27 APRIL 1996, Page 23

. . . need a sinking fund

MR JUSTICE DARLING once addressed the Classical Association on the subject of the Iliad. The Greeks, he said, sent out a lot of ships, most of which sank — and as far as he could see from the commercial courts they had been doing the same thing ever since. Fortunes have been founded like that. The point was tactfully made by the Financial Times in its obituary of Stavros Niarchos: 'His early career was shadowed by the sinking in suspicious circumstances of several elderly vessels, registered in Panama to to avoid paying US taxes.' I hope that his heirs are properly grateful to the underwriters — but perhaps he has remembered Lloyd's in his will.