Chief executives may be in the spotlight during the new puritanism but keep an eye on the rampant pay inflation for part-time chairmen. Sir Roy Gardner, lately of British Gas group Centrica, was paid a startling £451,000 for racking up a few hours a week at caterer Compass. That's £56,000 for each board meeting he chaired during the year. Over at Imperial Tobacco, part-time chairman Iain Napier, formerly chief executive of housebuilder Taylor Woodrow, picked up a pay rise of nearly 50% to £360,000 and is getting an extra £60,000 this year to take his annual salary to £420,000.

* City Spy can't get over the description of Freshfields restructuring partner Ken Baird in The Lawyer as someone who can repeatedly throw a pen into a cup from five feet. How does he do that?

* Michael Lewis, he of Liar's Poker fame, is doing good business writing about the Madoff scandal. Here he is discussing one reason why the Securities and Exchange Commission is no good: “It's not hard to see why the SEC behaves as it does. If you work for the enforcement division of the SEC, you probably know in the back of your mind, and in the front, too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall Street, you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it...”

* Tim Melville-Ross is a busy chap. Once criticised by Pirc for holding too many appointments — he chaired DTZ, Manganese Bronze, Royal London Mutual Insurance and Bovis — he gave up the latter. But while Bovis has gone, he has added the chairmanship of the Higher Education Funding Council. City Spy wonders how he finds the time, given the attention he must be affording DTZ. He must be terribly concerned about the DTZ share price — the shares were quoted at over £8, and they are now 28p. Taxi cab manufacturer Manganese must be a worry as well — its shares are now 79.75p, down from their peak in the last 12 months of 567p. Tim, how do you manage it all?

Splitting hairs on copyright

AN item that didn't make the BBC News. One of the world's leading pubic hair dye manufacturers — yes, you did read that correctly — is suing an archrival over copyright.

Betty Beauty sells its colourings for “hair down there” for a snip at just £16.95 — auburn, blonde, black and shocking pink are among the best-sellers. But now it claims rival Smart Beauty, while choosing a different euphemism (“bikini hair”), is ripping off its thong logo and nicking a hefty chunk of its instructions.

In the interests of research, City Spy examined the marketing literature of both and, it has to be said, the two do match like a collar and cuffs.

* Budget airline Iceland Express is offering “a special reduced rate” to Reykjavik next week as it changes its London hub from Stansted to Gatwick. “Three thousand seats will be available from midday on 12 January until midnight on 14 January 2009,” trills an airline spokesman, blithely ignoring the question of who would want to go to Iceland right now.

Have a heart, Mack, this is a critical case

That Mack the Knife's a card, isn't he? At the height of the liquidity crisis last year, when John Mack and his top team at Morgan Stanley were negotiating its desperate fundraising effort to retain the company's independence, he passed out blood-pressure kits to top executives. Happily for Mack and Co, Japanese and Chinese investors stepped in to bail it out before any coronary arrests, although you could argue the bank remains in intensive care.

* Six — the number of QCs taking part in the judicial review brought by hedge-fund manager Jon Wood and others against the Treasury's handling of Northern Rock, and listed for hearing later this month.

* But that is one less than the seven QCs appearing in the High Court this year in a Russian bribery dispute: Fiona Trust and Holding Corporation and Others v Yuri Privalov and Others.

* And it is nowhere near the legal gravy train that is the banks' row with the Office of Fair Trading over bank charges, which is also due for airing this month. Ranged against the OFT's single silk, Jonathan Crow, will be seven QCs for Abbey, Barclays, Clydesdale, HSBC, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide and RBS. Question: can't one lawyer represent them all?

Big-name soccer stars make money – put your shirt on it

You would think Virgin Money, the failed bidder for Northern Rock, might have more pressing concerns than calculating the relative costs of football replica shirts for fans of players with names of various lengths. But no.

“Chelsea might think they're big-name stars, but they're really the Premier League's smallest and cheapest squad — Blackburn are the proper big names,” the lender declares. Its research shows the average length of surname at Chelsea is the shortest in the Premier League. So when a fan wants a player's name on the back of a replica shirt, at 50p a letter, the average cost is £2.83. At Blackburn the average is £3.50.

“Parents better hope their children don't support real big names like Man City and England's Shaun Wright-Phillips,” whose name would add £7.50 to the price of a shirt, warns Virgin Money. Richard, get a grip.

* Tim Smit, the inspiration behind the Eden Project, is among the few who saw the financial crash coming — and said as much in the first draft of its last annual report. “I wrote something about the pyramid salesmen in the City,” he tells Director magazine. “In the end it was removed because it would have upset the City.

“Any fool could see it coming. Where you have a bunch of people using the language of growth, but where the only thing that's growing is house prices, it's time to worry. When the history of these events is told, it will be clear it was caused by old men concerned about their virility, watching young men take risks.”