There is speculation that former PM, Tony Blair, has brokered an eleventh-hour deal in a bid to save Swiss mining firm Glencore's merger with London-listed Xstrata.

The deal, should it go ahead, "would give them a lot of pricing power and could mean that consumers of them end up paying more," warned the BBC's business correspondent Theo Leggett. "There is a lot at stake here."

"The companies are already very much combined," John Mayer, a mining analyst, told the Today programme. "The European Commission considers these two companies to be joined at the hip anyway."

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