While rage erupts at Westminster about the behaviour of Stephen Byers, Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon, there is also more than a whiff of hypocrisy in the air.

Part of the charge levelled at Byers is rank gluttony, that he said his day rate was up to £5000 — this in response to a question as to how much he would quote to attend an advisory panel meeting every other month.

So £30,000 a year in other words.

City Spy can't help wondering how other MPs' day rates compare. John Reid, for instance, earns £50,000 a year from G4S. How many actual meetings does he go to for that?

Or there's Charles Clarke — £146,669 from LJ Create, which sells computer equipment to schools, Beachcroft, the law firm, and KPMG.

And Hewitt herself, who pockets £280,000 from BT, Boots and Cinven.

Byers, it seems, wasn't being especially greedy — he was merely proposing the standard rate that is discussed in the Commons bars and tearooms. His mistake was to get caught on camera saying it.

Iron connections for the Rio Four

Facts about the Chinese judiciary and the Rio Tinto Four: judges openly admit their decisions are directly affected by the will of the Communist Party.

Another fact: the Party reckons the iron ore negotiations Stern Hu and his colleagues were working on at the time of the alleged bribery cost the country 700 billion renminbi.

Cold comfort for Iceland victims

The world may have moved on, but some depositors caught up in the Icelandic banking collapse are still waiting for compensation.

Some 67 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion for the Government to define who's responsible for dealing with the £500 million lost by savers in Kaupthing Singer and Friedlander Isle of Man.

The Isle of Man regulator says: “Not us guv. The FSA and HMG told us to move the money to the UK.”

The FSA and Treasury say: “Depositors in the Isle of Man are covered by the Isle of Man regulator” — a right muddle in other words.

Many of those who lost their money are British expats who wanted to use a UK bank, but if you don't live here you can't have a UK bank account. The advice of the FSA has always been therefore to “use a UK bank in an offshore dependency” — like the Isle of Man, in fact.

So you do as they say, your money goes up in smoke, and then you sit in regulatory no-man's land with nobody prepared to address the issue with any urgency!

Stamping down green shoots

First it was the Noho Square allotments that bit the dust, as it were, following the decision by the owners, Kaupthing, to put the vacant site on the market.

Now a competition-winning scheme to turn the site of the Leadenhall “Cheesegrater” tower into a city farm has been shelved by British Land.

Last October a Bath-based firm of architects won the contest to find a short-term use for the plot of the stalled skyscraper scheme.

But the developer appears to have had a change of heart. In a statement to the Architects' Journal, British Land admitted this was because market conditions had changed.

“There has been no decision to progress with the construction of the Leadenhall building”, the statement says, “but with the change in the market, it would be imprudent for British Land to create a situation whereby it was unable to move forward if appropriate.”

A case of the green shoots killing the farm?

Goldman's the family business

Alexander Blankfein must be cursing the day nepotism died.

Despite being the oldest son of Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd, he had to go through the usual zillion rounds of interviews to secure his job at the vampire squid's HQ. Now, Goldman's most recent filing shows the twenty-something earns a mere $155,000 (about £100,000) a year.

Will that be enough to put off Lloyd's younger son Jonathan, who is due to set up camp at Goldman this summer when he graduates from Harvard?

Lyle & Scott's sales bogey

Lyle & Scott shocked retail sector bigwigs at last year's Drapers Fashion Summit when the golfing label's managing director Derrick Campbell said they were thinking of taking a torch to their jumpers to avoid damaging their brand.

Campbell said: “I ask my retailers not to discount and they have been loyal to me. It's only fair we do the same.”

Odd then that the brand, which has a shop in Covent Garden and whose fans include Kaiser Chiefs and Cristiano Ronaldo, held a sample sale last week.

Black and white

Hmmm. Singer Capital Markets is both an adviser to Blacks Leisure and broker to Mike Ashley's Sports Direct — currently bidding for Blacks.