Pembroke: Bouquet of barbed wire for British Airways

POOR OLD British Airways collected an unwanted accolade yesterday when Sir Colin Marshall's outfit was voted the most reviled company in Britain. The vote of no-confidence will be all the more galling for Sir Colin as the most-popular vote went to BA's arch-rival, Virgin.

The figures have been compiled by Presswatch, an agency that monitors the coverage of companies in the British financial press. It awards positive marks for favourable coverage but docks points for negative comment. Over 1993 Virgin accrued 1,475 - ahead of last year's winner, the ever- steady Marks and Spencer, with 1,285. BA was the runaway loser with a hopeless score of minus 3,859. Others languishing at the bottom include Barclays and that perennial in the hate stakes, British Rail.

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OH, THE perils of cross-border marketing. A Belgian biscuit maker has announced it will change one letter in the name of its latest product when it is launched in Britain so as to avoid any embarrassment. A spokesman for Coruna Lotus said its chocolate-covered biscuit would be re-named Spink 'to avoid all potential problems'.

A BUNCH of Oxford and Cambridge under-graduates have discovered that a fistful of A levels may not be enough to achieve big- hitter status on the stock market.

In an inter-varsity competition that closed earlier this week, two groups of students were each given an imaginary pounds 20,000 to invest over a two-month period. After stripping out dealing costs, both made a loss. Cambridge finished on top with pounds 19,989.92 while Oxford's fund dwindled to pounds 18,663.

Both sides picked some real stinkers. Cambridge's fund included the engineering group Beauford, which finished down 39 per cent. Oxford's Goldmines Kalgoorlie sank 19 per cent.

Failure to take dealing costs into account was blamed for the poor performance of the varsity funds. This was a blow for the competition's organisers - ShareLink, the telephone share- dealing service.

JOHN ROQUES, the senior partner at the accountants Touche Ross, must like a bit of confrontation. He has somewhat rashly agreed to be main speaker at the University of East London at the end of the month, when he will give a talk on regulation and market forces.

But his audience will include a few people who do not necessarily have his best interests at heart.

Prem Sikka of the university's accountancy research group, which has organised the talk, is an adviser to the accountant-baiting Labour MP Austin Mitchell and himself a known critic of the big firms. At least question time might be interesting.

HARD ON THE HEELS of spending dollars 1bn to acquire WordPerfect, America's Novell Inc has taken on a new chief executive. The appointment of Robert Frankenburg, the wide-ranging manager who runs Hewlett Packard's PC business, puts an end to years of speculation about who might succeed Ray Noorda, Novell's 69- year-old founder. It doesn't, however, end the speculation about Novell's chances of surviving the impending all-out attack on its core business - computer networking - by the behemoth of the software sector, Bill Gates's Microsoft.

IT IS common for public companies to blow their own trumpet on the cover of their annual report, but the Telegraph Group, publisher of the Daily Telegraph, was a little cheeky with its document released yesterday.

On the pale blue cover stands the bold quote: 'The world's foremost assemblage of quality newspapers under one general corporate umbrella'.

The implication is that the words of praise - which are not credited to a source on the cover - come from an impressed objective source, like the 'best film of the year' (Lancashire Guardian) quotes that appear on cinema posters. Er, not quite. They are from the statement to shareholders by the Telegraph's chairman, Conrad Black.