It's not getting any better for Oleg Deripaska. He's already lost the bulk of his fortune now the government of Montenegro is seeking to nationalise his giant aluminium plant KAP because his workers haven't been paid since February.

They are owed around £5 million, the plant is £150 million in debt, and has been forced to reduce output from 120,000 tonnes of aluminium in 2008 to 60,000 this year because of higher environmental costs and the reduced price of the metal. And the contretemps with the Montenegrin government could scupper his involvement in the giant marina on the country's Mediterranean coast — already given Prince Andrew's seal of approval — where he so loves cruising in his yacht with boating chums Nat Rothschild and Peter Mandelson.

Morley's fantasy is nightmare

After MP Elliot Morley was suspended, having pocketed £16,000 in fantasy mortgage expenses, can he have much of a future as chairman of the Commons Energy Select Committee, which prides itself on baiting profit-gouging power and gas supply companies?

* Good news for landlords in Westminster: experts reckon that because of the clampdown on the taxpayer funding MPs' mortgage payments, they will be forced to rent accommodation near the Commons instead of buying. Property website Smartlandlord.co.uk forecasts that MPs could drive up rents by 5%.

Why media like green shoots

At a seminar this week organised by Hays, CBI chief Richard Lambert was on fine form. He said that he had been chatting to a quality newspaper editor, who said that one Friday recently he only had a piece of bad economic news to splash on for Saturday. The result was a dramatic fall in sales and a deluge of angry emails from readers saying “if you ruin my weekend like that another time I will never buy the paper again.” The implication from Lambert being that this is why the papers have been so full of green shoots recently...

* Richard Lambert also said he was at a Goldman Sachs conference for hedge fund managers last week. Apparently they were saying to him: “What are you doing here? You should be with your stockbroker buying every share you can get you hands on.” He went on: “The mood was so optimistic, they all thought we are now on the right hand side of a V-shaped recession.
The sense was overwhelming that 2008 was a blip. It was a surreal experience.”

* Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson is laying down the law to his staff about the perils of using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The key rules are: “Don't recruit friends or family to promote or defend your work; Don't detail how an article was reported, written or edited; Don't discuss articles that haven't been published, meetings you've attended or plan to attend with staff or sources, or interviews that you've conducted; Don't disparage the work of colleagues or competitors or aggressively promote your coverage.” City Spy feels sorry for the poor staff of the Journal. They will only disparage each other's work inside the office...

Someone's got it in for Sainsbury's chief Justin

Ring, ring. It's a rival retailer to Justin King on the line who wants to have a word in City Spy's ear about Sainsbury's results. “How much has he made — £543 million on sales of £20 billion? That's half what Tesco makes. It's a scandal. He pays no rent as well. King ought to be ashamed.”

* Fidelity's legendary stock-picker Anthony Bolton was guest of honour at the Sammons Associates Annual Heads of Equity Research Awards, held at the London Capital Club. The winners were chosen from a poll of over 1500 City fund managers and analysts. Bolton presented the top prize, Best Head of Research in a Large Cap, to Jose Linares of JPMorgan while the award for Small/Mid Cap went to Joe Brent of Citi Investment Research. Bolton has been bullish of late, and host for the evening Jonathan Evans, boss of recruitment firm Sammons and a self-confessed pessimist, said even he is also “cautiously optimistic”.

* There is no love lost between brokers Brewin Dolphin and Charles Stanley so there was tension in the air when they met for a cricket match the other day. Brewin's wicket-keeper lost a tooth, but it is being insisted this was after taking a ball in the face from his own bowler, not from one of Charles Stanley's batters losing their temper. The CS lot slogged their way to 159 from 20 overs. Brewin were all out for 100. So, I am told enigmatically, the bounce of the ball was like the markets: “extremely volatile”.

* John Cresswell, chief operating officer of ITV and hot favourite to take over from Michael Grade as its chief executive, was interrupted by a loud feminine sneeze when he was telling City Spy about the tough TV advertising market. Said Cresswell: “That's not so much swine flu as wine flu. She had a late night last night.”

* Mindshare executive Graham Bednash, reports Campaign, was at home and left his laptop on as he answered a call of nature. His young son posted on the Twitter site under his name: “Bednash did a poo.”

* More bank belt-tightening, this time from JPMorgan: the car service can only be used if leaving the office after 10pm — previously it was 9pm; any damaged BlackBerrys or laptops have to be replaced; and no tips for meals and taxis over 15%.

* How must Intel be feeling about its choice of public affairs advisers, after yesterday's record fine of almost £1 billion imposed by the European Commission for “abusing its dominant position” and engaging in “persistent and illegal anti-competitive practices” in the microprocessor market? Intel decided to appoint consultancies APCO and Hill & Knowlton to handle their UK and European lobbying, in preference to FIPRA, the European public affairs practice that specialises in such competition cases. FIPRA, part of the Finsbury PR group, went on to work instead for AMD, which brought the complaint against Intel and won hands-down. Ouch.