If you are a politician who accepts the odd small token of esteem from top businesspeople, you have to admit to it. For example, Boris Johnson once received a glass paperweight and an engraved trowel worth £500 from the housebuilder Tony Pidgley, so there’s a record of the London mayor being presented with these objets (if not what he did with them).
Frustratingly, however, there’s no central record of the gifts doled out by politicians to businessmen, although one such offering to Pidgley’s trade will be in evidence this week.
The builder he founded and chairs, Berkeley Group, is holding its annual meeting (while rivals Redrow and Barratt Developments report results), so expect a few queries about the astonishing rewards being trousered by Pidgley and his fellow directors – which some might suggest would have come to anyone lucky enough to be running a builder since the government generously rigged the market in the sector’s favour.
Pidgley got £20m in shares in April from a 2009 incentive scheme, and the same plan seems certain to pay out similarly next year. Then there’s a 2011-21 scheme, which market-watchers reckon could generate the biggest payout to the board of a UK public company: at which point Pidgley might feel moved to engrave a few words of gratitude on another trowel.
Investors police Sports Direct
Could this be the end for Keith Hellawell, the chairman of Sports Direct, who has distinguished himself as possibly the most biddable leader of a FTSE 100 board since the City fell in love with all those Kazakh miners?
The obedient former chief constable of West Yorkshire has done little to prevent the law according to Mike Ashley, the sports retailer’s founder and majority shareholder, being followed to the letter within the company – cheerfully admitting as much earlier this year when he told MPs that Ashley ran the business with three or four key executives and had informed the board of some key decisions only at the last moment.
Eventually even fund managers notice these things, and the former rozzer is expected to come under pressure to step down from the board at the retailer’s annual meeting this week, as new rules give increased rights to minority shareholders to elect non-executives. Unions have been lobbying shareholders to vote against Hellawell, and even the Institute of Directors has warned that Sports Direct’s board is “dysfunctional” and provides insufficient checks on Ashley’s powers. Developing ...
Morrisons a bit off-key
A bit like Eric Morecambe’s efforts to play Grieg’s piano concerto, former Morrisons boss Dalton Philips came up with all the right strategies, just not necessarily in the right order.
After constant pleading from the City, he finally launched a chain of convenience stores and got around to flogging groceries online, but only after rivals had been at both for years. However, by the time those gaps were being filled, Morrisons should really have been focusing on its core supermarket business, which was suddenly under attack from the discounters Aldi and Lidl.
Which brings us to Morrisons’s interim results announcement this week, where Philips’s successor, David Potts, will get his first major chance to perform in front of the City.
There’ll be focus on Potts’s suggested withdrawal from convenience stores, as well as questions about what he reckons to Philips’s efforts at online retailing – where, after failing to get started as many times as Morecambe in the Grieg sketch, he simply handed the gig to Ocado.
Still, Potts is likely to mimic his predecessor in one way: by trying out a Morecambesque line. Something along the lines of having “conveniently located supermarkets”, just not necessarily convenience stores.
