UBS Tricked Madoff Victims With Prospectus -Lawyer

By Lionel Laurent and Matthieu Protard

Swiss bank UBS (UBSN.VX) "tricked" victims of Bernard Madoff's giant Ponzi scheme by sponsoring a Luxembourg-registered fund that for four years fed assets directly to the fraudster without saying so in its prospectus, a Paris court heard on Wednesday.

The "Luxalpha" fund was deemed safe by investors because of the link to UBS, which was presented in the prospectus as sole custodian of the assets, said Jean-Pierre Martel, a lawyer representing 78 French investors who invested 28 million euros ($39.69 million) in total in Luxalpha.

UBS denies the charge.

"The prospectus was saying: 'this product is 100 percent UBS, you can go for it'," Martel told a hearing at the Paris Court of Commerce.

"Here we have investors who were shamefully cheated by one bank ... with information that was wrong and dishonest."

A verdict date has been set for June 9.

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French Bank Chiefs Win Million-Euro Bonuses

By Lionel Laurent

PARIS, March 21 (Reuters) - BNP Paribas SA (BNPP.PA) and Credit Agricole SA (CAGR.PA), two of France's top listed banks, have awarded their chief executives 2010 bonuses of 1.67 million euros ($2.37 million) and 916,000 euros, respectively, as pay levels recover.

But French bank pay packages are still far behind those of British bank Barclays Plc (BARC.L), Germany's Deutsche Bank AG(DBKGn.DE) and even state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc (RBS.L).

BNP CEO Baudouin Prot, one of the few bank chiefs to have kept his position throughout the crisis, will receive 60 percent of his 1.67 million-euro bonus, or 1 million, as a deferred payment between 2012 and 2014, the bank said on its website.

The bonus takes Prot's total compensation for 2010 to 2.7 million euros, including salary and other payments disclosed in regulatory filings.

Although this is 10 percent more than Prot got for 2009, it pales in comparison with the 6.5 million pounds ($10.58 million) bonus given to Barclays CEO Bob Diamond or the potential 7.7 million pound package lined up for RBS' Stephen Hester.

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Nuclear Scare An Opportunity For Embattled Areva CEO

By Lionel Laurent and Nina Sovich

PARIS, March 21 (Reuters) - The nuclear crisis in Japan could strengthen the hand of Areva's (CEPFi.PA) embattled chief Anne Lauvergeon as she fights to keep her job at the helm of the French state-owned reactor maker.

Critics have previously said Areva's preference for selling powerful and expensive reactors to emerging markets was a mistake, as many countries would be content with older, cheaper technology that was tested but true.

But with Japan's second-generation Fukishima reactors shedding radiation, Lauvergeon's mantra that safety and superior engineering are worth the cost seems prescient.

The Japan disaster could thus validate her strategy and perhaps keep her atop Areva, which she created in 2001 from a jumble of state-owned assets.

"No government wants to get tagged with buying less than top of the line reactors ... Not even in India where Areva will probably make its next sale," a banking source close to Areva said. "So suddenly Lauvergeon's huge, expensive, overly French techy reactor looks good."

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Starbucks Fighting Commodity Costs

By Lionel Laurent

PARIS, March 8 (Reuters) - Coffee chain Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) is feeling the pressure from rising commodity costs and is working to offset them by keeping a flexible pricing policy, its U.S. head told Reuters late on Tuesday.

Although Starbucks has already secured coffee supplies through end-September, other ingredients like cocoa and sugar are causing concern as supply fears fan prices, Cliff Burrows said in an interview in Paris.

"Everything from dairy to what's been happening in recent weeks to the price of oil is all adding to the pressure," he said. "We are working very hard to mitigate those commodity pressures ... Whether that's moving some prices down, keeping some the same and moving some up."

Coffee and cocoa futures are trading at historic highs on the back of supply concerns and political unrest in Africa, where major cocoa exporter Ivory Coast has been paralysed by international sanctions and the aftermath of a disputed November election that has brought it to the brink of civil war.

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Carrefour Exec's Qualifications Under Scrutiny

This story was picked up by the International Herald Tribune, the U.K. Daily Telegraph, France's La Tribune, Le Point and Le Monde -- the only newspaper to actually manage to get Carrefour to react, too.

By Lionel Laurent

PARIS, March 25 (Reuters) - Carrefour (CARR.PA), the world's No. 2 retailer, is facing embarrassing questions over the appointment of a senior executive whose previous employer disputes that he held the top role claimed in his profile.

When Paris-based Carrefour hired Jose Carlos Gonzalez-Hurtado away from Procter & Gamble (PG.N) to take the newly created post of chief commercial officer in Nov. 2009, the food retailer heralded his recent promotion to worldwide head of P&G's male grooming unit Braun.

"In 2006, he was appointed Vice President of Global Braun Male Products, and in 2008, he was put in charge of Braun globally," the press release said in November 2009, language that is echoed in the profile of the Spaniard -- now a member of Carrefour's board - on the retailer's website.

But according both to Braun itself and to the P&G unit's former head, Gonzalez-Hurtado's promotion from vice president to president of the unit is a fiction.

"That is not accurate," Braun spokesman Lars Atorf said, stating that Hurtado had never been president at the P&G unit, best known for its electric razors. "When you are in the role of vice-president you are number two, you are leading the brand-building."

Procter & Gamble's annual reports for 2008 and 2009 cite Juan Pedro Hernandez as the president of Braun. Reached by Reuters, Hernandez said: "I was the only president of Braun."

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