Friday newspaper round-up: Elon Musk, Co-op Bank, BP

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly opened an investigation into whether recent stock sales by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his brother Kimbal Musk violated insider trading rules. The SEC inquiry – first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday – was sparked in part by the Tesla CEO’s own tweets. – Guardian
The Co-operative Bank has more than tripled its bonus pot for bankers after a “milestone year” that resulted in its first profit in a decade. The ethical lender, which has struggled to turn a profit since 2011, announced it was paying bankers a total of £13.3m in bonuses for 2021, compared with a £4.2m bonus pot shared among its more than 3,200 staff in 2020. – Guardian

BP is under renewed pressure to abandon its stake in the oil giant Rosneft after Boris Johnson said Britain must reduce its reliance on Russian hydrocarbons. The FTSE 100 oil firm has held a 20pc stake in Russia’s state-owned gas company Rosneft for 10 years.- Telegraph

Alibaba has recorded its slowest quarterly growth since its listing in New York in 2014 after being hit by rising competition and a slowing Chinese economy. The world’s second largest ecommerce business behind Amazon said that its group sales had risen by 10 per cent in the final three months of last year to 242.6 billion yuan (£28.6 billion). – The Times

Leading chip manufacturers have said that they are prepared for any immediate disruption caused by the Russia-Ukraine conflict to the supply of materials used to make the microprocessors that power cars, smartphones and computers. The United States remains highly dependent on the two countries for materials such as palladium and neon. Techcet, a supply chain research company that advises the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and suppliers, said that Russia accounted for 35 per cent of the palladium imported to America, while Ukraine supplied the majority of neon consumed in the US chip manufacturing sector. – The Times