Russia's richest woman is Yelena Baturina. Said to have a fortune of £3 billion, she is a regular visitor to London, where she has a property in Holland Park (she is also thought to own Britain's most expensive private residence, £50 million Witanhurst in Highgate).

Baturina made her fortune mainly through her company Inteco, which is possibly the most successful building conglomerate of the post-Soviet era.

She also happens to be married to Yury Luzhkov, the mayor of Moscow. Coincidentally, during Luzhkov's tenure, which began in 1992, Inteko managed to win several municipal tenders, including seats for Moscow's 82,000-seater Luzhniki Stadium.

Baturina has just had some more good news: her previously rebuffed attempt to buy the Alpine chalet where she and Luzhkov are regular vacationers has finally borne fruit.

Baturina's plans for the multi-million-pound spread in Kitzbühel were thwarted by locals who objected to it being purchased in the name of an obscure Vienna-based property firm in which she had an interest.

Said one leading resident: "We discussed the possibilities of the sale being in the public interest, but that did not take very long."

Now, happily, that ruling has been overturned - a decision, City Spy's man in the lederhosen says, that may not be unconnected with the fact that Baturina's company sponsors a jazz festival there, which last summer was able to call upon no less a world star than Stevie Wonder to perform.

* Further demands for apologies at the Beeb. The BBC's head chef has expressed "grave concerns" to contract caterer Aramark about the job it is doing at Bush House on The Strand, home to the World Service.

In a memo passed in a napkin to City Spy, Chef wants to know what "Aramark's policies and procedures on health and safety and food hygiene" are, as "general cleanliness" is in question and there is a lack of spot checks.

Aramark is also taken to task for a failure to direct staff, for putting out too much food and incorrectly labelling it. Aramark, a US contract-catering giant, includes celebrity chefs Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing among its consultants...

Sorrell's New York sojourns

The Guardian's investigation into tax avoidance by British companies highlights how a string of firms have relocated to Ireland for accounting purposes, despite apparently having few staff there.

Among those FTSE 100 firms now headquartered across the Irish sea is advertising giant WPP - although the newspaper reports it has only "around eight people" based in a Georgian townhouse it calls its global HQ, and WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell "owns a house in Chelsea, west London".

In fact, from what City Spy hears, Sorrell doesn't spend much time in London or Dublin these days. He is spending more and more of his time in New York with his second wife, Cristina Falcone...

* Alleged fraudster Bernard Madoff is being lined up to host a new TV show: Who Used To Be A Millionaire?

All to play for at troubled Saints

Rugby union team Northampton Saints are the latest sporting club to chance their arm on a publicly traded stock exchange, with a listing on Plus Markets.

Like their counterparts in the round-ball game, however, below-midtable Saints are clearly living beyond their means, with their costs outstripping their £5 million half-year revenues and losses widening by 15% to £336,000.

Undeterred, Keith Barwell, the club's long-standing sugar daddy and chairman, slips into sporting cliché: "We have everything to play for in the second half. The world is full of doom and gloom but the Saints will still march on."

* More from The Times's Anatole Kaletsky, the irreverent joker of the credit crunch. City Spy has finally got it: Kaletsky's role all along has been satirical - he was poking fun at the whole notion of economists-as-experts by posing as one, and getting it wrong on purpose. On Monday, he suggested that it is "time for a revolution in economic thought" - in other words, stop asking economists what's going to happen because they have just proven that they don't know. Genius.

HSBC banks on its man from Mexico

Going into bat for banking at the Treasury Select Committee today: John Varley of Barclays, Eric Daniels of Lloyds, Antonio Horta-Osorio of Abbey and Paul Thurston of HSBC. Paul Thurston? Yes, Thurston has been head of HSBC's UK banking since last April, when he was drafted in after a year heading the bank's Mexico operations. HSBC likes to think of itself as a world bank, so its country boss will field the flak.

* Bob Diamond has waived his right to a bonus for 2008, knowing that it would cause fury if he accepted it at a time Barclays has gone cap in hand to sovereign wealth. Perish the thought, however, that Diamond would ever suggest that the bonus culture needs to be curbed. "There is an appropriate debate around the process of incentive compensation and we think the principles, and we would like to be in that debate, and the principles about pay for performance, about a mixture of short-term and long-term, about a mixture of cash and equity, about significant deferral programmes are all appropriate and we look forward to the debate but we don't think that eliminating incentive compensation is the right result." So there.

* "The party is over for the banks," intones shadow chancellor George Osborne. "You can't go on paying yourselves 20 times what a heart surgeon earns, so that whole culture has to come to an end." George, please explain. What do you think a banker is worth? Ten times a brain surgeon? Five times? Half as much?

* More on Osborne. Is City Spy alone in suspecting he's had something of a makeover, and is trying to look a bit more grown-up, sorry, statesmanlike? Gone are the boyish curls, and in their place is a swept-back, executive number.

* A new ad from South West Trains catches the eye: "Kiss your partner somewhere they've never been kissed before. Weymouth."