Will Kraft’s feel for Cadbury clear 2012 hurdle?

Presumably, its lawyers could have advised on how such contracts are usually drawn up. You decide. And an ironic sidenote: Kraft is based outside Chicago, humiliatingly bundled out of the race for the 2016 Olympics, despite the Obama effect.

All those banking prizes are an acquired taste

It must be terribly difficult for firms handing out all those endless “bank of the year” awards to find winners that do not invite instant ridicule in these times. So one has some sympathy for Acquisitions Monthly, whose annual awards dinner was presented with its “Roll of Honour” for 2009. Alas, astonishment and muffled laughter in the audience when the various winners swaggered up to the podium to pick up their gongs.

Benelux M&A Adviser of the Year went to the Royal Bank of Scotland, whose own piece of Benelux M&A, of ABN Amro, almost did for the bank. And the team from Bank of America Merrill Lynch won Defence of the Year for their work on behalf of Lloyds Banking Group. That would be the same Merrill Lynch that advised Lloyds in the purchase of HBOS, which again almost did for the bank. And now I come to think of it, who also advised on the RBS purchase of ABN Amro? Still, all ancient history now, clearly.

There is a definite suspicion that, in all the fundraising for the Haiti disaster, some of the smaller City businesses are comfortably outstripping the efforts of the bigger beasts in the jungle. So we have already had Jefferies chipping in $7.5 million from a one-off event last week in New York and London. Today MarketAxess, which operates an electronic bonds trading platform, is hoping for a similar result from its own charity trading day.

When Lord Heseltine delayed the launch of a key report into a new national high-speed rail network at the Commons by 20 minutes by arriving late, there was some joking about transport problems. Not so. I am told that the peer was late for the report from the Bow Group, the Tory think-tank, because he had got stuck in the Palace of Westminster’s notorious security system and was wandering the corridors with no swipe pass.

We last came across Darius Yuen when he was about to move from the relatively unscarred BNP Paribas to the doomed Bear Stearns to become head of the equity capital markets group in Asia. Yuen, after “a shift in his own values”, according to his website, tells me that he has now set up the SOW (Asia) Foundation, a Hong Kong-registered charity investing in social entrepreneurs. The first investment is in the producers of a much-needed rating system for building materials in China, which tells architects or whoever how green they are. So proving that some good can emerge out of almost any disaster imaginable.

Harbinger of industrial doom
In the blue corner: Ray Egan

Another disappointment for Ray Egan, the retired policeman who dresses up as John Bull to appear outside threatened factories to protest against the possible loss of British jobs. Egan was widely pictured outside Cadbury’s historic Bournville plant in Birmingham.

This prompted one Cadbury worker to remark: “He’s a bad omen. Wherever he goes, factories close.”

One can only hope not.

But Egan’s previous appearance was outside LDV, the van maker, almost a year ago.

LDV foundered last summer.

One executive, whose unnamed business collapsed not long after Egan turned up to promote his cause at the factory gate, was quoted as saying: “When John Bull shows up outside your works, you know you’ve really had it.”

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