Neil Collins, who resigned in controversial circumstances from Thomson Reuters in October last year, has returned to the business press mainstream by writing for the Financial Times.
He started a weekly column on the FT Alphaville site, called Something for the weekend, earlier this month.
Collins quit the Reuters Breaking Views website after he was said to have failed to declare that he owned shares in a number of companies he was writing about, including BP, Marks & Spencer, Yell and Diageo.
But there was no evidence Collins was "abusing his position for financial gain", as a Reuters report stated.
In an email sent by Collins to Hugo Dixon, the co-founder and global editor of BreakingViews, (reproduced in full on this site) Collins said he was "saddened and embarrassed by my breaches of the [Reuters] rules."
At the time, there was considerable sympathy for Collins's plight within the financial journalistic community. He was thought to have been foolish.
He certainly appears eager to be as transparent as possible now. In his most recent Alphaville column, he writes:
"I'm a shareholder in Alliance Trust. Its subsidiary, Alliance Trust Savings, is home to my (substantial) SIPP. The service from ATS is simple, cheap and exemplary, and I'd recommend it.
I wouldn't recommend the shares to anyone until the management can persuade me they know what they're doing."
Source: FT. See also neilcollinsxxx.wordpress.com.
