Martin Waller: City Diary
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The City has been playing host to a terribly posh work experience type, I learn. Chelsy Davy, who is apparently the girlfriend of Prince Harry, who is himself apparently third in line to the throne, has been working at PR firm Pelham, though she has now departed. (To be honest, I always get these minor royals horribly confused. Edward? William? The girl with the spike through her tongue?) So what did Chelsy, a Zimbabwean whose dad is a bit too pally with Robert Mugabe, as I recall, actually do? “The normal work experience, helping around the office,” one insider tells me. That’ll be settling the restaurant bill and saying, I’ll have to get back to you on that, to any query, then. It seems Charles Vivian, a partner at Pelham, moves in such circles, and so the introduction was made. Why did no one notice, over a period of some weeks, that she was there? “We already have a Chelsea in the office.” Ah. Somehow I just knew that.

Once again we hike off into the foothills of the internet, where the thin line between fact and hoax is occasionally pixelated. (The site I wrote about the other day where you can hire a dog is definitely genuine, by the way.) This is one where you can order your business cards laser-etched on to the side of a peanut “to liven up the formal rigamarole surrounding the exchange of business cards in Japan”. Again, by all accounts genuine.


The share price that dare not speak its name . . . One well-known retailer refuses to list its shares on the prices pages of either this paper or the Financial Times, unlike virtually every other company of an equivalent size.
So just why is Sports Direct International, shares less than half their flotation price, acting so shy? I speak to the PR man. (Is there any worse job in the City than Sports Direct and Mike Ashley’s PR man?) He spins gamely. “Their shareholders are quite sophisticated and they go to the internet (for the share price).” Not a bad effort, and from a cold start, too. He’s earning his money.

As I have yet to master the technology behind “social networking” sites such as MySpace, I am well behind the curve on this one. But it seems there is one called linkedin.com, much used by professional people, which features a number of Tony Blairs, several of which claim, with varying degrees of verisimilitude, to be in charge of the UK. We can probably disregard the chap who claims to be “Prime Minister at Great Britain Ltd and Owner, Great Britain Ltd”, and the one who is “Owner, British State”. But one looks worryingly genuine. And he wants you to be his friend.

Unco-operative bank
Customers of the Clydesdale Bank will know the sign bidding them to “Haste Ye Back” as they leave the branches. But can it really be true, as my informant there assures me, that the Co-Op branch in Benbecula, in the Outer Hebrides, has a sign above the door saying “Not you again”? Mind, you, there are only four other shops competing with it.

I am puzzled by this one. Suleman Sadeque, a businessman, would like to supply me his bank account number so I can help him to repay his debts, which total £200,000. It has to be a scam, but how does it work? Does he at some stage ask me for my banking details?
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