So who’s smiling with Cowdery?

Meanwhile, what of retail investors, those poor saps nobly doing the right thing by trying to put some cash away for a rainy day? Friends Provident policyholders got some "free" shares when the company abandoned mutuality in favour of the stock market back in 2001. Since then the share price performance has been awful and the performance of the savings schemes not much better (note to Friends' flacks: don't even bother to contest this point). Resolution is paying 79.4p for each Friends share compared with a share price at float of 225p.

The stock market is a great route to riches. As long as you are on the inside

* TALKING through the merger yesterday Trevor Matthews, the Friends chief executive, reckoned he is "midway" through a turnaround of the company.

"Left to our own devices, I am confident we would have started producing good numbers 12 months from now," he said. In which case, why not wait and sell the business for more money later on? Presumably, Matthews' pay and bonuses will no longer be disclosed once he is working for a subsidiary of Resolution, rather than for a public company. It would be quite wrong to suggest this could be a motivating factor.

* MEANWHILE, what next for Legal & General? Its fund management arm is one of the Friends' shareholders that wanted the Resolution deal to happen. Now it has, that long sought after consolidation of the sector can begin in earnest. Will Resolution now target L&G? If it did, how would the company plausibly argue against such a deal? Well, L&G chief executive Tim Breedon reckons insurance mergers almost never work. The products and back office computers of separate insurers are too complex and too different to merge in any sensible way, he reckons. Hmmm. Has he told his fund managers this?

* MEANWHILE, what next for Legal & General? Its fund management arm is one of the Friends' shareholders that wanted the Resolution deal to happen. Now it has, that long sought after consolidation of the sector can begin in earnest. Will Resolution now target L&G? If it did, how would the company plausibly argue against such a deal? Well, L&G chief executive Tim Breedon reckons insurance mergers almost never work. The products and back office computers of separate insurers are too complex and too different to merge in any sensible way, he reckons. Hmmm. Has he told his fund managers this?

* THE BBC website has enhanced its business coverage with regular bulletins or "City Diaries" from anonymous City workers. So there's: "Anthony (not his real name) works for an investment bank in the City", "Laura (not her real name) works for a commercial bank in London" and "Stephen (not his real name) has worked in the City of London for over a decade". It is all most baffling and un-BBC. Anthony (not his real name) asks: "Why is the stock market rallying? It's because we are over the worst and prices had fallen too far but watch out for the second V of the W recession and another correction in October." A bold prediction for Anthony (not his real name) to place his reputation on.

August — the month of the living dead in the City

"I rather get the impression that anyone who isn't on holiday this week is probably brain dead.'" So offers the clearly at work City veteran David Buik of BGC Partners in his latest email missive.

* IT had to be expected. If you're going to train staff to become legal experts, you can't be too surprised if they sue you when you fire them. According to legal website RollonFriday, a gaggle of former Linklaters' employees are taking the firm to court, apparently because it took on newly qualified lawyers a month after booting out similar employees. Insiders expect it could kick off a series of cases.

* FROM US humour website the Borowitz Report: "In what some on Wall Street are calling the biggest blockbuster deal in the history of the financial sector, Goldman Sachs confirmed today that it was in talks to acquire the US Department of the Treasury. According to Goldman spokesperson Jonathan Hestron, the merger between Goldman and the Treasury Department is a good fit' because they're in the business of printing money and so are we.' The Goldman spokesman said that the merger would create efficiencies for both entities: We already have so many employees and so much money flowing back and forth, this would just streamline things.'"

Taxing time in Liechtenstein

JUST how many of the 5,000 British account holders in Liechtenstein are quaking at the tax treaty between the two countries? Or, to ask another question: just how much of the estimated £2 billion to £3 billion in secret accounts in the tiny Alpine state is still there? So heavily trailed was the agreement that anybody with anything serious to hide will have got their money out — probably to one of those offshore havens not covered by any deal to supply any information on anything to anyone.

* THE Liechtenstein move affords easy terms to the account holders, apparently, because the Revenue has such little detail about what is there and is hoping to persuade them to come clean. City Spy wonders if the Government has taken the simple, first step of tapping "Vaduz" or "Liechtenstein" into the computers of the bank it owns, Northern Rock, the bank which it controls (and counts Coutts as a subsidiary), Royal Bank of Scotland, and the bank it rescued, Lloyds-HBOS, and seeing what turns up?

* A £3 million government advertising campaign, fronted by Sir Alan (sorry, Lord) Sugar, for apprentices resulted in only 600 recruits. Just one in 25 of the advertised vacancies were filled. If Sugar had sent a team off from his TV series with such a task and they had come back with the same dreadful performance then he would surely have told them: "You're fired."