Leighton and his inside line at Sainsbury

THE rather closer than comfortable links between Allan Leighton and Sainsbury boss Justin King are raising eyebrows, given Financial Mail's revelation last weekend that the Royal Mail chief is poised to make a £5 billion bid for the supermarket group.

Leighton has already sounded out members of the Sainsbury family, who together own about 35% of the company.

As we pointed out last week, if the putative bid succeeds, he clearly sees a role for King, with whom he worked closely at Asda.

Leighton also feels there is room in his top team for two other former colleagues from his Asda days, Mike Coupe and Gwyn Burr, who are already installed in the hierarchy at Sainsbury.

But now it has emerged that there are even closer links than a shared Asda history between Leighton and Burr, who was drafted in as customer services director.

She is on a one-year contract with Sainsbury supplying the services from her company, Resultant Team, to sort out at boardroom level the troubled supermarket chain's rather wayward relations with its long-suffering customers.

While shareholders and shoppers are probably delighted that the group has finally decided to look more closely at the needs of its customers than previously, perhaps both sets of stakeholders should be interested in looking more closely at the Resultant Team. For in that boardroom alongside Burr sits her fellow director and founding member - a certain Allan Leighton.

Sainsbury is keen to point out that Leighton has no involvement of any kind in Resultant Team's work with it, though he does have a stake in the consultancy company.

Ah, says Sainsbury, Burr has signed 'confidentiality agreements' and the group is delighted to work with her.

It would, of course, be asking the impossible to expect executives not to turn to valued colleagues when they are trying to put together a topflight executive team, particularly one who would face the demands that turning Sainsbury around is likely to make.

It would also be unrealistic to think that former colleagues would not maintain contact, and even discuss the problems and demands of their new jobs.

But the extremely close ties between Leighton, as a possible bidder for Sainsbury, and several of that group's senior executives raise potentially embarrassing questions about whether information on the company's performance might have been shared - and whether Leighton gave his former colleagues any insight into his takeover thinking.