One of the leading business supporters of UK membership of the European single currency called yesterday for monetary union to be phased in, with countries joining as soon as they could achieve enough economic convergence. Britain would lose an opportunity to shape the single currency in its own interests.Mr FitzGerald also said Labour ministers should push for the completion of the single market and for an EU-wide commitment to jobs flexibility. Niall FitzGerald, chairman of Unilever, said it would be better to delay the project than go ahead with a fudge in order to meet the 1 January 1999 deadline. But he urged the Government to commit Britain to joining later on a firm timetable.
“A pragmatic British voice with credibility and authority restored through its clear commitment to the success of EMU is now essential in the crucial months ahead,” Mr FitzGerald said in a speech at the London School of Economics last night, joining the chorus of voices calling on Tony Blair to take a lead in Europe.Continuing the former government’s “wait and see” policy would be disastrous, Mr FitzGerald argued. It also owns several small agricultural hand tool companies.Mr Legg, who has run the company for 20 years, said yesterday: “The communication received from Mr Roditi does not contain any reason or indication why the appointment of two individuals with no apparent previous experience managing a plantations group is a better course of action for the company.”Last week, the company announced a collapse in profits from pounds 5.4m to pounds 900,000 and a reorganisation that will focus the group on its African activities..

He delivered a return of 160 per cent to investors, increasing the value of the fund from pounds 350m to pounds 900m.The apparent bid to take control of Plantation & General marks a change of strategy for Mr Roditi, who usually buys minority holdings in small companies on behalf of Mr Soros, the financier who became almost a household name after reputedly making pounds 650m from sterling’s ejection from the exchange rate mechanism.Mr Roditi has already tried and failed once to pull off a recommended bid for Plantation & General, a London-based holding company with interests in tea estates in Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Malawi, together with coffee, sisal and rubber plantations. Nick Roditi, the secretive and highly paid manager of a pounds 900m fund for Mr Soros, yesterday requisitioned an extraordinary meeting at Plantation & General in a bid to unseat its chairman Konrad Legg and replace him with Mr Pennant-Rea, the former deputy governor of the Bank of England.
Plantation & General, an otherwise unremarkable tea and coffee grower, hit the headlines briefly at the end of last year when it emerged that a large number of machetes manufactured by a subsidiary of the company in Kigali had ended up in the hands of members of the Hutu militia during Rwanda’s violent civil war.There was no immediate explanation of why Mr Roditi, who owns 29 per cent of Plantation & General, wanted to install Mr Pennant-Rea on the board. Neither Mr Roditi nor Mr Pennant-Rea was available for comment yesterday.Mr Roditi, the publicity shy investment manager who operates from an unremarkable office above the Body Shop on Hampstead High Street, is estimated to have earned pounds 50m last year from his management of George Soros’s Quantum Quota fund. Mr Brown has given the sceptics an excuse for saying: “Told you so.”. George Soros, Rupert Pennant-Rea and the Rwandan civil war were bizarrely thrown together yesterday by a boardroom coup at an obscure London-quoted plantation company. Since he plainly has not delivered on his promise to be “at least as tough” as his predecessor on the actual inflation target, the Chancellor has been in too much of a rush to change it.No wonder long bond yields are still so much higher than those of Germany, despite the well-justified dive they took when Mr Brown announced the Bank’s new operational independence No one quite believes in the British economic miracle yet. After all, a majority on the committee will soon be Brown appointees.To establish credibility as a low-inflation economy, Britain does need a prolonged stretch at 2.5 per cent or less.

Whatever the good theoretical grounds for setting the Bank a target that prevents it doing too much on interest rates as well as doing too little, it could have waited. Although the new inflation target is symmetric, the Bank’s own preferences are not. It will lean towards the lower figure.Even so, it is hard to imagine the Bank finding it as easy to increase interest rates again this year as it would have under the old regime. Its current forecast shows inflation at about 3 per cent in early 1999.

With growth still romping away, a “2.5 per cent or less” target for inflation would require at least one base rate increase and more likely two. Even a Chancellor as relaxed as Mr Clarke would have had to bow to the inevitable. But imagine the fuss from the Bank’s critics if it goes ahead now when its own forecast shows no sign of reaching the new upper limit for the next two years.Mr Brown’s new target is a bit of a disappointment. He has tried to find a clever compromise that will satisfy both those who welcome Bank of England independence and a tough inflation regime, and the lobby that reckons the Bank is over-hawkish and ignores the needs of industry and employment.But the Chancellor should have left the newly independent Bank with the old inflation target, and trusted Eddie George and his committee not to overdo its zealousness. The old target might have been tougher but Ken Clarke didn’t really want to hit it and allowed policy to drift accordingly.In practice, the Bank is in any case unlikely to sit idly by if target inflation does reach 3 per cent and is still climbing. One of the things he wants to do is reassure critics that his move to give the Bank of England operational independence will not allow the inflation hawks in Threadneedle Street to keep the economy permanently depressed in pursuit of ever-lower inflation.The Treasury’s spin doctors claimed yesterday that inflation will actually turn out lower under the new regime because the Bank is now free to act of its own accord, even though its remit appears a little looser Plainly there’s something in this. The old regime would have required the Bank to err more on the side of caution than does the new one.