It’s a profits warning, no doubt about it. Mike Ashley says Sports Direct’s profits are set to fall, which is not what the last trading update predicted. “We are in trouble, we are not trading very well. We can’t make the same profit we made last year,” the retailer’s founder told the Times during Monday’s invitation-only tour of the firm’s warehouse in Shirebrook, Derbyshire.

His words are clear: there is no possibility that profits will beat last year’s tally. So where was the formal confirmation that trading had deteriorated since Sports Direct last spoke in January?

There was no statement, even though the rules are meant to be strict: quoted companies should release sensitive financial information in a timely manner that gives all investors equal access.

Not for the first time, the Financial Conduct Authority, which runs the listing authority, has shown itself incapable of spotting price-sensitive information at close range. Come on, chaps, there was a large clue – the 10% fall in Sports Direct’s share price.

Mind you, Ashley’s disregard for the niceties of public-company reporting is not the greatest concern for outside shareholders in Sports Direct. More worrying was the contents of the rest of the interview.

Ashley grumbled that shareholders said at flotation in 2008 that he could run Sports Direct as a private company but now “everyone wants to know everything”. Ashley would prefer them to sell their shares if they don’t trust him rather than lob insults from the “cheap seats”.

Once upon a time such bluntness could have been viewed as a refreshing antidote to usual corporate waffle. Though 55% ownership gives you a lot of clout, the 45% are still interested in what goes on. There never was a licence to avoid answering questions.

The interview, of course, was designed to generate sympathy as Ashley battles to avoid appearing before the MPs on the business select committee to talk about employment practices.

Perhaps, in some quarters, he will indeed come across as a put-upon employer being snagged unfairly by a bunch of parliamentarians who have never created a job in their lives.

But it’s hard to believe the MPs will give up. This affair will run and run and the “media circus”, as Ashley calls it, will be bigger than it would have been.

Perhaps Ashley just enjoys a good scrap – but it’s hard to see how such an approach serves even his own interests.

Will Wolseley return to pre-crisis heights?

Wolseley’s chief executive, Ian Meakins, will leave in the summer with applause ringing in his ears after another decent set of financial figures.

Quite right, too. On his watch, the share price has improved from £11.30 in 2009 to £39.28. The chain of builders’ merchants, which makes most of its money in the US these days, has returned £2bn to shareholders via dividends, special dividends and share buybacks.

What was the magic ingredient? Actually, there wasn’t one. The strategy has simply been to run a tight ship, control costs, generate cash and sell unwanted businesses. For most of its long life, Wolseley was run on such conservative lines, recognising that the building business will forever be cyclical.

It was only in the mid-noughties, under predecessor Chip Hornsby, that the company lost its head and joined the debt and deal-making party. The first rights issue in 2006 was to fund a big acquisition; the next, in 2009, was a £1bn monster to repair the balance sheet.

The tragedy, from an investment point of view, is that even a slick self-help programme has not restored the share price to its pre-crisis heights.

Wolseley has been a great recovery story for those who climbed aboard with Meakins in 2009. But the house should never have fallen down in the first place.

Missed targets link RBS with George Osborne

A rare piece of good news for our beleaguered chancellor: Royal Bank of Scotland handed the Treasury £1.2bn on Tuesday.

This was not, of course, the bank’s contribution to ease the likely overshoot in government borrowing for the current financial year. Instead, RBS is repaying the so-called dividend access share (DAS) – a relatively minor plank in the state’s 2009 rescue operation.

The significance for RBS is that, in theory, it can start paying regular dividends. In practice, a lot of water still has to flow under the bridge.

RBS has to complete the process of separating 300 branches to be branded as Williams & Glyn. And it has to wait to discover how many billions of dollars it will have to pay to US authorities to settle a legal wrangle over pre-crisis mortgage-backed securities.

So, yes, RBS’s chief executive, Ross McEwan, can say fairly that the removal of the DAS is an “important milestone in our plan to resume capital distributions to our shareholders”.

But, back in 2009, few would have believed it would take until 2016 to reach that marker. The recovery is happening – just far more slowly than expected at the outset.

In that sense, there’s a symmetry with George Osborne’s position at the Treasury. As the bank has missed its unofficial targets, so he has missed his official ones.