Taxpayers will be less likely to recover the £45 billion from the rescue of Royal Bank of Scotland after the surprise departure of Stephen Hester, according to investors. Fund managers yesterday sounded the alarm that the Chancellor appeared to be running the company from Whitehall after the chief executive’s departure and an apparent new strategy to make the bank more business-focused. An array of senior government figures suggested that they saw a different future for RBS from the blueprint envisaged by Mr Hester, prompting Opposition accusations of a “shambles”. The market was unimpressed, with the shares dropping by as much as 8 per cent at one point yesterday. They closed down 3.3 per cent at 315p. Nick Clegg abandoned the pretence that the 81 per cent taxpayer bank was operating at “arm’s length” from Government, issuing a blunt warning to RBS that it must shrink further. “It needs to downsize,” he told LBC Radio. “It can’t carry on being this huge, big, hulking, what they call ‘universal bank’.” David Cameron signalled last night there would be no early return to the private sector. “It will take time, because this is a bank that is still healing,” Mr Cameron told Bloomberg TV. “As for when we get it back into the private sector, I just have two very simple concerns — one is we must make sure this bank contributes to the recovery of the UK economy. Secondly, people put their money in. I want them to get their
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Online US-based auction company eBay is in talks to acquire Voice-over-IP (VoIP) provider Skype for US$5 billion. Many believe that eBay intends to enter the rapidly expanding VoIP market and give recent entrants, Google and Microsoft, a run for their money.

The speculation that eBay may buy the small Luxembourg-based company sent their shares down four percent on Wall Street.

Last month, Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, was in talks with Skype to possibly buy the company. The talks ended when Skype said the company was not for sale.

VoIP is becoming an increasingly significant threat to traditional telephone companies, since most calls between computers are free and some users wonder why a separate land line is still needed.

Skype was founded by the creators of the P2P file-sharing program KaZaA.