The thinking is right — and so is the execution

It was perhaps most true, however, in Vodafone’s €7.95 billion sale of its 44 per cent stake in the French mobile operator SFR to Vivendi. The latter stands accused of overpaying but Jean Bernard Lévy, Vivendi’s chief executive, is taking a long view and will be relaxed about such criticism.

For Vittorio Colao, unwinding the expansionist policies of his predecessors Sir Christopher Gent and Arun Sarin, the sale is another feather in his cap. As with last September’s sale of Voda’s 3.2 per cent stake in China Mobile, Mr Colao has managed expectations, only to then beat them.

These abilities will need to be at the fore as Mr Colao braces for another big sale where there is only one logical buyer — Voda’s 45 per cent stake in US mobile operator Verizon Wireless.

With this sale, though, he has certainly strengthened his hand.

Dragged down in the tax net

Tomorrow marks the start of the new tax year. What? You hadn’t noticed? Well, you will later this month, if you happen to be one of the 750,000 new members of an exclusive club to which you may rather wish you had not been admitted.

These are the people who, after the emergency Budget last summer, will find themselves paying income tax at 40p in the pound for the first time following a fall in the threshold, from £43,875 to £42,475, at which tax becomes payable at that rate.

Under a similar process, known as fiscal drag, many people in the past few years found themselves paying the top rate of tax after thresholds were frozen or failed to rise in line with earnings.

For only the third time since Denis Healey was Chancellor — the first was in 2003, when Gordon Brown craftily thumped more than one million higher rate taxpayers with an extra 1 per cent in national insurance, while the second was Alistair Darling’s new 50p rate of income tax introduced this time last year — hundreds of thousands of people are about to find their April pay packet contains less than the one in March.

George Osborne has rightly made tough choices to tackle the deficit that Labour bequeathed him. But retailers, already reeling from a collapse in consumer spending, will not be the only ones anxious about the impact of this particular policy decision.

A study past its sub-prime time

Those eager to read the report on Wall Street’s role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, by the Senate Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations, do have not much longer to wait.

The report, 2½ years in the making, is imminent and contains such goodies as previously unseen e-mails sent by securities firms that sold or traded sub-prime mortgages and investments, such as collateralised debt obligations, backed by such loans.

But why has it taken so long? One theory is that the sub-committee, led by the Democrat senator for Michigan Carl Levin, has to be unanimous before it can put its name to something — and that Mr Levin and the senior Republican on the sub-committee, Tom Coburn, are far from unanimous.

The danger is that the rest of the world — and certainly Wall Street — has moved on. Goldman Sachs, one of those expected to be most criticised in the report, has already settled with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on matters related to CDOs, while JP Morgan Chase is also thought to be close to some kind of sub-prime related settlement.

The sub-committee provided much entertainment with its grillings of Wall Street’s chiefs. The danger is that its final report is irrelevant.

Valiant effort to prove a point

George Osborne suffered a barrage of criticism when, in the Budget two weeks ago, he unveiled what amounted to a windfall tax on North Sea oil producers.

In his speech, the Chancellor said the oil companies were making “unexpected profits on oil prices that are far higher than those they based their investment decisions on”.

Some of the criticism he has received subsequently is undoubtedly justified. There is a genuine danger that some marginal projects will be cancelled as a result of the extra tax.

But that does not mean that Mr Osborne’s basic assertion was wrong. Proving the point, Valiant Petroleum — one of those likely to be hardest hit by the tax — popped up yesterday to report a near-fivefold increase in full-year pre-tax profits and a more than fivefold rise in operating cashflow.

This was partly down to higher production levels resulting from Valiant’s previous hard work and investment, but partly also to what the company coyly described as “strong commodity prices during 2010”.

It rather suggests Mr Osborne might be on to something, after all.

To the garden they must go

Civil servants, when leaving for the private sector, often go on “gardening leave” in case they are accused of doing things in their old job that might benefit a new employer.

The same rules, it appears, do not apply to former House of Commons employees. It that seems one, who has worked for both the Treasury and Business select committees, left her old job yesterday and begins work next Monday for a leading hedge fund manager. Many Commons staff do not have the mundane roles that their titles suggest. Select committee clerks, for instance, read private submissions or hear private discussions between committee members, some of which will have value to a private sector employer. No one is saying the woman here has done anything wrong. But her case shows the rules are inconsistent.

ian.king@thetimes.co.uk