CITY DIARY
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
This is the season for giving the Chancellor advice about his budget: and since he is always offered a variety of odd ideas, I hope he won't mind one more from me. What about arranging for most of the nation's manufacturing indus- tries, and all of its farmers, to pay the Govern- ment a sum of money which the Government then pays back, in full?
There are, I think, two reasons why Mr Jen- kins won't use my suggestion. One is that the idea is obviously fatuous. Shovelling sand from A to B and then back from B to A would seem old-fashioned in a convict prison, and as a way to use national resources it defies com- ment. The second reason is that he has such a tax already. It is called the selective employ- ment tax. The 'employer's premium'-meaning that he got back 7s 6d a head more than he paid in-vanished at the time of devaluation. Now either you pay SET without refund, like those good foreign currency earners the hoteliers and export packers, or your money goes on this round trip. Sir Desmond Lee maintains that you can't parody modern life-its absurdities are always a step ahead of what you could imagine. I wonder whether the Chancellor will continue to prove him right.
Nothing like getting in at the bottom of the market. Everyone knows that life has been diffi- cult for Sperry and Hutchinson, the 'pink %tamp' firm. Its big supermarket customer. Victor Value, was being outpaced by its rivals: and now-whether or not pro pier hoc-s & H and Victor Value have parted. So this is no bad • time for Mr Leslie Carter to come in to S &H as 'general management consultant.'
The title is an odd one-but Mr Emil Corona is already chairman and managing director. Mr Carter sees his job as broadening the base of
& tes operations. The stock market rumour that this means buying Victor Value he dis- counts: it wouldn't use s & Ws expertise and it would infuriate the other customers. He wants to use the company's purchasing power, its warehousing capacity-it has just opened a £500,000 development in Manchester-and its natural links with mail order. Both busi- nesses, in effect, sell goods by catalogue.. For some of the smaller customers, Mr Carter 'thinks that s & it could provide services- site-finding, security, possibly marriage-brok- ing. On the stamp side, it has been observed that the Co-op's `divi' is a diminishing incentive and dear to administer: there may be scope for some kind of `divi stamp.'
Mr Carter comes from the Garfield Weston companies, where he spent twenty years, becom- ing managing director of Food Securities, the wholesaling company
As the enfeebled and impoverished joint-stock banks huddle together for warmth-and if you don't like that 'explanation, do you like the official ones any better?-I learn of a dastardly blow dealt by one of their customers. His bank (I decline to tell you which) puts, at the back of its cheque books, a few paying-in slips. These, like the cheques, have the client's account number in magnetic ink. What this client did was to tear them out and put them at the front of the tray, filled ,with paying-in slips, that stands on his bank's counter.
Other customers then came along to PO • .
money in and took a slip from the tray. The bank's computer read the magnetic ink and at once credited the money to our villain's account. Every few days he would call in, ask for a bank statement, cream off the account, and ask for a new cheque book. Now the bank has discovered what has been happening, but the account has been closed and the customer has left no address. Dear, dear.
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