Won’t be long, darling, just another 20 calls . . .
TAKING your work home with you is one thing but fancy taking it on a holiday to celebrate your wedding anniversary. Misys boss Kevin Lomax spent much of such a holiday in Venice on the phone to shareholders, trying to convince them to back a controversial bonus package for two directors, when he should have been pushing out the gondola for his wife. Lomax admitted yesterday after the agm that his wife was used to such behaviour. “My wife was delighted,” he confessed, giving a strong impression she wasn’t. What’s more, Misys was forced to withdraw the resolution last week because of shareholder opposition.
A fair wicket, after all
READERS who felt sorry for Michael Hitchcock, Ottakar’s fi nance director, following our story here last week, should stop shedding tears. We reported Hitchcock had suffered a double blow on Thursday when HMV scuppered his chances of being part of a management buyout for the bookshop chain and he was then bowled a googly and forced to turn down a ticket to the Oval.
It turns out a reader of the diary (a rather large consulting company) took pity on him and invited him to their box for the thrilling last day of the Ashes series. “What a day! It was fantastic,” he gushes. It also appears that, despite joining the company only eight months ago, he should pick up his annual salary of £140,000 as compensation if HMV is successful. It’s tough at the top. ARTIST Tracey Emin was on her best behaviour at a BP-sponsored dinner at the Tate on Monday evening. She told the assembled crowd how, at the age of 42, she had finally passed her driving test in her home town of Margate, Kent last week. “So I’m now a customer,” she told the senior BP executives. Unfortunately she has also had her first crash. Thinking she was in reverse, Emin accidentally ploughed into the car in front of her. Whoops.
Off the rails at 30,000ft
WHO should former rail regulator Tom Winsor bump into at Gatwick airport than Gwyneth Dunwoody MP, the battleaxe who chairs the transport select committee. The pair have not met since her committee’s report in April 2004 savaged Winsor (and others) for making a monumental mess of the railways. Winsor hit back at the time, saying her report demonstrated “the quality of analysis you normally get from taxi drivers and hairdressers”.
They found themselves on the same fl ight to Budapest, though luckily not sitting together, according to my Gatwick mole. Winsor mentioned the Railtrack shareholders case against former transport secretary Stephen Byers. Dunwoody promptly told him there had been “no queue” at her constituency office of Railtrack shareholders “ complaining they’d lost their money”. “Have a nice fl ight” was all that Winsor could squeak.