Luxury brand Burberry Group chief executive officer (CEO) Angela Ahrendts has become the first female to top an annual survey of executive directors' remuneration across the United Kingdom's top 350 listed companies, including the FTSE 100. Reportedly, the Manifest/MM&K Executive Director Total Remuneration Survey 2013 ranked Ms Ahrendts first on the list, taking into account measures including salary and bonuses, while only two other FTSE 100 companies have female CEOs.

The United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has announced that seven banks have adopted a new "retry system" which allows customers to have their prescheduled payments for a given day reprocessed if they have failed at the usual morning processing time due to insufficient funds. The FCA stated that Barclays, The Co-operative, HSBC, Nationwide, RBS Group, Santander and National Australia Group banks had agreed to retry the processing of customers' payments in the afternoon, in a move to redress the previous arrangements which are estimated to have cost customers up to £200 million annually in late payment charges.

The Autorite de la concurrence has announced that it has fined commodity chemical distributors Brenntag, Caldic Est, Univar and Solvadis a total sum of €79 million in relation to an anticompetitive agreement that restricted competition by allocating customers among the parties and coordinating prices.

Major supermarket retailer Asda has committed to redistribute surplus stock to FareShare, one of the United Kingdom's (UK) biggest food banks, rather than sending the stock back to the manufacturer. Reportedly, Asda has stated that the initiative will increase the quantity of food sent to FareShare by 41% per year, and provide 3.75 million meals per year to homeless and vulnerable people.

Heathrow Airport in the United Kingdom will introduce its Fly Quiet scheme later in 2013. The scheme will reportedly rank airlines according to the noise levels produced by their aircraft, in an attempt to reduce overall noise levels at the airport.

KPMG has announced that its analysis of 55 major United Kingdom-based organizations found that 51% did not comply with cookie consent requirements established by Directive 2002/58/EC on privacy and electronic communications. KPMG information protection and business resilience team partner Stephen Bonner stated that while the figure had improved from the 80% recorded in the previous year, the current result "is a pretty patchy response to the law at best".

The United Kingdom Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has made available its decision notice (28 November 2012) regarding the banning of a former non-executive director from financial services for failing to disclose conflicts of interest. According to the FCA, Angela Burns breached FCA requirements by seeking to benefit herself through her non-executive director (NED) positions on the investment committee for two mutual societies.

Germany's competition regulator the Bundeskartellamt (BKA) has announced that the BKA market transparency unit (the Unit) is set to implement a requirement for oil companies and petrol station operators to report "any change in price of the fuel types Super E5, Super E10 and [d]iesel" to the Unit.

A solicitor who became pregnant towards the end of her £42,000 per annum trainee contract with law firm Travers Smith has won her discrimination case against the firm after it failed to offer her a permanent position. According to solicitor Nigel Mackay, Katie Tantum's performance was such that she would have been offered a permanent position but for her pregnancy, reports The Telegraph.

Republic of Ireland Health Minister James Reilly has announced that the government will introduce "standardised/plain packaging of tobacco products", which would involve the removal from cigarette packaging of "all form of branding - trademarks, logos, colours and graphics".