Fraudsters are taking APCIMS’ name in vain. A series of e-mails has been circulating claiming to come from the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers offering an investment opportunity, reports the website Citywire. In return, just provide your financial details. “We’re a membership body. We’re not regulated to offer investment advice,” explains a spokesman for APCIMS. Instead, it’s the old phishing scam. Inevitably, the scammers have made the usual obvious mistakes. The e-mail is in broken English, though our man admits: “As broken English goes, this is more understandable than most.” The e-mail purports to come from APCIMS employee Roland Cornwall. There is none such, but the head of UK regulation there is Ian Cornwall, a fact easily checkable from the organisation’s website. And the e-mail claims to come from “APCIMS-UBS”, a hitherto unknown combination. The initial attempts were pretty amateurish, but more recent versions seem to display some worrying knowledge, albeit limited, of the financial services industry, which has prompted the organisation to pass them on to the police.

And in her sapre time...

In the blue corner: Amelia Fawcett

Amelia Fawcett, the terrifyingly proficient former Morgan Stanley investment banker, is the new chairman of the Guardian Media Group (GMG), appointed by The Scott Trust, the independent body that ensures that Hampstead’s favourite reading material does not have its principles too sullied by an imperfect world. Some on the Trust had wanted John Peace, who used to run GUS. Fawcett has been on the GMG board for almost two years and succeeds Paul Myners, another City heavyweight, who stood down last year. She is one of those people who, if they lost nine tenths of their abilities overnight, would probably still qualify as a polymath. She has dual American and British citizenship, she qualified as a lawyer in New York and spent 20 years at Morgan, becoming one of the most powerful women bankers in London. Her surprise departure in late 2007 was to launch Pensions First, with the modest ambition of sorting out UK final salary schemes. She had helped to set up the Financial Services Authority, served on the Court of the Bank of England and raised more than £275,000 for a breast cancer charity by sailing across the Atlantic in 17 days. I need to go and lie down.

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Curious aims of new group of shareholders

A curious pressure group claims to have been formed to agitate at the annual meeting of Savills, the estate agent, in a fortnight’s time. Curious, because it is not entirely clear what the aims of the “Savills PLC Shareholder Group” are from a string of sometimes contradictory e-mails sent to me and, I assume, other journalists who are being invited to attend. One claims to be wanting to influence the board before trouble arises, Savills having weathered the recession reasonably well, rather than after, as at Northern Rock and RBS; another talks of finding other potential investors in the company. I suspect an individual with a grudge.

But what about the RBS directors’ sandwiches? Weekend reports suggested that “Fred’s Folly” at Royal Bank of Scotland’s palatial Edinburgh HQ, the executive wing and dining rooms where RBS bigwigs gobbled larks’ tongues and foie gras off the naked shoulderblades of 13-year-old virgins — a lawyer insists I make it clear this is an exaggeration — has been dismantled, and they have been dispersed around the bank. But one report talks of them also losing the right to their “fancy subsidised sandwiches”. RBS refuses to confirm or deny this, muttering about “journalistic licence”. It’s not quite the image we had of the ancien régime under Fred the Shred, is it? The serfs quailed under the knout while the aristos scoffed subsidised prawn sandwiches?

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How goes the development at Ten Trinity Square, the old Willis building near Tower Hill that used to house the Port of London Authority? It is being turned into a luxury hotel and mega-posh flats by Thomas Enterprises, an American developer, but the buzz in the hotel trade is that one of the key consultants behind the job has quit and is threatening legal action. Jean Mestriner, a world expert in designing hotels, used to run that division at Thomas. A spokesman says that, because of the “legal ramifications”, he can’t say much, but the development, one of the landmark projects in the City, “continues apace and we’re waiting for an immediate [planning] committee debate”. No date yet, though.

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