Could this somehow be related to the American sub-prime lending crisis? Lawrence Staden, the founder of the Covent Garden hedge fund GLC, draws my attention to recent developments in one of the more unusual forms of risk exposure – the Colombian kidnapping index.

The index, published on Bloomberg, shows that the number of kidnappings in the Latin American country has surged over the past few months. From a peak of 453 in early 2000, the number of kidnappings fell to a low of 14 just a couple of years ago, but now are back up over 100.

Staden, who is at a loss to explain the increase, claims that his funds are trading up after the recent fallout on Wall Street and the City – but then the Cambridge-educated mathematician is well used to weighing up risk exposure. A number of years ago he was teaching at an inner-city comprehensive but soon tired of the constant need to restore order among his rowdy pupils.

“I worked out that setting up a hedge fund was easier than teaching maths,” he says.

An inauspicious start to life under Tesco for James Barnes, the chief executive of Dobbies Garden Centres. His head of merchandising, Craig Roman, has resigned to take up the same post at Wyevale Garden Centres. Barnes nailed his colours firmly to the Tesco mast at an early stage of the bidding process and in the face of Sir Tom Hunter’s dogged attempts to scupper a deal. Wyevale is owned by none other than Sir Tom, so the loss of such a key executive will be doubly painful.

Bonds restaurant at the Threadneedles hotel in the City is celebrating its fifth anniversary next month. To mark the occasion, it is offering a three-course menu and a selection of cocktails at 2002 prices. The hotel says that, during those five years, there has been a marked trend towards ever more luxurious tastes. The most expensive bottle of wine in 2002 was a 1985 Château Lafleur Pomerol at £600. Today it is a 1985 Château Pétrus, which sells at £1,200.

Carbon neutral, or just a prooofread-free zone?

The GMB union, as this column noted last week, employs a rather eccentric mode of spelling in its press communications. It is not alone, alas. A London-based PR firm e-mails to ask whether we’d like to write about the UK launch of an Icelandic mineral water, which it claims is “the forst imported water with a carbon nuetral status”. The sender, whose blushes I shall spare, goes on to commit two cardinal sins by asking whether we’d like to cover the launch “in the FT” and spelling the client’s name two different ways.

Everyone has their favourite Bill Deedes story. One of mine relates to the time he phoned The Savoy, one of his favourite watering holes, to ask if it could arrange for the steaming of his top hat as he was attending a wedding.

It turned out he had called The Savoy not because it was hosting the wedding reception but because it was the first place in London he thought of to ask. “I think he thought we had an in-house department to deal with such things,” recalls a staff member.

A new book plops through the City Diary letterbox aimed at those who want to make money from trading stocks on the internet. The book, Discount eTrading – Revealed , claims to provide “the astonishing secrets of how to make money as a discount [online] trader”. I’m no expert on such matters, which tend to go straight over my head, but the author does seem very well qualified. Meg Nolasco-Brewer has spent the past 20 years working for the likes of Merrill Lynch and Nikko Securities.

Shares of Gemfields Resources shot up by 20 per cent after the AIM-listed miner reported the discovery of a 10,050-carat emerald at its Mbuva-Chibolele mine in Zambia. Sounds like a lots of carats, yet it is but a fraction of the size of the biggest emerald ever, a 86,000-carat boulder dug up in Brazil in 1974

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