Any other business

Winemaker to the maharajas

It’s not often your host has passed up dinner with Mick Jagger and the Maharaja of Jodhpur to take you to his country house for the weekend. But that’s what Rajeev Samant, the pioneer of India’s wine craze, lets slip as we begin the long drive north from Mumbai to his Sula vineyard. Samant has

Time gentlemen please

Does anyone actually resign anymore? Nowadays a resignation is regarded not as a final act but as a temporary career break and that’s bad for business. Paul Gray – the former head of HM Revenue and Customs who ‘resigned’ two weeks ago after someone in his department posted the names, addresses and bank details of

The Liberal Democrats’ sound money man

I met Vincent Cable recently at a dinner party with a mixture of City and business bigwigs: a few FTSE-100 bosses, a smattering of hedge-fund tycoons, the odd private-equity baron. The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman was the only politician at the table and the debate inevitably focused on financial worries: the credit crunch, Northern Rock,

The end of the world is nigh

For a solvent mortgage lender to require emergency government support on a huge scale suggests that all is not well in our financial markets. This understatement matches the gorgeously hubristic claim from ‘Chuck’ Prince of Citigroup, America’s largest bank, in July, that ‘as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and

Free at last: the next web revolution

Edie G. Lush explains why we’re rarely asked to pay for online news and entertainment these days Amid the shockwaves caused by Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, one significant policy shift attracted relatively little attention. When the ink finally dries on the deal, one of Murdoch’s first moves

Martin Vander Weyer

Northern Rock’s blonde knight?

Is it time for a reassessment of Sir Richard Branson? Chosen by the Treasury as the ‘preferred bidder’ for Northern Rock, he’s back where he craves to be and so often manages to put himself: in the headlines. And like every time he grabs the nation’s attention, two quite different caricatures of him have been

Shock and ore: the fight for the world’s mineral riches

Marius Kloppers is a man who has clearly learnt that business is like warfare in at least one respect: if you’re planning an attack, it might as well be done quickly. On 1 October this year, the 45-year-old South African was installed as chief executive of the Australian mining conglomerate BHP Billiton. Within less than

Half a million rooms to choose from

Most hotel-group bosses like to be at the opening of each new property in their chain. Some claim to have slept in all of their establishments or even to have spent a night in every room. Not Andrew Cosslett. His company is the biggest hotel group in the world. It has 572,000 rooms in more

In salons for writers, beware giving a black eye to literature

Students of words enjoy the way in which adjectives normally used to describe reprehensible actions are whitewashed to become terms of praise. One instance, which has caught my eye recently, is ‘aggressive’. In the past few days I have seen a firm’s brochure praising its ‘aggressive approach to the worldwide sale of megayachts’, a reference

Don’t bank on it

With Alistair Darling coming under increasing pressure after the loss of the personal data of twenty-five million people by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Martin Vander Weyer reviews how Darling and Gordon Brown have also moved into the firing line in the whole Northern Rock debacle. They along with its employees and shareholders now have the

Darling is out of his depth

For a man who has been Chancellor of the Exchequer for just over four months, Alistair Darling has certainly made some powerful enemies. In fact, it’s hard to think of anybody important with whom he hasn’t fallen out. Sir Ronald Cohen, the private equity king who is one of Labour’s most prominent business supporters, has

The price of valour and the value of money

Our gallant armed forces who face the daily horrors of Iraq and Afghanistan are often said to be undervalued by the public. But at least in the narrow financial sense, that cannot be said of historic acts of bravery and devotion to duty and the medals that commemorate them. Have you ever looked to see

Celebrating St Pancras Day

I like to think I was the first (indeed I may have been the only) journalist to have been invited to climb the scaffolding under the clock at St Pancras station. That was back at the beginning of May, when the refurbishment of what is, from today, London’s Eurostar terminus still had a little over