Odds are against Sky rebels

BSKYB will not be another Carlton. Big battalion shareholders can huff and puff as much as they like at the house of Murdoch but they will not be able to blow it down. The best that can be expected is the regal head of Lord St John of Fawsley on a pikestaff.

But then, what better can be expected from a 74-year-old City neophyte who was so confused by the process he thought he was appointing a director general not a chief executive?

The hope must be that the cathartic experience of the past few days will persuade the puppet master Rupert Murdoch to accept that BSkyB does need to change. At the moment shareholders are in the dark on almost everything.

How much will James Murdoch be paid? What are the terms of his contract? What is the payoff for his predecessor Tony Ball? He was deeply unhappy about his overnight transition from boss to underling and only reluctantly added a positive spin to the board succession statement.

Moreover, while Lord Jacob Rothschild is a terrific financier, most of his activity in the past has been outside the public arena, he is 67 and is a pal and business associate of Rupert.

Not quite the counterweight that hostile shareholders like Morley and Standard Life might want to see.

The reality is that investors in BSkyB do not have any realistic chance of defeating the house of Murdoch. Sky believes it has up to 45% of the votes in the bag with the support of some American allies.

The risk for the non-family investors is that BSkyB will simply become another vehicle for empire building. Instead of paying down the debt and rewarding investors for their patience, cash will be siphoned off from BSkyB for investment in Murdoch's other European satellite operations such as Sky Italia.

No one would blame them for selling the shares in the market and cutting and running. If Rupert thinks he can run Sky as a personal fiefdom, let him do so.

But not with equity provided by your pension fund and mine.

Marks‘ slip

THE glory days of rebirth at Marks & Spencer are over.

The worrying thing is that Roger Holmes and his team are shifting the goalposts by putting all the emphasis on investment in financial services, Simply Food and homeware, at a time when womenswear - the core of the business - appears to have come unstuck.

Fortunately the bottom line is better because of the work M&S has been doing on battening down costs and improving the supply chain.

But there is a feeling that despite a consumer boom and strong sales figures from the High Street, it is a bit stuck in a groove. This is a combination of bad luck and judgment. No one can blame Holmes and his team for having to discount knitwear after the kind of summer and autumn experienced.

M&S is no more able to control the weather than Network Rail, although it hopefully has more wit about dealing with it.

But certainly, at the fashion, designer and formal wear end of the market it has slipped below the best in the industry with Debenhams - despite the distraction of a bidding war - demonstrating it has got the formula more right. So thinking caps will be needed if M&S is to restore its clothing share to the 13% of its glory days.

Despite the mishap with the &more credit card launch, present customers seem to want the new offer with a drop-out rate of just 3%. But again there are problems. Cards are not the flavour of the moment and a rise in interest rates may provide a psychological bar to going mad with plastic.

Shares in M&S have gone from being the best performing in the sector in a bear market to severe under-performers in a recovering market. This may be partly because there is no takeover premium to be had, since it is seen as too big a bite for the private equity groups.

Investors who want a better return from M&S may have to wait. It will be some time before the benefits of the new investments come through, if at all.

Foot-dragging

DARK hints from Financial Secretary to the Treasury Ruth Kelly that 'legal confidentiality' may hinder publication of the Penrose report into Equitable Life look like foot-dragging.

The million or so Equitable policyholders whose savings have been devastated by the fiasco deserve better.

To its credit the Financial Services Authority published the findings of its own inquiry - legal criticisms and all - in record time. The Chancellor must order the same, otherwise the Treasury will rightly face charges of cover-up and doing nothing to restore confidence in savings.