Martin Vander Weyer

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business The flotation of a business that has carved a big slice of a fast-growth consumer market within less than a decade of its start-up ought to be a cause for celebration: an example of capitalism doing what it’s supposed to do in support of entrepreneurs; an affirmation that markets are back in business after their nervous breakdown two years ago. But the share offering for the online grocer Ocado, for which a price will be struck on 21 July, has provoked more of a City brawl than a champagne reception. Some fund managers are enraged by the indicative pricing, which values Ocado at up to £1.3 billion even though it lost £26 million last year on £402 million of sales.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business I once heard an after-dinner speech by Jackie Blanchflower, brother of the great Spurs captain Danny. Jackie also played professional football, for Manchester United, but his career was cut short by his injuries in the 1958 Munich air crash, in which eight of his fellow ‘Busby Babes’ died. Thereafter he scratched a living as a publican, a bookie and an accounts clerk, and by the time I saw him, not long before he died in 1998, he looked so knackered that I wondered whether he would be capable of standing to speak. But he did, and delivered an unforgettably funny and poignant account of the rotten hand he had been dealt.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business I wrote here in February that I did not believe the Conservatives’ pretence of having ‘absolutely no plans to increase VAT’, and that, having examined this fiercely complex issue at some length with an ice pack on my head, I had come down in favour of a VAT rise — as indeed had the experts at the Institute of Directors, who wrote: ‘The VAT rate should be increased to 20 per cent, in order to allow for more substantial and rapid tax reductions elsewhere than would otherwise be possible.’ That has now come to pass, and despite the howls of protest in the House of Commons when the Chancellor announced it, I’m sticking to my guns.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business I’m baffled why anyone should be offended by the £275,000 salary paid to John Fingleton, the director of the Office of Fair Trading who was declared last week to be Britain’s highest-paid public servant. Even if Fingleton’s wad represents double the prime minister’s, it is barely more than one tenth of the bundle taken home by Adam Crozier in his final year as chief executive of the Royal Mail, which — despite Vince Cable’s declared intention to press ahead with part-privatisation — is still wholly in the state sector. The Teflon-coated Crozier, who came to the Royal Mail from the Football Association and has moved on to become chief executive of ITV, collected £633,000 in salary, a £1.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business ‘Does anyone remember David Laws?’ a former City colleague asked me during the brief interlude between the Lib Dem MP’s debut as financial secretary last Monday and his descent into hell on Friday. Judging by the sketchy accounts of his banking career in the weekend papers, with their references to a ‘billion-dollar gamble’ that made him a ‘multimillionaire’, few journalists bothered to track down City sources who really knew him in those days. But in fact he held the same title of managing director of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW, the forerunner of Barclays Capital) that I once held myself.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business Hedge funds can be accused of many different sins, not least because they operate in many different shapes and forms across the investment universe. As a label, ‘hedge fund’ is so loosely generic that generalising about the sector is almost as pointless as trying to corral it with tighter regulation, as EU finance ministers have been doing this week. Some hedge funds pursue, with brilliant results, the contrarian hunches of individual fund managers. Some cheat by trading on insider information or false rumours. Some are ‘long-only’, meaning that they buy and keep things that they expect to appreciate in value. Some are habitual short-sellers, seeking to profit from things they expect to depreciate.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business It’s never easy to know what the Mayor of London really thinks — as many of us at The Spectator can attest from weekly experience during his benignly idiosyncratic editorship. His opposition to a third runway at Heathrow, and his espousal of an apparently fantastical alternative scheme to move the entire airport to a pair of man-made islands in the Thames estuary, 60 miles from central London, might just be seat-of-the-pants Boris, blustering his way out of an awkward corner. You can see why he came out against the third runway: it’s Labour policy, and it could lose him votes under the flight path in 2012.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business No sooner do I confess (6 March) to having dabbled in the dark art of off-balance-sheet finance, than along comes an official report into the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street firm led by the monstrous Dick Fuld, that reveals the mother of all financial disappearing tricks. This was a series of transactions codenamed ‘Repo 105’, under the advice of the eminent City law firm Linklaters and without demur from Lehman’s auditors Ernst & Young, designed to exploit a disparity between US and UK law that allowed $50 billion of Lehman liabilities to pretend they weren’t there.

Martin Vander Weyer's Any Other Business A dark hour imprisoned in a gridlocked multi-storey car park close to Old Trafford on a home-match evening gave me an opportunity to ponder what was once called ‘the beautiful game’. I was a Chelsea fan in my youth — the heroic era of Cooke, Wilkins and Droy — but I’m irritated by the modern fashion for corporate chiefs to declare their club allegiances in the interest of looking blokeish.