People & Business

A former director of Courtaulds has just won the accolade of running the Best Pub in Britain. Graeme Jameson and his wife Anne have been licensees of the Wykeham Arms in Winchester for the last 13 years, and yesterday the 1998 Good Pub Guide named "the Wyk" as the best boozer in the country.

The pub has already won plaudits from Michelin, Egon Ronay and the Good Hotel Guide. Mr Jameson said: "We started off knowing nothing at all about running a pub, and to reach this pinnacle of recognition is beyond my wildest dreams."

Whilst not in the Courtaulds league, the Wykeham is a larger business than you might think, with turnover of pounds 1.4m including 70,000 meals, 30,000 bottles of wine and a mighty 200,000 pints of beer.

The bigwigs of the CBI are being booted out of their Centre Point head office in central London next Monday. The landmark Sixties tower block is undergoing a complete refurbishment, which means director general Adair Turner and his cohorts will have to make do with just two floors instead of their usual seven. Council meetings and the like will have to be held elsewhere at a venue yet to be decided. The Barbican in the City is in pole position, I hear.

The tarting up will be finished in April next year. Till then it represents just one more upheaval to be handled by the CBI's president, Colin Marshall. Our Colin is also, lest we forget, deputy chairman of BT, a company much in the news at the moment, as well as chairman of Inchcape and British Airways.

NM Rothschild corporate financier Christian Schosland, 31, is leaving to join the City PR firm Citigate's BioCommunications unit, run by Miranda Kavanagh. At Citigate Mr Schosland, a specialist in floating biotech companies, will be shifting his attention to promoting deals rather than actually doing them.

By joining the firm Mr Schosland will be travelling in the opposite direction of Stephen Ewing, who recently left Citigate to join brokers Panmure Gordon, to become an analyst.

Other moves recently include pharmaceuticals analyst Ian White, a former Kleinwort Benson bod, who has left Robert Fleming together with his deputy Sarb Klair to join TT International. TT is a London-based fund management company founded by Tim Tacchi, an investment guru in health care who used to work for Fidelity.

And then there's drugs analyst Tom Geimer, who left Henry Cooke Lumsden three months ago to join the corporate finance side of Apax Securities in Manchester.

Mr Geimer, a native of the US who settled over here "many years ago," can still not get his head around "soccer," as he calls it. Which is a pity, since Apax has been heavily involved in financing football clubs like including Leicester, Millwall and Sheffield United. The game "makes no sense to me", he murmurs.

While the fevered negotiations over the proposed merger between global accountancy firms Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse go on in smoke- filled rooms across the planet, one particular sticking point has turned up in the UK. The insolvency people at Price Waterhouse are still in the process of suing Coopers & Lybrand over the latter's role as Robert Maxwell's auditors.

PW were appointed administrators to Maxwell Communication Corporation (MCC) in December 1991. Since then insolvency partners including Mark Homan and Jonathan Phillips have worked mightily to sort out the Anglo American group in the interests of creditors, and in the process have launched legal action against the auditors of MCC, Coopers.

Lawyers working on behalf of the merger say they are working to find a way around this obstacle. They probably will. After all, all the Big Six accountancy firms have suffered from being auditors of one big corporate casualty or another during the recent recession. Ian Brindle, senior partner of PW, still has the shadow of BCCI hanging over him.

The corrupt bank, which operated in 62 countries and was shut down six years ago by regulators after years of massive fraud, was audited by PW. BCCI's liquidators Deloitte & Touche duly sued PW.

Still, Deloitte & Touche aren't merging with Coopers - yet.

Andrew Parry, a former pension fund manager with Barings and Lazards, is joining Julius Baer Investments in London as their director of equities. He will be responsible for the firm's specialist European and international equity products.

Mr Parry will report to Jonathan Minter, Julius Baer's managing director in London. Mr Minter said yesterday: "Whilst we were disappointed that our first director of equities, Jon Skeath, decided after 10 years with us to switch from investment management to research, we are exceptionally pleased to have attracted the skills and experience of Andrew Parry."

Mr Minter continued: "We are seeking to continue to grow our specialist equity business which now has a commendable track record and Andrew will provide added momentum to our strategic plans.