—Allan Leighton to run EMI? That was the chat, implying he is ready to step aside from Royal Mail when his contract comes up in spring, and forsake the joys of Canada and the Weston food family, which he also serves. Actually, Leighton is working as “special adviser” to Guy Hands, head of Terra Firma, EMI’s owner, to help to find a new chief executive, but he is not a candidate. Apparently.

—Jane Lighting, the chief executive of Five, is being treated less kindly by the rumour mill, amid speculation – denied emphatically – that its parent company, RTL, is sounding out people about a possible replacement. Five is having another tough year. Audience share is down from 5.7 per cent last year to 5.2 per cent this year, making it the second-worst performer among free-to-air channels, but Channel 4 is worse, down from 9.7 per cent to 8.5 in the same period. And no one is saying Andy Duncan is for the chop, although one rumour circulating at its Horseferry Road base is that he is a candidate to run, you guessed it, EMI.

—Half a million pounds of BBC licence fee payers’ money was wasted on an “electronic procurement system”, whatever that is, according to the National Audit Office. The otherwise upbeat report pointed out that the new technology, supposedly intended to cut costs, was issued to 2,126 staff who never used it, and 1,230 who used it less than once a month last year. The software licences cost £150 a pop. That’s £503,400 gone then.

—Citigroup is not having much fun. It fails to sell Emap’s professional publishing side (the magazine and radio arms were auctioned by Lazard) for a decent price and shares in Emap slide. Then its normally astute analysts issue a revised €190 million valuation of The Independent - after their earlier stated £190 million. That figure, it turns out, had been “incorrect”, presumably because the currency sign was wrong.

—Ian Livingstone, creative director of Eidos, the Lara Croft computer games publisher, is unhappy that Britain has just been overtaken by Canada as the third most prolific producer of video games. “Most of the best UK studios have lost their independence and have sold out to foreign companies, many in the last 12 months, with the future for UK being a work-for-hire industry with no intellectual property ownership,” he says. Thanks, Ian. For the rest of the interview with him, go to timesonline.co.uk/technology

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