wealth fund and had high-level meetings with Chinese Communist party figures in 2024 and this year. - Guardian Meta is to announce a $15bn (£11bn) bid to achieve computerised "superintelligence", according to multiple reports. The Silicon Valley race to dominate artificial intelligence is speeding up despite the patchy performance of many existing AI systems. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, is expected to announce the company will buy a 49% stake in Scale AI, a startup led by Alexandr Wang and co-founded by Lucy Guo, in a move described by one Silicon Valley analyst as the action of "a wartime CEO". - Guardian

Britain's biggest advertising company has suffered a fresh setback after losing a $1.7bn (£1.3bn) Mars contract to a French rival. Mars, which also owns M&Ms, Snickers and Whiskas cat food, has appointed Paris-based Publicis to lead its global media account after kicking off a review late last year. The move deals a major blow to WPP, which has held the lucrative contract since 2018. - Telegraph

A state-backed oil giant from the United Arab Emirates is positioning itself for a swoop on BP's energy empire. Adnoc, the Abu Dhabi-owned group, has been considering a move for BP's key assets and looking to partner with another bidder to buy some of the FTSE 100 group's divisions, Bloomberg reported. The Middle Eastern company, which is run by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE's energy minister, is said to be most interested in BP's liquefied natural gas (LNG) fields, rather than taking over the entire company. - Telegraph

The world's largest commercial aircraft owner AerCap can recover more than $1 billion after the High Court ruled that insurers must cover losses from planes stranded in Russia since the start of the war in Ukraine. Making one of the biggest awards by a UK court in an insurance dispute, Mr Justice Butcher ordered firms including AIG, Lloyd's of London and Chubb to pay the losses for 147 aircraft and 16 standalone engines owned by a group of six lessors that became trapped in Russia after the February 2022 invasion. - The Times