The revelations about MPs' expenses - Tories, in particular - has left a string of City folk looking red-faced. How about Sarah Hogg, chairman of private equity firm 3i? Her husband, MP Douglas Hogg, claimed £18,000 for the gardener at his Lincolnshire home; almost £1000 to have the lawn mowed; and, best of all, £2115 to have the moat cleared on their estate. Incidentally, Baroness Hogg herself earned £290,000 last year for her 3i job.

* Another Tory with City connections who has been mopping up expenses is Oliver Letwin, who is a non-executive director of NM Rothschild Corporate Finance Limited, where he is believed to pick up a six-figure sum on top of his MP's salary. He claimed around £80,000 for his country home in Somerset, including £2,000 to have a leaky pipe under his tennis court mended and his Aga serviced.

Shadow business secretary Ken Clarke seems almost abstemious in comparison, claiming only around £10,000 a year on his second home. But he still raised eyebrows by avoiding paying the full rate of council tax - on either his main or second home - by telling the local council in Nottinghamshire and the Commons a different tale. Perhaps he learned such cunning accounting from his days at the Treasury.

For better and for worse

Is the dashing Lord Portman who presides over several acres of the smarter parts of the West End and Marylebone, London's most enlightened landlord? City Spy hears businesses which are tenants of Portman Estates have been given up to three-month rent holidays this spring and summer.

* One chap who could not fall into the category of much-loved landlord is Toby Anstruther who has been causing havoc with tenants in the Brompton quarter of Knightsbridge. Businesses in dispute with Anstruther over new leases are said to have racked up six figures in lawyers' fees with their largely absentee landlord. Worse, John Brinkley's much-missed Oratory watering hole, closed after a row with Anstruther, remains abandoned despite claims a Michelin-starred restaurant would open there.

* SO, Goldman Sachs is paying $60 million to settle claims by the Massachusetts attorney general in a probe into the securitisation of subprime mortgages and “deceptive marketing”. Goldman was not a big player and Massachusetts folk were far from the most regular subprime buyers. Extrapolate that number across the US and the banking industry and you get ... a whole ton of money.

* Staff from Royal Bank of Scotland in London have been shipped over to Stamford, Connecticut to fill out the bank's new $500 million US HQ. The white-elephant building is too far out for RBS's existing US workers, whose contracts say that they can leave with a fat redundancy cheque if they are relocated beyond a set mileage from their current offices in Greenwich and New York City. As part of its agreement with the government of Connecticut, the nationalised bank stands to lose $100 million in tax credits over the next 10 years if it fails to employ at least 1,850 employees at the 12-storey building - so scores of London staff have been packed off across the pond.

* It is City Spy's sad duty to report the death of ex-Mail on Sunday City Editor, Maurice Barnfather. On his appointment in 1987, he was at that time the youngest-ever City Editor, aged 39. Like so many financial journalists, he left the calling to found his own financial PR firm, Barnfather Associates, and represented Lord Hollick and Joe Lewis among others.

An immaculate dresser, Maurice was so fully at ease with the big shots that few would have realised his humble beginnings. His parents were hotel workers, and Maurice's education came from that well-known institution: the University of Life. In the early 1980s, he worked in the US for Forbes magazine and in the late '90s, he returned to California. For the past two years, he had worked for a series of share-tipping newsletters in America that built up a substantial following.

* The following quote from a Brit newly hired by the Qataris to help them run their UK real estate operations must surely be a dig at Nick and Christian Candy, the brothers who persuaded the oil-rich state to pay nearly £1 billion for the 13-acre Chelsea Barracks site in 2006. "We should no longer be regarded as dumb money," said Stephen Barter, a member of the property establishment who used to work for the Duke of Westminster before transferring his skills to an even richer boss in Doha.

"That is the message" he told a conference in London yesterday. No wonder the Qataris feel like klutzes - the site which has become the centre of a stormy architectural debate featuring the Prince of Wales is worth no more than £500 million today.

* Club owner Piers Adam, pictured - the brains behind the Princes Wills and Harry's favourite Dover Street hangout Mahiki as well as Whisky Mist, the Mayfair location of choice for hedge fund managers to drown their sorrows - has taken to having "board" meetings with his protégé royal hanger-on Guy Pelly at Jake's in Walton Street. Doubtless the yummy mummies who inhabit the Knightsbridge deli take great interest in overhearing the detailed reports about the toilets of Adam's burgeoning empire and whatever goes on in them...