The dastardly Mr Deedes
Aberdeen Standard Life’s gregarious boss Martin gilbert, 62, pocketed a £1.3m bonus last year. Joint chief executive Keith Skeoch, 61, with whom gilbert insists he can forge a good working partnership, was awarded £116,000 less. A Caledonian source murmurs: ‘Trust me, this’ll end in tears.’ Speaking at yesterday’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, BT boss Gavin Patterson’s buoyant hair appears to have grizzled. Some wonder if Gav’s feeling the strain following BT’s weaker- thanexpected results earlier this month. He also has the stress of a new chairman, nononsense Jan du Plessis, breathing down his neck. Travelling all the way to Edinburgh to watch England get thumped in the Calcutta Cup on Saturday won’t have done much to lighten Patterson’s mood. Nick Leeson’s £823m worth of trading losses, which brought down Barings Bank in 1995, is chicken feed compared to those racked up by UBS’s Kweku Adoboli (£1.7bn), Sumitomo’s Yasuo Hamanaka (£1.8bn) or Societe generale’s Jerome Kerviel (£4.9bn). Has Leeson, 51, ever met any of them? He says: ‘No. We don’t have a rogue trading club where we go down to the pub.’ Pity. Perhaps Radio 4’s Today programme could coax them all into the studio. It could use an interesting item. Indecipherable press release of the week goes to software firm Cisco, which announces: ‘Cisco is demonstrating new network slicing techniques via segment routing this week. The technique could help to lower and control latency for high-bandwidth applications. Segment Routing is an innovative IP routing protocol that allows the transport network to differentiate the way it delivers applications, removing legacy protocols and making network operations easier...’ Make it stop! Bearded Superdry founder Julian Dunkerton, 52, who’s made nearly £400m flogging biker jackets and garish raincoats, puts the success of his clothing label down to great branding. He says: ‘The only people who think in the same way are at gucci or Louis Vuitton.’ Both fashion houses must be tickled pink by the comparison.