While he was managing director group turnover grew from pounds 100m to about pounds 600m.Mr Cruickshank left the group after representing the interests of private shareholders and independent directors during the stock market buyout of Virgin in 1988.From 1980-84 he was a director of Pearson Longman and before that a director and general manager of the Sunday Times from 1977 until 1980. Surging to a peak of 164p in the post- election euphoria, the price has since dwindled back to 128p, up 5p on Friday.The flotation helped BDM to tidy up its balance sheet, placing the company in a position of strength from which to negotiate acquisitions – not that it is under pressure to make any.Organic growth alone enabled the directors confidently to predict tripled profits before tax of pounds 2.38m for the year to June. ‘It’s always fun,’ he says, declaring that he has missed the place, not having rowed there for two years The accent is firmly on the place rather than the race. If you were to tape an audience watching Raging Bull, and you played the tape back, I believe you would swear you were listening to an audience watch a comedy – because they’re laughing the entire time You can do this for Taxi Driver too.

The deal was based on a memorandum of understanding reached after a conference in Brussels on 18-21 January between Russia, Norway, the US, the EU, Australia and Canada.Aluminium prices have tumbled from more than dollars 2,000 to nearer dollars 1,000 a tonne over the past three years as oversupply, largely the result of Russian exports, caused a glut on world markets.But it is uncertain whether the new arrangement will lead to production cuts sufficient to allow prices to return to more normal levels. THE Serious Fraud Office faces a potentially embarrassing High Court judgment today in a pre-trial hearing in the case of Imran Imam, a former executive of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, whose trial on six charges of false accounting is due to start on 28 January. It is expected to finish this year with an unchanged net cash pile of about pounds 2m, putting it in a strong position to finance any acquisitions.Anthony Henfrey, chairman, said: ‘Our objective is to create a more diversified offshore services group. ‘Each one is in a different Hebrew style, for which I had to find some kind of equivalent English. Products of that literate bourgeoisie that fostered its young on the BBC’s Children’s Hour and Puffin Books we could have told you why the three black cats in ‘Hans’ Old Mill’ had five eyes rather than six, and discoursed knowledgeably on Old Sallie Worm, the fish that talks in the frying-pan and the fairy mimbling- mambling in the garden.

Encouragingly, it is also cash- positive, and the chairman, Tom Long, predicts that the group will return to profits this year.David Smith, its new chief executive and former boss of Isosceles, the debt-laden Gateway supermarket group, will need to achieve only modest profit margins on annual group turnover of about pounds 120m to produce a taxable result of about pounds 4m this year.That implies earnings of about 2p a share this year, rating the shares, up 2.5p to 14p yesterday, on a multiple of seven. The virtual write-off of an Ir pounds 24m GPA stake held by Irish Life’s non- linked fund helped to push embedded value 9 per cent lower to Ir pounds 494m. The reason, says a spokeswoman, is that ‘a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then’ and the issue has never really gone away.In particular, the 1990 Courts and Legal Services Act lifted the legal ban contained in the 1974 Solicitors Act on members of the profession sharing profits with outsiders. Asked what it discovered at the Safetex Corporation in Colonial Heights, Virginia, the US Food and Drug Administration provided a file half-an-inch thick expressing misgivings about the company’s products.The firm’s procedures would not discover if its condoms leaked, the report said, and some employees wore rings likely to rip the rubber.But it was not all bad news for Safetex.