If the Commission does not appeal, Unipetrol will include the penalty in operating results for the third quarter, Borek Konecny, from Unipetrol’s investor relations, said.”According to the preliminary information we have, the Commission has not appealed, however it is still not an official position,” he said.Analysts earlier said the fine would significantly improve the quarterly results of the downstream oil group, which is 63 percent owned by Polish PKN Orlen .Unipetrol reported net profit of 463 million Czech Crowns ($25.6 million) in the first half of the year.($1 = 0.730 Euros)($1 = 18.071 Czech Crowns)

French banks have been scaling back risky activities as a way of complying with tougher regulatory capital requirements, but Bregier insisted that aircraft suppliers were a safe bet.”Aircraft manufacturing has nothing to do with toxic assets, so far as I know,” he was quoted as saying.

By Anna YukhananovWASHINGTON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - A bill that would loosen conflict of interest rules for advisers to the Food and Drug Administration has been proposed by three U.S. senators seeking to speed up review times for medical devices.The measure would reverse 2007 legislation that barred experts who had financial ties to a company or its competitor from serving on an advisory panel without a waiver. There is also a limit on the number of waivers that keeps decreasing.A senior FDA drugs office official testified in August that the agency was having difficulty in recruiting highly qualified people for its advisory panels.The legislation also comes as medical device makers such as Boston Scientific and Stryker have criticized the FDA for strangling innovation with inconsistent regulation and lagging device approvals.”The legislation would restore the appropriate balance to conflicts of interest requirements by requiring the FDA to be subject to the same conflicts of interest requirements as the rest of the federal government,” according to a statement issued by the senators.Federal regulations allow those with conflicts to serve as advisers as long as the conflict is publicly disclosed and is “unavoidable.”“It is critical that we don’t allow regulatory burdens to get in the way of delivering lifesaving products to the patients who need them,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota. “This legislation will help ensure that we have processes that promote safe, pioneering technologies that help save lives and create good jobs in Minnesota.”Minnesota, home to devicemaker Medtronic , has about 30,000 jobs in the medical device industry, according to AdvaMed, an industry trade group.Klobuchar proposed the bill along with Senator Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, and Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Colorado. Similar legislation is likely to come from the House of Representatives in coming days, one congressional staffer said.Patient and consumer groups contend the FDA is simply not looking hard enough to find experts, and worry loosening the rules could jeopardize the independence of panels. They also point out the FDA does not use up all of its allotted waivers.

* BritNed discussing whether to hold second auctionBy Karolin SchapsLONDON, Oct 13 (Reuters) - Power traders refused to settle an auction price for reserving east-flow capacity on the British-Dutch interconnector for next year on Wednesday, saying the minimum price for securing up to 150 megawatts (MW) on the cable was too high.The BritNed cable, which started operating in April, held its first annual capacity auction on Tuesday and Wednesday, but failed to settle any contracts in the UK to the Netherlands direction despite attracting 65 bids.Power interconnectors can send electricity in either direction between two borders, usually transporting power from the cheaper to the more expensive market to balance prices and allowing traders to make a profit.The BritNed company, jointly owned by UK network operator National Grid and Dutch counterpart Tennet, has set a minimum bid price — or reserve price — of 2-3 euros per megawatt-hour, which traders said was too high.”They should put (the reserve price) at 0.25 euro or something, but they put both directions at the same level,” said one power trader who participated in the auction.”You can never ask the same amount for both directions because your ‘loss’ on one side will be offset by the ‘profit’ on the other direction.”Dutch power prices for delivery in 2012 were trading at a roughly 8-pound premium over UK equivalents on Thursday, meaning traders would make a loss sending electricity from Britain to the Netherlands next year.BritNed said it was discussing whether to hold a second auction, but could not say if lowering the reserve price was an option.Eleven trading parties made bids to snatch up some of the UK-Netherlands capacity auctioned off, overshooting the available 150 MW more than five times.Interest in securing capacity to send power in the other direction — from the Netherlands to Britain — was even higher, with 86 bids submitted requesting as much as 1,169 MW of capacity and settling at a price of 4.86 euros per megawatt-hour.Five trading participants successfully locked in some of the capacity, but BritNed refused to disclose their names.Barclays Bank , Statkraft , Gazprom Marketing & Trading and Vattenfall were some of the parties represented in the auction, the BritNed website showed, but did not specify whether they were successful bidders.

By Dmitry Zhdannikov and Emma FargeLONDON, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Energy bankers are telling small oil companies they will soon face a spike in funding costs and should therefore hedge through selling oil not yet produced to protect future cash-flows and survive.”We are saying to people: You need to be creative and look at other sources. The IPO market is not a place where, if you are a small company, you can find funding,” Morgan Stanley’s co-head of the oil and gas group, Michael O’Dwyer, told an annual Oil and Money conference.Banks have been facing a drought of merger and acquisition activity this year due to severe asset price volatility and are looking for new ways of doing business — including through providing hedging services — while they also face a higher regulatory burden.Banking sources say big clients are not asking for banks’ hedging services but that small companies with production costs close to the current oil prices are increasingly seeking to mitigate risks through hedges.O’Dwyer said he has told small companies, “Ultimately you have to consider selling yourself as a company. If you don’t have the balance sheet to finance your project, someone else will.”He said other options included a farmout, in which an oil company sells a small stake in its assets, or hedging through selling Brent oil futures.”Oil prices are discounted in share prices far below the forward (Brent) curve. If the market is not giving you credit for $100-$110 oil, why not monetise it?”Standard Charter’s managing director for Global Energy, John Martin, said he was also witnessing a slowdown in merger and acquisition deals.”One of the hindering factors is commodity prices. At these price levels, companies aren’t rushing to sell assets.”Robert Maguire, a partner at Perella Weinberg Partners, said owners of small firms find it difficult to sell because they still remember their assets being valued higher earlier this year, when oil prices peaked.BASEL III AND FUNDING COSTSO’Dwyer, Martin and Maguire all warned that the oil industry will soon face a spike in funding costs.”One should remember that equity markets are closed for banks … Oil companies don’t understand how those regulations are changing the (banking) industry,” said Martin.All three bankers said pressure on banks to recapitalise, partly to meet tougher Basel III capital adequacy rules, will rebound on the oil industry by constricting banks’ lending ability.”Smaller companies will face a greater impact of increased cost of debt,” said Martin.He said the trend was especially worrying at a time that the oil industry’s combined upstream capital expenditure programmes are set to exceed $500 billion for the first time ever this year.The amount is likely to rise further in the years to come as major investments planned in countries such as Australia and Brazil stretch infrastructure and industry resources and continue to drive up costs across the world.Maurizio La Noce, chief of Mubadala Oil and Gas, which manages $46 billion in assets on behalf of the government of Abu Dhabi, said cash-rich companies might decide to delay acquisitions by at least another three to six months to get a clear view of where financial markets are heading.Hopes that investors from the resource-rich Middle East will snap up assets are also unfounded, because they have to deal with problems inside their own countries amid mounting unrest.”(In the Middle East) there is a lot of pressure to build, rebuild, improve the infrastructure, to expand job creation in the countries and the local economies, rather than going outside,” La Noce said.