More woe for embattled Oleg Deripaska, this time from Montenegro, where he so famously hosted Lord Mandelson and George Osborne last summer on board his yacht the Queen K. Plans for the oligarch to expand his once vast, now merely enormous, wealth in the tiny Mediterranean country have had something of a hiccup. His huge aluminium factory on the edge of the capital Podgorica, has seen prices crash and costs rise as the Soviet-era plant belches its toxic fumes across the country.

Now 430 workers at Deripaska's KAP complex, which generates about 14% of the little state's GDP, have had their wages stopped. And CEO Vjeceslav Krilov has threatened to close the plant next month if a dispute with the government over electricity prices is not resolved.

All a very Russian way of doing business, as Europe's gas consumers have been seeing recently.

But not such good news for Deripaska, who likes nothing more than cruising up and down the unspoilt coast in his mammoth yacht, oiling the corridors of power and buttering up sundry politicians, and who has invested heavily in a marina development in the country.

City Spy is told: “The government isn't going to view all your other projects very sympathetically if you've just closed the biggest employer in the country in a matter of months, is it?”

* What's fair value for shares in JJB Sports? Citigroup's Ben Spruntulis says 1p.His argument in a note yesterday: “Since September, JJB has reportedly breached banking covenants, borrowed and not fully repaid a bridging loan from Kaupthing, received a qualified audit report and cut the dividend to zero.” Fair enough.

Driven mad by Aviva adverts

Just how irritating are those Norwich Union/Aviva TV ads featuring Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr
et al? Very, if City Spy's postbag is anything to go by.

One reader writes: “The dumbing-down fashion has claimed another known and trusted brand. The experts responsible for the funky name, reminiscent of teenage pep pills or shampoo, no doubt hope to sell more products to a younger market. To claim Aviva has more global impact than Norwich Union is nonsense.

“Just like the pub operators who thought it clever to change traditional pub names, they are destroying a tradition. But they will not be the ones to pay for it. They will take their bonuses and move on to do more damage elsewhere. It's the shareholders who will bear the cost.”

* Come back Fred, all is forgiven. Sir Fred Goodwin's old firm, Royal Bank of Scotland, is taking its new role in the civil service seriously — so much so that management is busying itself with layers of bureaucracy that would be anathema in the Shred's day. Then managers used to have to run the gauntlet of the credit committee — the much-feared demigods whose function it was to sneer at every piece of new business before sanctioning a loan. Now, City Spy's man in Edinburgh reports, there is a pricing committee and, wait for it… a balance-sheet committee to oversee loans of more than £500,000.

Life of Sugar is such a tall story

Sir Alan Sugar must have been delighted with the, er, sugary, profile of him that Fiona Bruce anchored for the BBC's Money Programme on Sunday evening. It seems 5ft 11in Bruce went to great lengths to keep the rather less tall Sir Alan happy.

BBC newspaper Ariel reports: “It is surely no coincidence that in both promotional photographs for a Money Programme special on the self-made business hero, Sugar is nonchalantly posed on a couple of stairs while the statuesque Fiona Bruce remains firmly on the ground.”

* An architect, a surgeon and a banker are discussing The Creation. The surgeon says: “Look, we surgeons are most important. God's a surgeon because the first thing he did was to extract Eve from Adam's rib.” The architect says: “No, wait a minute, God is an architect. He made the world in seven days out of chaos.” The banker smiles: “And who made the chaos?”

Fraudbusters have their eye on web mogul

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (yes, the organisation that failed to spot Bernard Madoff for all those years) has another high-profile target in its sight for alleged insider trading. He is dot-com winner Mark Cuban, who sold his start-up Broadcast.com to Yahoo for eight figures and used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and HDNet, a high-definition TV channel.

Cuban is in trouble for selling his stake in search engine start-up Mamma.com, after hearing it was going to raise money and dilute his holding. He denies all charges. His $750,000 “profit” could mean that jail beckons.

* So Mervyn Davies heads off to Gordon Brown-land to become Trade Minister. In his new role, he is expected to be involved in the banks' bailout — a fitting reward, or punishment, some might say, since it was Davies and his colleagues at Standard Chartered that devised the nationalisation plan in the first place. The Standard Chartered chairman's appointment is being seen as an admission the rescue is much more complex than first thought.

* What a difference a month makes. 5 December 2008: A spokeswoman for Barclays Wealth angrily denies that it is axeing significant numbers of staff from its private banking arm. 13 January 2009: Barclays Wealth to slash an estimated 500 staff as part of a cull of 2100 across the bank.

* The words “credit” and “crunch” have assumed a new and abrasive meaning for Martin Sullivan, the Essex lad ejected from the top slot at AIG last summer with a $15 million pay-off, a $3.7 million bonus and retirement benefits valued at $3.75 million. “There have been a couple of incidents where he's walked into parties or whatever and there have been AIG people there. It's got very tasty,” an acquaintance tells Insurance Insider. The cost of sticking-plaster may soon also be a concern for Sullivan: his pay-off deal, City Spy gathers, is “on hold”.