There is a long and ignoble tradition of slipping out unwelcome news that must, nonetheless, be reported to the market and your shareholders at a time when you can be pretty certain no one sentient is watching.

Budget Day was a favourite, as is last thing before a public holiday. As I remarked at the time, last Friday felt awfully like Christmas Eve, being the last working day for most people, so it would be a shame for anyone to have missed the interim results from the little-known Max Petroleum.

These showed increased losses and, more interestingly, the $2.3 million (£1.2 million) cost of an “internal investigation” that resulted in the sacking of the two most senior executives and five managers. This was released at, er, 6.42pm on Friday.

The press contact, when finally tracked down, muttered something about it being “an absolute nightmare formatting it for RNS [the Stock Exchange’s news service]”. Of course it was.

Barbican venue gives Bond a view to a call At the Barbican, a sign has gone up giving warning that next week it will be the venue for the filming of a scene from the next James Bond film, current working title Bond 22, which again will star Daniel Craig. Relax, ladies, Craig won’t be there, as far as I know; but in the Sculpture Court – so named, my informant tells me, because it was once meant to have contained sculpture but now doesn’t – they will film a man talking on a mobile phone, the sign says. We will have to wait for the release of the film, set for November, to see why it was necessary to go to the Barbican to film someone talking on their mobile phone.

In the US, William McGuire, former chief executive of UnitedHealth Group, has asked a judge to lift a freeze on stock options that could be worth as much as $800 million (£402 million). McGuire left after fellow directors found evidence of backdated options – a practice not actually illegal, but frowned upon.

He did not get a terribly sympathetic response. Judge James Rosenbaum said that words such as “huge”, “fantastic”, “astounding”, “staggering” or “astronomical” did not do the options justice.

“Such a sum can only be thought of as ‘transcendent’, or in terms of the gross national product of smaller members of the United Nations,” Rosenbaum concluded in his court order.

Times Recommends

• Lies and cover-up at MG Rover exposed by report
• High oil prices push manufacturing costs up
• Primark founder steps down as chief executive