The dastardly Mr Deedes
Lloyds Bank announces that online account holders will be able to track the location of their transactions via Google Maps. This helps protect customers against fraud, it says. That it’ll help the long-suffering wife of frisky chief Antonio Horta-Osorio to keep tabs on her glinty-eyed hubby’s whereabouts is an added bonus. Media tycoon Michael Bloomberg’s presidential candidacy is much discussed in New York society salons. After re-registering as a Democrat there’s fresh hope among the financial elite he’ll run as the anti-Trump candidate in 2020. But at 76, will Bloomberg, seen as a largely decent (albeit a trifle dull) fellow, really want to put himself through such a campaign? If the recent mid-terms are any guide, it’ll be an unedifying spectacle. Regarding reports that Chelsea Cloisters, owned by property magnate Christopher Moran, is overrun with ladies of ill repute, a boulevardier of my acquaintance remarks wolfishly: ‘This is news to people?’ Ousted Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn’s capitulation is greeted with outrage in Lebanon where he’s hailed as a national treasure. The government’s information minister Melhem Riachy remarks: ‘There is a not-so-clean smell. There may be a third party involved in targeting him because of his success or his wealth.’ Save it for the judge, as they say in legal circles. Although Ghosn may never be charged, he will be praying it doesn’t come to that. Japan’s criminal justice system has an ominous 99pc conviction rate. Goldman Sachs’s £15m-a-year chief David Solomon is reckoned to be £8m poorer since the bank’s stock plummeted following a corruption scandal. D-Sol, as he’s known, missed out on a vast windfall when he joined the bank in 1999. Having dithered over accepting a job, he arrived just weeks after the bank’s stock market float, which netted some of his fellow partners as much as £200m. A potential bidding war between Virgin and IAG over Flybe promises renewed hostilities between Willie Walsh and Sir Richard Branson. The latter still owes Walsh a kick in the groin after the Irishman bet Virgin Atlantic would be out of business by 2017. Double or quits on Flybe?