When Tom Hiddleston’s character, Jonathan Pine, sauntered through some Arab spring uprising at the beginning of the BBC’s The Night Manager, it was tempting to view the scene as a lampooning of the 2012 “shareholder spring”.
That was the series of equally courageous revolutions against, er, executive pay, bringing us once again the implausible alignment of rebellions notable for overthrowing repressive regimes with some well-tailored smoothy-chops strolling practically untouched through staged carnage.
Without wanting to appear unreasonably churlish, the BBC is almost certainly now conducting a review to discover what happened to the scene featuring men in flash suits, taking tea and biscuits at the QEII, and politely asking a pal to trouser slightly less loot. But let’s not join that witch-hunt. The City has its own tribute.
BP kicked off “shareholder spring 2.0” last Thursday, and this week we are braced for similar episodes at the AGMs of miner Anglo American and HSBC, where last year some wag turned up wearing a Panama hat.
That looks like a very prescient joke, although you’ll recall it was actually a critique of one director’s pay. HSBC, of course, is the bank that likes to say yes, even when its chief exec asks to be paid in Panamanian balboas.
Brexit battle
Another week, another kerfuffle over Brexit. On Tuesday Bank of England governor Mark Carney will be giving evidence to the House of Lords economic affairs committee, where he looks certain to cause yet another row – not least because the first question being trailed is: “What risks are there to remaining in the European Union?”
The governor, you may recall, made a stab at answering that one early last month during a Treasury select committee hearing.
On that occasion, he ended up enraging Brexit-ers when he described transition out of the EU in the event of a leave vote as “the biggest domestic risk to financial stability”.
That reaction seemed rather harsh on Carney, who is actually paid to have a view on that sort of stuff, but few people are being tedious enough to allow such considerations get in the way of a good barney on the topic.
As the Treasury select committee chairman Andrew Tyrie puts it: “Both sides in the referendum campaign have traded in outrageous claims and unsubstantiated assertions, masquerading as facts.”
Such an outrageous state of affairs must come as a complete shock to everyone in Westminster.
Mid-table obscurity for Sky
As Sky subscribers know well, the pay-TV channel has never knowingly under-hyped anything on its schedule. Even a League Two clash – perhaps on a blustery evening on a bobbly pitch at Meadow Lane – ends up seeming like something only extremely careless armchair fans would miss. Yet it will be interesting to see how the group plugs its latest trading figures ahead of announcing them this week.
Analysts at UBS have pencilled in “a steady quarter with continued solid growth in financials”, which is hardly the way you might imagine Jeff Stelling plugging it. Still, for the real aficionado, there should be some commentary on a couple of European fixtures that may be worth listening to.
First up, Vivendi’s tie-up with Mediaset is expected to provide Sky with more competition in Italy, while the German cartel office’s ruling that Bundesliga football rights cannot all be sold to one bidder, and will have to be split, has prompted some analysts to predict a bidding war, “which would be unhelpful for Sky Deutschland”.
That said, the courageous experiment to insert any sort of competition into top-flight German football is to be applauded. Nobody apart from Bayern Munich (currently clear at the top once again) has won the Bundesliga title since 2012.
