It's not been the best week to chat to fund managers. Share prices have been shooting up and down faster than a vicar's nightshirt. Yet there remains something reassuring about talking to people who look after billions of pounds of your and my money when all about are panicking... more
There are echoes of the heady days of the Eighties and junk-bond king Michael Milken in the City as a £125 million fully listed fund which will invest in "sub-investment grade" loans and debt is launched... more
While our pay cheques shrink, corporate giants are hightailing it to tax havens. Nick Curtis travels to the Swiss lakeside town where Boots, Glencore and nearly 30,000 other businesses are now based, to ask why they won't pay tax in Britain ... more
A multi-millionaire businessman and his wife were held at knifepoint in their Belgravia home and robbed of more than £50,000 worth of jewellery and a luxury watch... more
It is a happy coincidence that Parliament's latest blast against Kraft's conduct in its takeover of Cadbury should come in the last week of a consultation period in which the UK Takeover Panel put forward suggestions on how the UK takeover rules might be changed to make it slightly easier for companies to defend themselves... more
Alliance Boots shrugs off a sluggish European economy and irritation from tax campaigners about the move of its headquarters from Nottingham to Zug in Switzerland by recording soaring sales... more
The chief executives and chairmen were certain. There was not a ha'penny's worth of doubt in their minds. The 35 bosses, something close to a who's who of Britain's boardrooms, were so adamant that George Osborne's spending cuts were vital and wise that they wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying so... more
BSkyB shares jump to a nine-year high of 817.5p as top shareholder Crispin Odey demands at least 950p for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp to buy the pay-TV giant... more
Boots might have moved its headquarters from here to Switzerland, but even customers who are irritated by this move still keep shopping at the stores... more
Alliance Boots bosses insist the group is paying a fair amount of tax, shrugging off inquiries into why its official headquarters are in Switzerland... more
Alliance Boots smashes through the £1 billion profit barrier for the first time as its lipsticks, medicines and face cream prove near recession proof... more
Lord Kirkham sells DFS to private-equity house Advent International for an amount that wasn’t revealed, but is reckoned to be about £500 million... more
City Comment: It was Manchester United versus Arsenal in 1999 that Sky used to launch “pressing the red button”. By the end of this decade we'll all be watching in 3D. ... more
Archie Norman was the youngest-ever partner at management consultants McKinsey before becoming one of the three founders of Woolworths and B&Q retailer Kingfisher in the 1980s... more
Poor Stephen Byers wasn’t left with much of a choice when in 2000, as the Government minister in charge, he was responsible for sealing the fate of MG Rover... more
Andy Hornby is sitting in a Starbucks. At 42, he's just been made chief executive of one of our biggest, best-known businesses, Alliance Boots. But he's not wreathed in smiles and high-fiving it over the lattes ... more
When Boots was taken over by Stefano Pessina’s Alliance group, I irritated Richard Baker, the then Boots chief executive, when I said I did not expect him to last six months under the new regime. He disagreed and he was right; he lasted about a year. In the end though, he decided the company was not big enough to have a hands-on executive chairman in Pessina, and still leave a proper job for the chief executive ... more
Exclusive: After high-profile allegations this season, Charlton's manager is pleased the issue is now being addressed but says the authorities still have plenty of work to do
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