One year of business from A to Z

• C is for cannabis, an apt symbol of the Serious Fraud Office’s

annus horribilis, in which 32,000 document pages, 81 audio tapes and

electronic media from 59 sources, relating to its inquiry into BAE Systems, were

mysteriously relayed to a north London cannabis farm.

Meanwhile, the SFO’s ex-boss Richard Alderman was attacked by MPs for handing

£1m in unauthorised pay-offs to colleagues; the SFO faced a £300m lawsuit

from the Tchenguiz brothers; and its £40m bribery case into Labour donor

Victor Dahdaleh collapsed. Critics complained that the agency was going to

pot.

• D is for Drummer, the nickname for the ex-boss of Anglo Irish

Bank. Two of the lender’s executives were

caught on tape allegedly admitting that the bank had suckered the Irish

government into a €7bn (£5.9bn) bail-out – knowing that far more was

needed.

Peter Fitzgerald, Anglo’s former head of retail banking, is heard asking

then-head of capital markets, John Bowe, how he arrived at the figure. His

answer? “Just as Drummer would say, ‘picked it out my arse’.”

• E is for Extreme, the adjective used by architects Buro Fur

MEHR to

catch the attention of Sir Howard Davies’ Airports Commission.

“Flying is an extreme sport,” began the submission from the Dutch-Austrian

builders.

Sadly, their plan for a new type of airport where “the aircraft is pulled

through pit-stop stations along a service street” failed to make Davies’s

shortlist. Instead, Davies favoured expansion at either Heathrow or Gatwick.

Yawn.

• F is for Fizzy, the nickname former transport secretary John

Prescott once gave to former Railtrack boss Gerald Corbett. Aptly, Corbett

now chairs Britvic – and was also involved in two of the year’s non-MA

stories.

In July, plans to create a £1.9bn national soft drinks giant went pop when the

Britvic board rejected a proposed merger with AG Barr; as chairman

of Betfair, Corbett also

saw off a near-£1bn bid from a pantomime-horse bidder that had

investor Richard Koch at the front and CVC in the rear.

Elsewhere, Schneider acquired Invensys for $5.2bn and Vodafone sold its 45pc

stake in US mobile network Verizon Wireless for a mere $130bn. Corbett

couldn’t block either of them.

• G is for Grindr, the gay “dating” mobile phone app that the Rev

Paul Flowers must wish he had never used. Unceremoniously shopped by a

former beau, and

filmed allegedly handing over £300 for cocaine, Flowers was

duly defenestrated.

How the Co-op Bank chairman seemingly managed to pull off a drugs deal is a

moot point, since numbers were not his strong suit. He told MPs the bank’s

assets were £3bn. The correct answer was £47bn.

• H is for HMS Dreadnought, built at Portsmouth, the

shipyard being closed by BAE as England’s shipbuilding tradition is

transferred to Scotland’s Govan and Scotstoun yards in a move absolutely

unconnected to the forthcoming vote on the country’s independence.

• I is for Inter Milan, the Italian football club now part-owned

by Rosan Roeslani, who

turned up in October as part of a trio of Indonesians taking a 70pc stake in

the club for around €300m.

A brave move for the former Bumi director, who was being pursued for $173m

that went missing from its Berau Coal subsidiary – triggering the shares’

suspension – and which he failed to repay.

• J is for the Jumeirah Port Soller, the five-star hotel in

Majorca that Aviva’s

UK business booked in June to entertain “valued” insurance broker partners.

Despite its £3.1bn loss two months earlier, the insurance group flew in New

Romantic rockers Spandau Ballet, former Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, and

Welsh soprano Katherine Jenkins, who each commands £25,000 or more to

perform.

Still, Aviva is outperforming rival RSA Insurance, where chief executive

officer Simon Lee fell on his sword after alleged accounting irregularities

in its Irish arm triggered three profits warnings. In six weeks.

• K is for karma, after it emerged that Helen Weir, the erstwhile

head of retail banking at Lloyds, could

have £350,000 clawed back from her 2010 bonus as a penalty for

presiding over the “champagne bonuses” and “grand in the hand” sales

incentives implicated in a mis-selling scandal.

It is almost exactly the same amount she received as a controversial payout

while finance director at the DIY group Kingfisher.

• L is for La Ciotat, the French Riviera port that hosted the

Hampshire II during the on-off closure of the Grangemouth petrochemicals

plant in October. The

super-yacht belonged to the plant’s owner, Jim Ratcliffe, the

controlling shareholder of Swiss-based chemicals giant Ineos.

After announcing the plant’s closure, he was vilified as a Swiss-based

billionaire negotiating Grangemouth’s future from his yacht – a claim he

branded “a load of b******s”. After a bruising dispute, the unions caved in,

setting the stage for a £300m investment in Grangemouth to ship in cheap

shale gas from America.

• M is for the FTSE 100’s best-known mullet. Sadly, it got

sacked in May when G4S’s

chief executive Nick Buckles paid the price for adding a profits

warning to his failure to provide enough Olympic guards for Jessica Ennis.

As if to prove the point that his successor is a different type of boss, G4S

hired the follically challenged Ashley Almanza, but its problems weren’t

over – nicked by Justice Secretary Chris Grayling for a bit of creative

accounting on the criminal-tagging front, it found itself in the dock with

rival Serco.

^{Nick Buckles}

• N is for Noah and the Whale, the band headlining when Mark

Carney, the new Bank of England governor, put on his shorts at the

Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire in July.

Canadian Carney continued his “forward guidance” on pop culture when

he compared UK productivity to Jake Bugg, the teenage

singer-songwriter, at his first major speech in Nottingham.

• O is for Oxfordshire, where Stephen Hester has been spending

more time tending his arboretum, after handing the task of turning RBS into

“a really good bank” to

New Zealander Ross McEwan. Just don’t mention begonias – the former

RBS boss has a horror of orange flowers, which he says are fit only for

“municipal planting”.

• P is for profits, an endangered species over at Ladbrokes.

After four profits warnings in 18 months under Richard Glynn, the bookmaker

found itself in the bizarre position of having to update the market again

following a call by its investor relations chief to Ireland’s Goodbody

Stockbrokers, which led a Goodbody salesman to fire off an email to clients

headed: “Ladbrokes – another 7pc profits warning is coming!”

With its shares falling, Ladbrokes issued a statement that was barely

reassuring – forcing its chairman, Peter Erskine, to

spend almost £50,000 buying shares in the bookie to steady

nerves.

• Q is for the Queen, after Her Majesty unwittingly became the

face of the controversial Royal Mail privatisation. The £3.3bn mega-float

didn’t get the stamp of approval from the Treasury Select Committee, where

Brian Binley MP demanded to know why Goldman Sachs and UBS had “let down”

taxpayers by

pricing the shares too cheaply, at 330p.

But the 38pc rise in Royal Mail shares on the first day of trading was

eclipsed by Twitter’s New York debut – for which Goldman also, happily,

pocketed multi-million fees. Shares surged 73pc by close of play as

investors overlooked the boring fact that the dotcom darling has yet to make

a profit.

• R is for removal. “In view of what has happened subsequently to

HBOS, I believe that it is right that I should now ask the appropriate

authorities to take the necessary steps for its removal,” declared

the now plain James Crosby in April, referring to his knighthood.

Crosby, anxious to avoid the fate of Fred Goodwin, had been done over by a

Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards report into the bank he once

ran. Dubbed the “architect of the strategy that set the course for

disaster”, he said he was “deeply sorry”.

• S is for South Sudan, which was graced with a comeback visit

from disgraced ex-International

Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn shortly before descending

into civil war. DSK wanted to launch a new bank. Africa is the destination

of choice for bankers with colourful CVs.

In December, Bob

Diamond returned to the financial stage to announce a new cash shell

with Ugandan entrepreneur Ashish Thakkar, who has paid $200,000 for a seat

on the first Virgin Galactic shuttle from Sir Richard Branson – himself no

stranger to faraway lands.

In Sir Richard’s case, it’s the tax-efficient Caribbean island of Necker,

which, as of October, became his full-time home.

• T is for 12 Portraits, the “authentic” half-hour propaganda

movie commissioned by Wonga to prove it is not a greedy loan shark. Wonga:

the Movie needed to be an Oscar-worthy production; the payday lender was not

only referred to the Competition Commission, but also attacked by the

Archbishop of Canterbury, who vowed to put the company out of business.

It was back to confession at Lambeth Palace, however, when it emerged that the

Church had invested in Accel Partners, the fund that led the 2009

fundraising for… Wonga.

• U is for unnecessarily, the key word in a memorable remark

from Michael O’Leary that heralded a shocking personality change.

“We should try to eliminate things that unnecessarily p**s people off,” the

Ryanair boss told its AGM.

O’Leary’s new approach was his response to the airline’s first profits warning

in a decade and the soaraway performance of arch-rival easyJet, which he

admitted had “s**t” all over us”. But no sooner had he come over all soft

and cuddly than Ryanair had a second profits warning.

• V is for vaults, of the Bank of England variety, after

Threadneedle Street managed to “mislay” 100,000 bars of gold – that’s the

difference between the number of gold bars given in the

Bank’s jazzy new iPad tour of its vaults, and the number in

its annual report. It was no time to be selling gold, with prices falling

almost a third this year.

Which explains why there were none of the traditional gold watches for the

five non-executive directors who quit Albemarle Bond rather abruptly

after two profits warnings. The pawnbroker had

already smelted down its entire gold supplies to meet lending limits.

• W is for window cleaners, which

Morrisons axed, using the marvellous excuse that clean windows are

“less important to customers at the darkest time of the year”.

But at least the Food Standards Agency found that Morrisons’ own-brand

products were free of horse meat – unlike some of the supermarket’s

“neigh-bours”, whose so-called beef lasagnes and burgers tested positive for

equine DNA.

• X is for Xetra. It is not just when tackling penalty shoot-outs

that our Teutonic cousins have the edge over us. Germany’s blue-chip index,

the Xetra Dax, soared 25pc during the year, eclipsing the FTSE 100’s 10pc

uplift. A worrying omen heading into a World Cup year.

• Y is for YouTube, where a

tutorial on how to heat your home for 8p a day became a viral sensation.

Dylan Winter’s riposte to the “Big Six” energy giants’ double-digit price

hikes was a DIY heater made using Ikea tealights, a loaf tin and two flower

pots. But it fell foul of the fire brigade, which branded it “extremely

dangerous”.

• Z is for ZZZs – what Glencore’s sacked oil trader Andrew Kearns

was catching instead of attending three meetings in Singapore the morning

after a night before spent carousing in Asian bars. Kearns tried to persuade

a court his 64 late or no-show incidents in two years was OK “as long as you

make money”.

Unfortunately, Mr Justice Seymour was more convinced by Glencore’s argument

that the defendant was a “wanton alcoholic”. Kearns

lost.

One year of business from A to Z