Your morning Briefing

Welcome to your morning digest of the top stories of the day.

Hello readers and welcome to your two-minute digest of what’s making news today.

Liddell Power Station in the Hunter Valley (Jane Dempster/The Australian).

Alinta bid

Energy retailer Alinta has made a $1.2 billion bid for the Liddell power station in NSW in a move that will ramp up public pressure on AGL to either sell or reverse its controversial decision to shut down the coal-fired power station by 2022. The Australian understands that an extraordinary board meeting of the Hong Kong-owned Alinta Energy was held yesterday to formalise the bid for the 1800 megawatt plant in the Hunter Valley.

14/03/2008 BUSINESS: ANZ, National Australia Bank NAB, Commonwealth, St George and Westpac Bank Logo for artist montage.

Super gouge

Superannuation companies owned by the big four banks are boosting their revenues by hundreds of millions of dollars a year by paying customers invested in the lowest-risk “cash” options ­interest returns that are as little as one-quarter of actual market rates. Retirees and other risk-averse investors are hard hit by the systemic gouging because they are most likely to allocate super to cash options, which are considered safest.

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11/5/17: AMP Ceo Craig Meller and chairman Catherine Brenner at the AMP annual meeting at Sydney Town Hall. John Feder/The Australian

AMP crisis

The board of AMP was locked in a crisis meeting last night, discussing the future of chairman Catherine Brenner after two weeks of turmoil at the $11.7 billion wealth manager triggered by the banking royal commission. An announcement to the sharemarket about Ms Brenner’s grip on the $660,000-a-year chairmanship could come as early as this morning.

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EK1D0H One Central Park, Sydney Australia. Architect by Jean Nouvel in front of the UTS Tower, "Sydney's ugliest building."

‘Expose corporate misconduct’

Activist group GetUp! has stepped up its campaign against corporate taxpayers by giving academics at Sydney’s University of Technology a year’s worth of funding to “keep corporate power in check”. The funding to UTS academics Roman Lanis, Brett Govendir and Ross McClure will be spent on a project GetUp! says “has one simple mission: conduct research to expose corporate misconduct”.

“In the face of increasing corporate influence, GetUp! is funding a year of independent research at UTS to keep corporate power in check.”

GetUp! announcement

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Fran's Devonshire Tea House owner Fran Hodgetts gives her opinion on the disappearance of Patrick Moriarty who went missing sometime after December 16.

Porky pies

Pie cook Fran Hodgetts must tear down poster linking her pies to those of Sweeney Todd, the fictional “demon barber of Fleet St”, while the Larrimah cook blames the local pub for pork pies about missing Paddy Moriarty. Delve into the mystery in a fascinating podcast series, Lost in Larrimah.

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the crash between Verstappen and Ricciardo.

Bulls lock horns

A furious Red Bull boss Christian Horner has demanded that Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo apologise in person to the team’s 800 staff following their “unacceptable” crash at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Verstappen and Ricciardo had been fighting ferociously for much of the race on the streets of Baku, and their high-speed collision with 11 laps remaining appeared almost inevitable.