As Amanda Staveley basks in the glory of having secured the £3.5 billion capital injection for Barclays from her friends in Abu Dhabi's royal family, thoughts turn to how things once were for the glamorous PCP Capital Partners director.
In 2004, she was sued by the self-same Barclays for just over £1 million over a personally guaranteed loan for Q.ton, her conference centre in Cambridge Science Park. She founded Q.ton with grand plans to roll out the concept of a meeting place, restaurant and leisure facility for scientists across Europe.

But she suffered a setback when broadband and IT services company EuroTelecom slid into administration just 11 months after raising £17 million by floating on the stock market.Staveley was a non-executive director of EuroTelecom, which bought a 49% stake in Q.ton for £750,000. She was cleared of any wrongdoing and later negotiated to buy her share in Q.ton back from the liquidators, PricewaterhouseCoopers.

At that time, King Abdullah of Jordan was aid to be among her backers. However, Q.ton ran into difficulties, and Barclays and other creditors came calling.

These days, Q.ton is the Trinity Centre bar and gym. With the £40 million Barclays is paying her for finding the Abu Dhabi investors, presumably Staveley can repay any outstanding debts from the Q.ton days.

* The buzzword in the City and Whitehall is “clawback” — as in a whole new approach to bonuses, which will see bankers being required to repay their bonuses if something goes wrong in the future. City Spy can't imagine how this will work in reality.

Icelandic rage on a T-shirt

Angry investors who have had their money frozen in Icelandic banks have launched a T-shirt line. A group called the Icelandic Bank Avengers is selling tops through Spreadshirt that feature slogans such as “My name is Thieving Bankersson, I am from Iceland”, “The Cod War: Fancy a replay, Iceland?” and “Icelandic bankers: nothing a few rounds of 7.62mm wouldn't solve”. But there are signs their rage is cooling. Recent additions to the range carry lines like “Please hug me — I'm from Iceland”.

Arsene, an Elle of a businessman

So, as City Spy predicted, Elle Macpherson won the Women At The Top award at Esquire magazine's annual business awards, sponsored by Glenmorangie at the Haymarket Hotel last night. Her supermodel looks always meant the clothing entrepreneur stood a good chance of beating the likes of Alliance Trust chief executive Katherine Garrett-Cox, Amanda Staveley and Net-A-Porter founder Natalie Massenet. Bizarrely, the Most Influential Business Thinker award went to that well-known business brain, er, Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger, who defeated Guy Hands of Terra Firma and BP's Tony Hayward among others. Even Wenger seemed surprised by the award, telling guests in a video message: “I don't know if I'm a business thinker. I just try to be an honest football thinker.” Wenger won because he's “the only Premier League manager to turn a profit in the transfer market last year”. Next year, Wenger succeeds Clara Furse at the London Stock Exchange...

The future's bright, the future...

Vodafone badly missed a trick in the Lewis Hamilton/McLaren celebrations. Despite being the new Formula One world champion's main sponsor, Hamilton and the McLaren team lined up for an orgy of photos clad in bright orange... suggesting another leading mobile brand.

* Does the slump in the Japanese stock market at the end of the 1980s offer a clue to the future, during our own shares turmoil? Chartists are puzzling over whether the recent bounce in the fortunes of the FTSE 100 index is temporary or permanent, and the Japanese experience is not cheering. In 1989, at its zenith, Tokyo's Nikkei 225 stood at 38,000, and interest rates were at 4.5%. And since then? The Nikkei has never recovered from the slump, the Japanese index barely making it above 20,000 at best. The fear in the City is that something similar will happen to the Footsie.

Women oil wheels of energy lobby

Offshore energy lobby group UK Oil & Gas seems to be worried about the prejudices people might have about its industry. It commissioned a demographics survey, which it was pleased to confirm said that the average age of its workers is 41 — about right for an industry with an age range of 20 to 60.

But it also showed a 7% year-on-year leap in the number of women working in the industry. Evidence of a new influx of female engineers?

Er no. UK Oil & Gas was forced to admit the majority of women working in the industry are involved in catering.

* “Selfridges truly is the ultimate, all-encompassing destination for men,” gushes the department store's David Walker-Smith, who's job title is director for beauty. The department store is opening a male grooming salon called Gentleman's Tonic, which it reckons is a growth market, credit crunch or not. Treatments include something called a “divorce detox”, which lasts 30 minutes and costs £46 and a “wild hair cure” which will set you back £20. “Kill the hangover” sounds more like it, consisting of a Bloody Mary, massage and aromatherapy facial. Except it's £140. Which is a lot of Bloody Marys.

* So Sarah Palin is Wal-Mart Mom. As New York Times columnist William Safire points out: “That chain has a great euphemism for
the guy on the way out who makes sure you're not stealing stuff: the
exit greeter.”

* Sign of the times? When retirement homes builder and developer Wren Homes discovered it owed chief executive Paul Treadaway £55,000, the firm got around the problem of eating into much-needed cash by issuing him 500,000 shares at 11p. The issue lifted Treadaway's stake in the company to 10.49 million shares, or 20% of the company. City Spy calculates that on that basis, he might control the company in 80-odd years.

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