SWINE FLU SCARE TAKES HOLD AT HEART OF THE FINANCIAL WORLD
MORE anxiety down at City accountancy firm Ernst & Young, where the dreaded swine flu has taken down a senior accountant and thrown concerned workers into panic.
The Capitalist revealed yesterday that one individual from the firm’s More London Place office has been diagnosed with swine flu, while his team and clients are awaiting results of tests to check if they are disease-free. I hear another load of workers at the Waterloo office are worried about various sniffles, though no concrete signs have been found there yet to suggest a further outbreak.
“The individual is now being treated at home,” an EY spinner says. “We have long-established policies and procedures in place to deal with these incidents and safeguard our people and clients.”
Cue a directive from management yesterday morning ordering all staff recovering from any kind of illness not to go into work, just in case.
Given that over 2,900 people in the UK have now contracted swine flu, The Capitalist supposes it probably won’t be long before the authorities give up efforts at containing the disease and leave every man to fend for himself. At least, as a sort of greyish lining to the cloud, those at EY can assume they’ve built up some early immunity.
BUNCH OF RIFF RAFF
Well-heeled hedgie types down at Trafalgar Asset Management are up in arms about a recent clamp-down on expenses at the firm.
The decree – which, by all accounts, is the first nod the firm has made to the pressures of the downturn since the world economy started to spiral down the drain – states that employees must no longer travel first class on business trips around the world, but must instead settle for mixing with the rabble in premium economy. Utterly dreadful, I’m sure.
SEEING DOUBLE
The dust has yet to settle after The Capitalist’s run-down of the ten hunkiest men in the City, published earlier this week.
“Readers who claim to have seen the number one hunk, Joshua Raymond, in recent days may well have been mistaken,” emails a City chum, going on to explain that the lovely Joshua actually has an identical twin brother working in the business world for financial PR firm Fleishman-Hillard.
Shaya Raymond, so I hear, is just as delectable as his brother and was also a child model in his younger days. He is also an actor in his spare time and has a role in a new UK film, Heartless – where the name of his character is “City Boy”.
There’s a symmetry in all that which is really rather pleasing.
FINE VINTAGE
To drinks yesterday with Stacey Golding, the co-founder of fine wine investment firm Premier Cru, who has a stark warning to anyone who might have recently inherited a cellarful of dusty wine bottles.
“We recently had a lady phone up whose husband used to like his wine,” Golding tells me.
“Sadly he had passed away, but the lady found a bottle of wine rattling around in an old dishwasher outside and wanted to know what it was worth. She then got the shock of her life when she found out the bottle in question – a 1961 Haut Brion, one of the wine’s very best vintages – was worth anything up to £2,000 a bottle when stored correctly.”
A pity that the dishwasher treatment had wiped 90 per cent off its value, though The Capitalist understands the vast majority of inheritors keep their hands on their tax-free investments anyway, for the sentimental value.