The dastardly Mr Deedes
News that Provident Financial’s ousted chief executive Peter Crook is a member of the Financial Conduct Authority’s advisory panel, even though the watchdog has been investigating its credit card arm for some time, surprisingly fails to raise eyebrows at the FCA. My swamped FCA source sighs: ‘These days, if we only selected advisers whose firms we weren’t investigating, it’d be pretty slim pickings I assure you.’
Shares in preppy fashion label Abercrombie & Fitch yesterday leapt 4pc after it reported quarterly losses of £12m. That’ll set moustaches eagerly twitching among pin-striped traditionalists on Savile Row, where Abercrombie’s flagship UK branch is based. They’re desperate to see the back of the déclassé, all-American firm, whose shirtless male models and heavily perfumed emporiums attract a tawdrier clientele to the Row.
JP Morgan’s Frankfurt offices are advertising for an executive assistant in its mergers and acquisitions department, to cover a period of maternity leave lasting two years. This is because of Germany’s ultra-generous system which allows an employee parental leave until a child turns three. Three! With banks threatening to decamp to Frankfurt from the City postBrexit, is it necessarily the land of milk and honey they’d have us believe?
US Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin’s glossy, Scots-born wife Louise, 36, is said to be persona non grata in the fashion world, after posting a photo of herself on Instagram on a government plane while flaunting her designer smocks. A ‘fashion insider’ tells the New York Post: ‘Louise won’t be invited to Fashion Week or the big galas. And she certainly won’t be appearing in Vogue.’ The indignity!
Proof that cost- cutting British Airways really is morphing into Ryanair – a recent passenger informs this week’s Spectator magazine of being told to pay double after ordering a strong cup of tea, as the airline now charges by the teabag. Listen carefully, you can almost hear BA’s late, buccaneering saviour Lord King turning in his grave.