Charming penguin contributions to charmless B decays into two pseudoscalar mesons -: art. no. 094005

We present estimates of the charming penguin contribution to B --> Kpi, pipi, Keta, Keta' decays due to intermediate charmed meson states. We find that this contribution is indeed significant for B --> Kpi decays, and its inclusion, together with the tree and penguin terms, produces large branching ratios in agreement with data, though the analysis is affected by large theoretical uncertainties. On the other hand, for B --> pipi, Keta, Keta' decays, the effect of the charming penguin contribution is more modest. We also compute CP asymmetries for B --> Kpi, pipi decays, and we obtain rather large results.