The warning came amid reports that one Cayman islands-based vulture fund, Dart Management, received almost 90pc of the €435m of debts that Greece repaid on Tuesday.

The fund, founded by American tax exile Kenneth Dart, was one of those that refused the debt restructuring deal that saved Greece from default in March.

It was one hell of a bet, gambling on hte diference between Greek bonds issued under Greek law and Greek bonds issued under foreign law that the Greek government couldn’t change.

And it paid off too.

A Sainsbury’s potato buyer accepted £5 million in corrupt payments from a key supplier, staying at Claridge’s and taking luxury holidays in return for a lucrative contract.

I have worked in parts of the world where this is actually the point of contract negotiations. Who gets what slice in the middle. This is actually what takes all the time and effort, not whether to be corrupt but how to be so.

I’ve also worked in the UK and the subject has never even raised its head. Not even working with advertising companies which, as we all know, are staffed with the scum of the Earth.

I have a very strong feeling that there are many who don’t realise quite how lucky and unusual we are with the business culture in the UK.

In at least one country I can think of those in business reading the Sainsbury’s story will be wondering whether they’re nicking enough themselves. Almst everyone in British industry will be horrified that it was happening in our green and pleasant land.

Money from the employees’ fund at the Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC) is alleged to have been used to send the son of a police chief in Kazakhstan, where the company mines for iron ore, to college 6,000 miles away in the United States.

It is claimed money was removed from ENRC’s subsidiary SSGPO to finance the education of the son of Kazakh regional police commander, Bulat Baizhasarov, at Michigan State University.

This is both very naughty indeed and very normal: in fact, in one way, it’s surprisingly honest.

The question is, by whose moral and business standards should we be measuring this?

Leave aside for the moment that this is an allegation, entirely unproved and no doubt only a malicious invention by a disgruntled employee.

Start from our view: this is a London listed company, part of the FTSE 100 and thus rightly considered to be playhing by London rules. This is an outrage, disgusting fleecing of the corporate coffers and people should be jailed.

Look at it by the standards of many parts of the world and it’s just how things are done. The local power brokers get a cut of any economic activity that happens in their area. While we don’t call it this it’s really no different from our own feudal times. You own an area, you get a cut. These days it might not be a geographical area of which you are Duke but it might well be a port of which you are customs chief (and we’ve had similar positions in our own feudal times) or indeed an area of which you are police chief (and there have been Margraves and Marches Barons which were not far off exactly that).

By the standards of Kazakhstan this is actually very weak beer. Almost sweet in its innocence in fact. Sticking the kid on a corporate scholarship? What happened to demanding vast bribes, in cash, in advance of not doing anything?

I know someone (listed company too) who once paid $50,000 to an aide just to get an interview with the PM of the country. To try to find out why they were nationalising, with no compensation, the company he’d just paid the government hundreds of millions for.

$100,000 a year as a scholarship to keep the local major general of police onside? Cheap at the price in that environment.

Which returns us to our basic question: whose morals, whose business practices, should we be using when we deal with Johnny Foreigner? We’re qadvised to speak the local languages, adopt the local customs of greetings, use local law in contracts: how far should we be willing to go?

It’s not for nothing that until recently you could declare bribes to foreigners as a tax allowable expense in your company tax return: bribes to anyone at home meant jail.

Here in the real world, important decisions about what to do with our money are made by politicians belonging to political parties. I understand why politicians are not here held in high esteem, and why there’s considerable distaste for giving them more of our money. But as a practical matter, we’re not going to get them to vote to cut themselves off from large donations unless we offer an alternative. What is idiocy is to do nothing and continue to allow our rulers to be induced by donors to waste our money – can you imagine a large corporation allow staffing for its CEO’s office to be paid for by donations solicited from suppliers and clients?

Err, let’s have that again?

can you imagine a large corporation allow staffing for its CEO’s office to be paid for by donations solicited from suppliers and clients?

Erm, everything that gets paid for in a corporation gets paid for from donations by suppliers and clients.

Because they’re all engaging in voluntary exchange?

It’s only tax which, being involuntary, is not a donation.

All of which is quite true yet:

A nurse with Asperger syndrome called Kay,

Given that the actual job of nursing is that empathic care which is nursing, I really cannot think of a job less likely to suit those different talents of the autistic.

If I were ever to run a large workforce I’d be deliberately looking for Aspies and the like to do the book keeping, programming (a rather large number of programmers are thought to be on the spectrum as it is) and, as an oddity, properly checking the expenses claims (I’m sure there are other areas too). The places where rigid attention to tedious detail is valuable. You’d not go out of your way to employ one as a glad handing salesman but then you don’t want someone who is hail good fellow and well met here’s my pen now sign here checking the books either.

It says that leading companies lure new customers – and those who take the trouble to switch suppliers – with “loss-leading” offers that are paid for by stinging longer-term customers with unfairly high tariffs. The IPPR says that the result is that neighbours who use the same amount of energy pay very different sums, while the big companies maintain their position unthreatened by new entrants into the field.

Customers on a “standard credit account” (paying in arrears) and who are unlikely to switch tariff or supplier are most likely to be paying over the odds. More than 60% of all households have never switched their energy supplier.

IPPR tested tariffs for British Gas, EDF, E.On, Npower, Scottish Power and SSE for three different payment types, using a price comparison website for properties in London, Sheffield, Dumfries and Aberystwyth. Scottish Power was found to offer the greatest differential between its standard and cheapest tariff: £339 in Sheffield, with London second-highest with £333. The gap at Npower was up to £315 and up to £229 at E.On. British Gas, SSE and EDF had figures of up to £126, £100 and £86 respectively. The thinktank found the difference in the tariffs offered could not be justified solely by the cost of different payment methods.

So there’s intense comptition in hte market for those new customers, for those willing to switch.

Excellent.

The solution to this is:

will increase the pressure on ministers and the energy regulator, Ofgem, to act to ensure that all customers are offered the cheapest available tariffs.

To remove the comptition!

Manufacturers ended 2011 with their worst quarter since Britain was in the grip of recession, although the pace of contraction slowed in December.

The closely watched Markit Purchasing Managers Index survey, which asks manufacturers about their output and order books, showed a reading of 49.6 last month — an improvement on the 47.7 recorded in November, but still below the 50 mark which signals expansion.

The MPMI explores the rate of change, not the absolute level.

“Worst” describes the absolute level not the rate of change.

Acceleration and deceleration are simply not the same thing as speed.

So, CEO pay has rebounded after a year of decline followed by a year of stagnation. But with median increases in remuneration of the order of 35 to 40%, the real question is: were the increases justified by performance? In order to determine this – and take the long view – I looked at pay movements and stock price performance over the last three years.

The decline in the economy in 2008 and 2009 outstripped the decline in CEO pay, by considerable amounts. In 2008, for example, the Russell 3000 Index was down by 37.3%; total realized pay (this includes salary, bonus and realized equity pay such as stock option profits) for CEOs fell by 6.34%.

But in 2010, when stock prices had begun to recover, the increase in CEO pay has outstripped the rise in share values. The Russell 3000 was up by 16.93%, but CEO pay went up by 27.19%. This differential, which always seems in favor of CEO pay, should give shareholders – whose investments are not subject to the same economic cushion – pause for thought.

OK, so let’s think about it then.

However, it is profits made on the exercise of stock options that continue to drive today’s largest pay packages and largest increases as grants made nine and 10 years ago (when options were much more popular) continue to mature. Eight of the top 10 highest paid CEOs made the list because of option profits.

So there’s your problem then. You’re measuring executive compensation over a three year performance period at the same time as you say that the major determinant is share options over an 8-10 year performance period.

Now go away and do your research properly you ghastly little boy.

Becht became chief executive as a result of 1999′s merger of Britain’s Reckitt & Colman with Benckiser of the Netherlands. Since then, he turned a £3bn company into a £23.5bn juggernaut, helped by the £1.9bn acquisition of Boots’s over-the-counter medicines wing in 2006 and last year’s £2.5bn purchase of Durex-owner SSL International. Such success turned his share options into his truly unmentionable pay.

Oh, he increased capitalisation of the company by £20 billion.

So he cashed in share options (which is indeed where his mega wonga came from) of 0.45% of the increase in value that happened on his watch.

Up to you whether you think that’s excessive or not really.

But let’s run it this way. Bloke comes along and says, you know, I can manage that business of yours really well. I can increase the capital value. And you pay me 0.5% of any increase in value and you keep 99.5% of it.

It’s not obvious that this is a bad deal for you.

However, evidence suggests that family-owned companies run by sons or daughters on average under-perform their professionally managed peers.

The Business Department is expected to encourage wider use of external expertise and non-executive directors on boards as part of a package of measures.

All mid sized companies that recognise they have reached the limits of their own skills are set be helped to bring in outside expertise. The Institute of Directors is understood to be drawing up a database of experienced non-execs as a new resource. Business schools could also be asked to redesign their MBA programmes to accommodate the needs of family owned companies.

All very nice: but a large part of what the management of large companies does is actually deleterious to the performance of the company. It’s only possible for them to do it because the margins and buffers of a large company can absorb the waste.

In medium sized companies salesmen go and sell. In large ones they have diversity meetings.

OK, that’s not quite true, but I can’t remember whether it’s Peters or Parkinson who points out that the best way to bankrupt a medium sized business is to bring in the ex-Chairman of a large one. What he’ll spend on redecorating the executive suite is what a medium sized business would spend on developing the next version of the product.

They’re just not the same worlds and the skills (hah!) aren’t transferable in quite the manner people seem to think.

And asw to small business: how many people in a large corporation have ever thought about cash flow? And how many (surviving) small businesses think about virtually nothing else?

Need some pointers to it all if anyone has any. I’ve got Chapter 9 of Galloway and the Borders, so I’ve got he effect on nature nailed down.

Now it’s tax breaks etc that I’ve got to mug up on.

Are there various audit committee reports? brochures from forestry companies telling of the riches to be made? Timelines of tax breaks?

The Commission has profiled DSL and a dozen other small and medium-sized companies (SMEs) from across the continent to mark the launch tomorrow of European SME Week.

Earlier this week, Moody’s, the ratings agency, downgraded several Kodak debt securities, sending it further towards “junk” status. Fitch downgraded the company a day later.

Its shares are at their lowest since June 1935.

There’s no particular reason why a company should last forever: in the larger scheme of things it’s a method of exploiting a technology, a market position. If that technology becomes redundant, the market position disappears, there’s no real reason for the company to continue to exist.

Sure, maybe it should have diversified: but perhaps not. All the systems, all the assets, the knowledge, were there to handle photography. That doesn’t particularly translate into being good at digital cameras (entirely different technology cycles, a very different business to be in) let alone anything else.Being good at film is just great: but when no one wants film any more than the assets, the knowledge, they probably should be sold off, dispersed: asset stripped if you like. Moved to other higher valued uses, creating wealth in the process.

This seems obvious with Kodak: but the same is true of all companies in the end. There’s a good argument sometimes put forward that Microsoft should stop investing. The money all came from owning the desktop: that stage of computing isn’t over, by a long way, but there’s no particular advantage that the company has outside the desktop: ecept for pots and pots of money of course. So why not return that money to the shareholders. Regard that near mkonopoly of the desktop as a wasting asset to be sweated for maximum return rather than having the money pilfered for Zune and other such nonsenses.

Or BP, Shell: great oil companies but that’s the point, they’re in oil. Not energy, not electricity, not solar, windmills. That’s not their skill. When we no longer want oil they probably won’t exist: and we also probably shouldn’t be shouting at them to invest in those things like wind and solar that they don’t know much about.

(Yes, I do know that Shell is in wind and BP was in solar, but they’re not actually what each company is good at).

Does our Mr. Gillies know more about this?

SIR – As past presidents of the Royal Town Planning Institute, this is the first time in more than 50 years that so many of us have come together to sign a public letter. The current debate in the media about planning reform, with claim and counter claim, highlights the importance of planning for economic growth, building communities and the conservation of our cherished spaces and places.

However, this debate has now descended into open hostility on all sides, with each party interpreting the same policy in very different ways.

The government also wants to bring in a new system almost overnight, reflecting the urgency of delivering localism and stimulating both housing and economic growth.

While we recognise this urgency and support the government’s overall objectives, the unintended consequences of this haste are greater confusion, uncertainty for the development industry and anxiety for communities.

Good planning is also about the long, as well as the short term.

What we need is a reasoned debate and clear thinking on managing this major change.

As the voice of the professionals, in the public, private and voluntary sectors, who will be charged with making any new system work, the RTPI stands ready to bring the parties together to address the confusion and to resolve the conflict.

Martin Willey
Janet O’Neill
Clive Harridge
Ron Tate
Professor Vincent Goodstadt
Mike Haslam
Nick Davies
Kevin Murray
Brian Raggett
Trevor Roberts
Tony Struthers
Jed Griffiths
Hazel McKay
Martin Bradshaw
Professor Peter Fidler
Robin Thompson
Chris Shepley
Stephen Byrne
John Anderson
Andrew Thorburn
John Collins
Ewart Parkinson
Professor Graham Ashworth
The Royal Town Planning Institute
London EC3

The thing is, y’see, that the aim of the changes to planning law is to get rid of you lot. Not only don’t we want you hosting a summit so that all sides can be heard, we don’t want you anywhere near the process at all. For it is exactly your sort of planning that has brought us to this pretty impasse.

We’d like to get you back in your box, back to where Jane Jacobs said you should be: you can do a bit of connecting up the sewers and running the ‘leccie lines after people have decided where they want to build. But we want you entirely out of the business of deciding what should be built where.

Nationalisation of coal, gas, electricity, steel and the railways by Labour heralded deeper political intervention. Harold Wilson went further after moving to Downing Street in 1964, talking ambitiously about a technological revolution and the creation of groups with a global reach to match the US giants.

He set up the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (IRC), the equivalent of a state-owned merchant bank, to fulfill the ‘mission.’ The ‘Young Turks’ in the IRC presided over the biggest ever shake-up in manufacturing. The motor industry was restructured around Donald Stokes and British Leyland. Arnold Weinstock was given carte blanche to ride roughshod through the electrical engineering industry. The exercise was repeated in machine tools, aerospace, mechanical engineering and other sectors.

British Leyland started life with more than 40pc of the British car market but lurched from crisis to crisis before disappearing. Lord Weinstock kept GEC intact but disappointed the politicians by being too cautious with his considerable cash pile. The successor body, the National Enterprise Board, did little better in its efforts to pick winners and in between industry was suffocated by ‘Neddy’ – the National Economic Development Council and ‘Little Neddy’ offshoots.

Which part of this is it that everyone wants to repeat?

“People are spending less on food – that’s a first,” said the Co-op’s chief executive. He added that he and other retailers are having to cut prices radically to shift stock.

While normally around a quarter of products are on promotion, approximately 40pc are discounted at the moment, Mr Marks said. He added: “We’re not into ‘buy one, get one free’ – we’re into ‘buy one, get two free’.”

He added: “It has been a tough six months, the toughest I’ve ever experienced in my 40 years of retailing. I don’t think we have come out of recession since 2008… I’ve operated through several recessions – this is by far the longest.”

Internet sales
Based on ONS experimental Internet sales series, the non-seasonally adjusted average weekly
value of Internet retail sales in July 2011 was £523.4 million which was approximately 9.1 per
cent of total retail sales (excluding automotive fuel), compared with July 2010 which was £395.8
million which was approximately 7.1 per cent of total retail sales (excluding automotive fuel).

We really do have a structural change going on. And yes, that structural change is affecting even food sales. From box deliveries of organics through Ocado to Amazon now offering groceries.

I don’t say that internet sales are the full and only cause of retail problems: yes, I’m sure that recession and general pennilessness have an effect. But I do think that this structural change (look, nearly 10% of retail sales are over the net now, up from nothing a decade ago and they’ve expanded by 2% of total retail sales in just the last twelvemonth) is the cause of at least part of it.

Does this matter though? In some cases no: if you’re an investor in retail stocks then why doesn’t matter. Falling sales are bad, M’Kay? But in two other senses yes. The first is just the general accumulation of woe and gloom about the economy. Lower storefront sales aren’t solely to do with woe and gloom in the economy therefore they shouldn’t be taken as signs of woe and gloom in the economy. Solely.

The second is whatever might be a policy response to events. It the change is a structural one then things like lower interest rates, QE III, fiscal expansion, these aren’t going to make a difference to that part of it which is structural.

Or, in short, as I’ve said a number of times recently, if 10% of retail sales are now over the internet who is surprised that 10% of shops are empty?

WWF, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, makes about $500m a year from donations and corporate endorsements

So the World Wildlife Fund gets $500 million a year in income.

Difficult to really place an “enterprise value” on something which doesn’t avowedly make profits but that sort of turnover would certainly put it in the FTSE 250, maybe even at the lower end of the FTSE 100.

No, no major point to make, it’s just not a small organisation: it’s big business.