Royal Bank of Scotland has said a big “thank you” to the British taxpayer with the bailed-out bank's latest cost-cutting exercise: it has scrapped its deal with British Airways, and has now instructed staff to fly American Airlines.

City Spy would like to thank RBS for its gratitude in accepting billions of taxpayers' pounds by supporting British industry in its hour of need...

• Further sign that the world recession has reached even the Gulf States. Observers in Dubai say mega-company DP Ports World has called in London PR outfit Financial Dynamics for a ticklish exercise in “crisis management”.

Expect an announcement imminently. The seriousness of the contract can be judged from the fact that FD group chief Charlie Watson was in Dubai.

• TO the Reform Club, where new chief executive Alan Leaman hosts the grand panjandrums of the Management Consultancies Association to discuss the pressing question of who is to succeed IBM's Jan Gower as president next year.

Succeeding the amiable Gower and becoming the voice of the industry is, of course, a heavyweight task in these troubled times.

Now City Spy's nark says the succession is likely to be between David Cox of Mott MacDonald, Paul Winter of Corpra and PricewaterhouseCoopers' Pat Newberry. Watch this space.

• With Setanta now looking destined for bankruptcy, perhaps it should take some advice from its former would-be saviour Len Blavatnik, who on Friday withdrew his £20 million rescue offer for a 51% stake in the Irish sports broadcaster.

“Len” is normally described as American although he is much better-known as a post-Soviet oligarch.

Partner with Mikhail Fridman in TNK, the troubled oil joint venture with BP, Blavatnik also has great experience in fending off creditors.

At the moment, wounded creditors of his LyondellBasell, which Blavatnik bought in 2007, thereby landing the company with some $22 billion of debt, are seeking permission to sue Len and his associates for landing the company with more liabilities than it could bear.

Among the creditors are Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch. The US end of the group filed for bankruptcy protection in January 2009, not long after RBS-owned ABN Amro was revealed to have written off the small matter of a £2.5 billion loan to the troubled chemicals giant.

And Len has no shortage of friends in the US — as earlier noted by City Spy, his and his family's list of donations to American politicians runs to some 37 pages.

• Did Gordon Brown take advice from the experts when he moved to sell half of the UK's gold reserves at an average price of $275.60 an ounce back in 1999 when he was Chancellor?

Seeing that the price has since touched almost $1000 an ounce, it must go down as one of the worst investment decisions ever made.

One ambitious precious metals analyst is on record as saying: “For those who see a turnaround in the value of the dollar this year and an upward creep in inflation, gold is the one to buy.”

Clearly, some things never change. That was the forecast back in December 1984, almost 15 years before Brown made his ill-fated move. Oh! And the name of that bright young thing was Clara Furse, who went on to discover her pot of gold at the end of the rainbow as chief executive of the London Stock Exchange.

Watch for Rake's progress at BT

The appointment of Tony Ball as a non-executive director of BT would suggest that the former BSkyB head no longer thinks he has much chance of becoming the next chief executive of ITV.

Ball has let it be known that whatever happens at ITV, he is glad to have raised his profile and is in the market for a big job again.

Interestingly, from what City Spy hears, BT is not a happy ship. Insiders complain of overmanning, stifling bureaucracy and red tape reminiscent of a nationalised company.

BT Vision's Dan Marks has just quit, and the telecoms giant is also considering farming out staff to other firms on a temporary basis to avoid redundancies.

It's hard to blame Ian Livingston, the current BT chief, who inherited this mess just over a year ago when he stepped up. And it's not all gloom.

City analysts are even quite bullish about BT's future in the broadband age.

But if chairman Sir Michael Rake decides there needs to be radical medicine, Ball might not be a bad CEO for the future...