CITY DIARY

Middle Eastern specialists are not surprised to see that Mohammad Abdul-Mohsin Kharafi, the Kuwaiti-owned conglomerate, has raised its stake in Costain, the British construction company, to a strategic 7.5 per cent.

The company's namesake, a leading member of the Kharafi trading family, died last year leaving the 100-year-old private company in the hands of Moksen Kamel and Nasser Kharafi.

They have been looking for ways of spreading out its $400m-a-year businesses, which include food and finance, and recently opened new offices in Pretoria and Dar-es-Salaam. Costain might provide the right vehicle for their ambitions.

The two companies have tried collaborations in the past and Costain retains a strong brand name in the Gulf states. A takeover would allow Kharafi to bid for lucrative European Union contracts that are sometimes open only to EU companies (CCC, the Lebanese-Palestinian construction company, recently bought Morganti, the American group, partly for a similar reason).

"It makes some sense," one industry expert said.

Barclays is the latest company to leap on the Internet bandwagon and launch its own worldwide web pages for what it implausibly calls "netties".

As I suspected, the services launched yesterday do not match the hype. Technical difficulties mean that users trying to log on to certain services are flashed the message "unable to locate host", while the £500 netlink competition has already closed.

"It is just a question of pressing the right button," says Sara Mak of Barclaycard, hopefully.

Ron Baker, the Barings Securities chief, is not letting the bank's $900m of losses let him become disillusioned with his job. Invited out for a drink yesterday by a journalist, he replied with a jaunty tone: "No sir, that's a fireable offence and I love my job too much to do that."

Paul Slade, personal finance reporter at Inside Money, has developed a considerable expertise in horse racing since his father, Alan, bought a horse half a dozen years ago. In a recent edition of the magazine he cheekily wrote a piece on ways of beating the bookmakers.

Instead of being struck down by the god of racing, he watched his seven- year-old bay, Jurz, romp home in first place last week at 20/1 at Wincanton and then win at Sandown Park three days later by 30 lengths. "It was uncanny luck," the disbelieving hack admits.

Hamish Mathers is one tough Scot. Now 61, and recently appointed as head of London & Continental's Channel tunnel rail link bid, he made a name for himself as head of Hong Kong's mass transit system. During his six-year tenure, he turned it into a profitable business -thanks to canny property deals yielding HK$4bn, which helped to offset construction costs and won plaudits from Chris Patten. However, it is Mathers' sense of caution that may be his greatest asset. Earlier this week he leapt on unsuspecting marketing executives who were preparing a mock Eurostar train built out of a Toyota transit van. "You'd better have two just in case one breaks down," he instructed them. Luckily the spare, kept parked around the corner during the photocall, was not needed.