“But actually Sherwood did quite well.”John Melbourn, who retires as deputy group chief executive of National Westminster Bank this year, was yesterday made a non-executive director of Tesco. Mr Melbourn, 58, has been a life-long NatWest man, and spent the last few years dealing with the bank’s big corporate lending.As such he was the bank’s main negotiator with the late Robert Maxwell, and played a big part in clearing up the mess when the Maxwell business empire collapsed.Tesco should be a lot quieter.Now it can be told. That puts the shares on a forward rating of 18, dropping to 16 Not cheap, but worth holding.. Johnson Fry was a name to conjure with when the business expansion scheme was at its height, but has become a pale shadow of its former self since the ending of the scheme in 1993. However, the ebullient Charles Fry who led the business in the glory days of the 1980s has had plenty of experience of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

Thirty months ago he rescued the remains of JF from the ruin of LIT Holdings, the financial conglomerate into which it was reversed in 1989. Yesterday Johnson Fry confirmed its continuing recovery, despite announcing pre-tax profits cut from pounds 4.18m to pounds 2.88m in the year to December. The figures were inevitably distorted by the ending of the BES scheme. JF pulled in pounds 250m to invest in decaying repossessed property in the dying days of the scheme and picked up a 10 per cent fee for managing a pounds 30m refurbishment which gave a one-off boost to the 1994 figures.
The legacy of the BES is that the group has been left with managing a pounds 900m property portfolio, half of which is repossessed, which it will be looking to liquidate in two years when the rules allow. That will hit revenues when the time comes, but the good news is that many of the properties are likely to prove unsaleable in the current climate and so at least some of the management contracts will continue.JF is also in the running for a slice of the work managing the pounds 2bn housing estate of the Ministry of Defence when it goes out to tender.Meanwhile, the group’s more traditional areas of dreaming up new financial products and managing other people’s money go from strength to strength. Funds under management up from pounds 270m in 1994 to over pounds 400m now look well on their way to the target of pounds 1bn in three years.Profits this year of pounds 3.5m would put the shares, up 12p at 134p, on a prospective p/e ratio of 9 Reasonable value, but the market is thin.. Anyone who enjoyed the autobiography, Soros on Soros, by George Soros, the billionaire hedge-fund entrepreneur, may wish to listen to the book which has now been transferred to four audio cassettes and read by – George Soros.

A review will appear as soon as we can persuade someone to listen all the way through it …
Pulses were raised at a normally sober institutional fund manager’s yesterday when it received a copy of the 1995 Sherwood Group annual report and accounts.The Nottingham-based lace and garments maker has included, alongside the normal facts and figures, two glossy colour triple-pull-out photos of glamorous young female models wearing, quite frankly, not that much apart from the company’s lingerie.”This is normally a very bad sign that the company wants to distract you from some pretty dire results in the back of the report,” one fund manager said yesterday. March figures were up 11 per cent on the same month last year, following February’s 12 per cent advance. The improvements have provided a welcome boost for the share price, which had been suffering from a period of weakness last year as a result of weak passenger numbers during the hot summer. After bottoming out at 465p in December they have now risen to 547p, up 2p yesterday, and several analysts think there is more left to come.
While March’s figures were boosted by pre-Easter traffic build-up, there were a number of strong performances from BAA’s seven airports, which indicate underlying strength rather than one-off boosts.Stansted increased its passenger numbers by 40 per cent due to an increase in Irish traffic and a number of new carriers using the airport. Gatwick also improved by nearly 20 per cent due to an increase in US and European flights.