A year ago Sir Ken Morrison, the founder of Morrisons supermarket, tore into the grocer’s then chief executive, Dalton Philips, in a scathing intervention at the annual general meeting. After listening to Philips outlining his latest strategy to modernise the Bradford-based chain, Morrison said: “When I left work and started working as a hobby, I chose to raise cattle. I have something like 1,000 bullocks and, having listened to your presentation, Dalton, you’ve got a lot more bullshit than me.”
Still, now that Philips has been replaced by David Potts – on top of the boardroom cull instigated by new chairman Andy Higginson last March – can we expect the Morrison clan to stay quiet at this week’s annual gathering of shareholders?
Er, probably not. Sir Ken will be in attendance, with other family members, who are expected to register their displeasure at the £2.1m Philips trousered last year, plus a £1.1m payoff.
They have a point, but it will need to be made with care, as the ferocity of last year’s attack left some in the City feeling for Philips. He perhaps wasn’t the best boss in the grocer’s history (there have been six), but they argue he only actually made two mistakes: the first was taking the long and expensive route to reversing the errors of Sir Ken; and the second was making blunders of his own.
EasyHotel: is it in the black?
There is a quite a well-known story, dating back a couple of millennia, that touches on the difficulty of checking into a hotel on Christmas Eve.
Less well known, possibly because it occurred after the New Testament went to press, is the one about the hotel finance director checking out on 24 December, which was the misfortune that befell the so-called “super-budget” hotel group easyHotel last year.
It was on that day that another of those companies created by Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou announced that Darren Mee, the finance director who’d helped float the company just six months earlier, would be tiptoeing out the door. After Stelios, Mee was the company’s largest private shareholder, so his early departure caused shareholders as many sleepless nights as those suffered by the firm’s punters, surrounded by that orange decor.
The shares have lost about 17% since then, but the company has found a new finance chief and is adding sites. So the group’s interim results this week will provide the City a much-sought-after view – which is more than can be said for the guests. Its rooms without a window always sell first, apparently.
Banana skins for G4S
G4S, the accident-prone security group and frequent star of this page, has been at it again. Last week, one of its guards was accused of smuggling refugees through airport security checks, with Austrian prosecutors alleging that the employee was one of 13 private security staff in Vienna suspected of using their security access to slip a few surprise passengers on board flights to the US and UK.
It is yet another cracking yarn to add to the G4S scrapbook of hilarious gaffes, which seem to have been lifted straight from a Tom Sharpe novel. They have included: a prisoner tricking his G4S guards into tagging his prosthetic leg, thereby allowing him to skip his curfew by detaching the limb; a security guard on a routine cash-collection call at Poundland taking his break immediately after parking his van outside the store - thereby allowing an impostor to dress in a G4S uniform and collect £14,000 of takings; and another of the firm’s guards absentmindedly leaving his loaded shotgun at a cash machine.
All of those gems occurred just before the company was about to address the City (and argue that the group really isn’t too large to manage) so is there anything in the diary this week? Indeed there is. G4S will host its annual meeting on Thursday.
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