With the shares languishing at 75

With the shares languishing at 75.5p, the move is likely to enrage lastminute’s wider retail investor base.
It is conventional for directors to allow friends and family to register for shares on preferential terms when companies are floated. However, lastminute’s decision to allow favourites to purchase several thousand pounds worth of shares caused consternation among retail investors, whose maximum allocation in the March float was restricted to just 35 shares. The slump in lastminute’s share price – from a peak close of 487.5p on its first day of trading to just 64.5p this month – has left participants in the friends and family share issue nursing hefty losses.It is understood that Ms Lane Fox, the high profile chief operating officer of the upstart e-commerce business, e-mailed several participants in the friends and family offering earlier this month, inviting them to sell their shares back to her at the issue price. Ms Lane Fox’s original invitation to participate in the offering in March came in an e-mail entitled “Easy Money”.Some friends have declined to accept her offer, arguing that they bought into lastminute for the long term Others have turned it down for ethical reasons.

But it is thought that at least one has accepted and already sold their stake.It is not clear how widely Ms Lane Fox has extended her offer. The friends and family register includes several high net worth individuals, such as Hans Snook, the chief executive of Orange, the mobile phone group. Ms Lane Fox, who has not sold any of her stake in the company, is believed to be unable to afford to rescue the entire friends and family register.The share purchases risk violating the Financial Services Authority’s guidelines on disclosure of directors’ share dealings. A spokeswoman for the FSA said: “The rules say directors’ share dealings must be disclosed.”A source within the London Stock Exchange said: “If a director buys shares, either on or off the Exchange, that would be worthy of note. It is in the spirit of the rules to disclose share dealings.”Pro Share, which promotes retail investing, declined to comment on specific cases, but said the general public should be able to trade on the same terms as other investors.Ms Lane Fox owns 5.99 per cent of lastminute, a stake worth about £7.67m.. Britain is one of agroup of countries that hasto compete particularlyhard on price

Britain is one of agroup of countries that hasto compete particularlyhard on price
We have come a long way from the 1960s, when (at least in political legend) a bad set of trade figures could lose you a general election campaign. Today, Britain’s external deficit causes barely a ripple on the smooth surface of satisfaction with our economic performance.

So long as output is rising and unemployment and inflation are low, who cares if we consume more than we produce?Steady on. That deficit does carry important signals, over and beyond the sudden misery of closing manufacturing plants. It is highly relevant to what is (or should be) the most important issue of this upcoming general election, which is whether Britain should abandon its own currency in favour of monetary union with its continental neighbours. Whatever Ministers say, this is not only or even primarily an economic question – how people want to be governed cannot be captured entirely on a profit and loss account.

But given that the Government is determined to position the debate on economic ground, the economic argument certainly matters.We can forget, or at least set aside, the Chancellor’s “tests”, which are too general to serve as anything more than a have-ready justification for whichever way he wants to lean. Rather more has been learnt from the light of experience with EMU, which has demonstrated that a single monetary policy can indeed cause trouble where different histories and institutional arrangements result in very different levels of inflation. However, work reported in the latestEconomic Journal, by Wendy Carlin, Andrew Glyn and John Van Reenen, sheds interesting light on the other side of the same coin – the role of the exchange rate in our economic performance.By joining the euro, what we would be giving up would be the national setting of interest rates in which (with the success of an independent Bank of England) we are currently taking so much pride. But what we would actually be abolishing would be the very idea of an exchange rate between our economy and our main competitors’. In the seesaw years since fixed exchange rates broke down at the end of the 1960s, two remarkably contradictory arguments in favour of fixed exchange rates have found supporters.One is that currency movements have no long-term effects on competitiveness, and so exchange rates are just a useless and disruptive feature of economic life. The other is that currency movements are only too effective in enabling countries to steal competitive advantage from each other, so that the existence of exchange rates is destructive of the very idea of a single market and a permanent temptation to beggar-my-neighbour policies. (Neither of these arguments, incidentally, were relevant to the European Exchange-Rate Mechanism, a “moveable peg” whose advantage to the UK was that it provided an anti-inflationary discipline where domestic monetary disciplines had failed.)The EJ authors have taken a long look at a group of developed countries, to see what explanations of their export performance stand the test of time.