City law firm Macfarlanes has come up with concrete evidence of what has so far been apocryphal, that banks are charging companies arrangement fees of up to 1.5% for restructuring their loans.

A survey by the solicitors shows banks that overlent in the good times are now grabbing back like mad in the bad.

Macfarlanes real estate partner Orla MacSherry came across one case where an investor, who renegotiated a 12-month waiver on a £110 million loan, had to pay a fee of £750,000. "That's a chunky fee because the waiver only lasts for a year," she said.

* Why is it, City Spy wonders, that during the recent kerfuffle over the Chelsea Barracks, the voices of Nick and Chris Candy have not been heard? It was the Candys, after all, who persuaded the Qataris to buy the site for £1 billion and to employ Lord Rogers to do the architecture. And, although they have been paid off for their equity in the development, they are still officially "project managers". But now that the Prince of Wales has entered the fray with a rival design, the brothers are nowhere to be seen or heard, and all callers are referred to Qatari Diar for comment. Funny that.

* We all know that Lord Mandelson is a great and noble figure. But a press release from Dubai goes a little over the top. It describes how "H E Peter Mandelson" praised the city's new metro system. A quick glance at the dictionary offers either His Excellency (a term used mainly for heads of state or ambassadors) or His Eminence (used pretty much only for cardinals in the Roman Catholic church). Peter, which one is it?

* The Electricity Retailers' Association is having a row with YouSwitch about the accuracy of household bills. The electricity companies say that 95% of the bills they send out are accurate. Er, that means 5% or one in 20 are wrong. Where's the argument?

Nul points for this protest

It gets worse for airlines. Anti-aviation campaigners are to descend on airports across Europe on the morning of the Eurovision song contest (yes, seriously) to sing their country's entry to this year's show in protest at airport expansion.

Organised by Heathrow baiter-in-chief John Stewart, the activists will turn up at Heathrow, Dublin, Schiphol, Frankfurt and Brussels airports at noon on 16 May, armed with loudspeakers
and songsheets.

According to Stewart: “Each airport will sing their entry to the Eurovision song contest being held that evening in Moscow, as well as other Eurovision classics from the past.” City Spy is lost for words...

* Black humour in the construction trade. Richard Steer, boss of the Gleeds surveying and consultancy firm, is quoted in Building magazine as saying the recession is so bad that surveyors are heading to Iraq for work. “If you had asked me two years ago whether I would go to Iraq I would have said you must be joking.'” But the push to rebuild Iraq is on and there are opportunities galore. Steer added that the choice was “getting killed over there or staying here and killing yourself”.

* Labour MP Austin Mitchell is downcast after reading The Rotten State of Britain by Adam Smith Institute director Eamonn Butler. “Suicide may be the only answer,” says Mitchell. “Though I will bet the bloody Labour Party has prohibited that on health and safety grounds, and that they won't be able to cremate the body because crematoria aren't allowed to smoke any more.”

* Keep an eye out for a change of ownership at Media Corporation. The AIM-listed internet company was hit by the US ban on online gaming but has successfully transformed itself into an internet media and advertising group. two bidders are thought to be going through the books, with Playtech the most likely buyer.

* City Spy has give National Be Kind to Lawyers Day a miss this year. The organisers' website offers lawyer fans the opportunity to spend a day appreciating the legal profession, or perhaps even “send your lawyer a just because' greeting card or a bouquet of flowers”.

They hope that “now lawyers of every stripe can be honored (yes, of course this started in America) and treated like regular people, for at least one 24-hour period every April”.

Regular people? They must be joking. Not even for 24 hours.

* Meanwhile, debt recovery solicitors report a 72% increase in the numbers of letters before actions issued in the first quarter of 2009, compared with the same period last year.

And the average number of days between the sending of invoices and the threat of legal action has fallen, from 117 days in the first three months of 2008 to 102 in the same period this year.

Hucknall strikes a nerve and O2 sees red

They were all bopping away at the recent O2 concert by Simply Red. Particularly frenzied, when lead singer Mick Hucknall launched into the Eighties hit Money's Too Tight (To Mention) — reports Property Week, without saying why — was the Greenwich Peninsula box shared by Lend Lease, Quintain and Jones Lang LaSalle.

Said Hucknall: “When I released this single 20 years ago I didn't think it would be bloody worse by now.”

Not only was the song apposite for the recession we're in but it must have carried added significance for the developers in the Greenwich Peninsula suite. Progress on building the promised 10,000 homes, and creating the 29,000 jobs in 3.5 million sq ft of office space — “a brand new business district for London” — and the 150-plus shops and restaurants does appear to be slow. Perhaps money really is too tight to mention…