HENDERSON Crosthwaite, the stockbrokers, is launching a Dublin- based Open-Ended Investment Company that combines the ability to take in new funds and the absence of a discount on assets, with the simplicity of an investment trust and a single trading price. It is also a pretty incisive criticism of the work on security that is [...]

Whitbread will spend £85m on 50 new Brewers Fayre sites, it said last week.The real transformation in Whitbread is a consequence of the fact that it has fallen into the hands of marketeers, in the shape of Mr Jarvis, an ex-Unilever employee, and the chairman, Sir Michael Angus, who used to head Unilever.Their ethos pervades [...]

This will initially use cartridges but Mr Tabizel believes it will quickly convert to CDs.As sales of these systems gather pace, demand for software will build. Sony is coming into the market for the first time with its Playstation, Sega is launching the Saturn, 3DO (a company backed by Matsushita) has a powerful new machine, [...]

At the other end of the scale, Standard Life, for years one of the best performers in the industry, has generated little more than £40,000.The more worrying aspect for the poorer recent performers is the industry- wide belief that Standard Life in particular has brought some of its problems on itself, by increasing the commissions [...]

ALLIED DOMECQ’S beverages businesses – best known for the Tetley tea bags brand – is close to being sold to a £400m management buy-in. As some of the evidence to the Scott inquiry (due to report in June) has shown, the British government adopted a rather schizophrenic attitude to the sale of weapons to barred [...]

Anyone depending on income from a job will not notice the benefit of a rise in foreign income. This distinction might appear a bit arcane, as the two measures of a country’s wealth generally give similar figures. But there are a few countries where overseas investment income is a large proportion of the total income [...]