John Lewis staff are celebrating soaring sales with a £151m bonus. Even after this cash is divided between 70,000 staff, it's still a sizeable sum – about 15% of each employee's salary.

The staff pay-out is estimated to be worth around eight weeks' wages for most staff. John Lewis full year profits hit £307m, almost 10% ahead of sales in the previous year.

Consumers will get tougher protection on mortgages, pensions and investment products in the future, according to FSA boss Hector Sants.

Sants is leaving his job soon. But he clearly wants to leave the British public better protected against product mis-selling - so some legacy-building is going on.

BP hopes Brazil is about to spout serious oil. BP has just bought a load of exploration assets from US company Devon Energy for £4.7bn.

These sites include ten promising new Brazilian fields, plus deep water sites in the Gulf of Mexico. It's all about long-term potential. But it's thought BP will gain around 40,000 barrels a day from the deal immediately.

Administrators at stricken Premiership football club Portsmouth are investigating "unexplained payments" of £1.5m. The news comes just hours after HMRC dropped its objection to the club going into administration. Another £4m payment to current owner Balram Chainrai has also raised questions.

It seems that at the very time the club was battling for its financial life, significant amounts of money were flowing out of the club. There's no suggestion that anything has been done wrong, but The Daily Telegraph quotes a source as saying, "A number of transactions have been highlighted as unexplained in the process of the club's accounts being reconciled."

Environment Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies yesterday announced the second round of the £5.5m Property Level Flood Protection Grant Scheme, providing £2.6m to help households protect their homes against flooding.

Can those of us not at risk of flooding have some money please? Why do people at risk of flooding get government help but those at risk of other threats - burglary or vandalism, for example - get nothing?

London and New York are level in the Global Financial Centres Index compiled by Z/Yen for the City of London Corporation for the first time because fears of "a regulatory backlash" and taxes cut London's score by 15 points.

"London has dropped 15 points in the ratings, from 790 to 775 points - the second largest drop in scores. New York has overtaken London in three of the subindices: Business Environment, People and Infrastructure," the report said. How worried should we be?

A quiet day for big names. However Aga has released 2009 preliminary results. Revenues dipped to £245m compared to £279.4m in 2008.

It was a very tough year for Aga with earnings per share being hammered, from 14.4p to 2.5p. Pre-tax profit figures were just £0.5m compared to £14.4m a year ago.

There's free money to be had when you have a baby and start to run a family. It's just as well because you need all the bargains, cut-price deals, cheap offers and other financial help with the cost of bringing up children. Here are tips on how to have a great family life on half your salary.

The first thing to go for when you're strapped for cash and running a family is to make the most of any benefits available to you.

Banks' lending to small businesses in January was just £543m, up on the seasonally low December figure of £511m, but lower than November's £573m and down by nearly a quarter on the same month last year when banks lent £669m.

Not only that, loans to small business fell by £151m and the rise was because the much more expensive overdrafts rose by £168. This is terrible. In my view, there are lies, damn lies and the British Banking Association's director of statistics. He - David Dooks - put a positive spin on these dire figures.

Last week's speculation that food giant Nestle was preparing to fork out $20 billion to buy out L'Oreal's biggest shareholder Lilian Bettencourt, seems to have been overwritten today after Bettencourt's family pledged their support for the company.

Dubbed as Europe's richest woman, Bettencourt is set to leave her 31% stake in Paris-based L'Oreal to her daughter despite claims of a family feud.