What price thousands of ruined lives?

TRUST. Either you have it or you don't. Like being pregnant, there's no halfway house. And trust is singularly lacking among consumers whose confidence has been wilfully annihilated by a series of grotesque mis-selling scandals in recent years.

Now our financial services industry is again failing to do what little it can to redeem itself in the eyes of investors.

The proposal to recompense some of the thousands who lost money in what were marketed as 'low risk' split capital investments is, as we reveal on the front page, dead in the water.

Yes, Aberdeen Asset Management, generally fingered as the bad guys in the whole affair and clearly with its reputation more on the line than most, has coughed up £1 million into a 'hardship fund' for victims.

The company also suggested an 'uplift package', offering others a potential way out of their losses, so long as they could hold on until the end of 2005. But what about all the sellers whose heads have been well below the parapet? I'm thinking of companies such as New Star, Brewin Dolphin, Quilter and Collins Stewart.

As our report shows, these companies were asked to dip into their pockets - not very deeply when you look at their profits - to support the hardship fund.

Yet so far none has, even though John McFall, head of the Treasury Select Committee which conducted a robust investigation into the debacle, has written to all of them asking where their money is.

The Financial Services Authority is conducting an investigation into the web of trust investments that collapsed when stock markets fell, revealing that they had invested in each other's funds and borrowed huge sums from banks that could not be repaid.

But the FSA, accused of failing to spot this dreadfully costly fiasco, is unlikely to rush out its report. In fact, there is no deadline for it.

Even optimists reckon we may still be in the dark this time next year. That will be too late to compensate many of the victims, some of whose lives have been ruined.

Whatever the sellers now say about how safe these products looked at the time - they were widely sold as widows and orphans investments - the reality is that thousands have had their savings wiped out.

There is simply no excuse for the perpetrators to avoid helping the hardest hit. The saga has shamed them. Refusing to do what they can, as soon as they can, is simply immoral.

ITV are World Cup losers
Michael Green's should not be the only scalp claimed as Granada and Carlton merge. If investors needed evidence of that, they had only to watch ITV's lamentable rugby World Cup coverage.

The companies bid virtually nothing for broadcast rights when rugby was considered something you did at school or watched your dad play on cold, wet Saturday afternoons.

But what penny-pinching broadcasters so palpably failed to realise - and capitalise on - was that rugby could be the new football, except better, as viewers of rugby (like the players) tend to be more upmarket and more attractive to advertisers.

But neither company appeared to have any idea of the value they were sitting on; of the opportunity to boost the top line rather than shrink costs.

They were too stingy to buy airtime from GMTV, which owns commercial airwaves before 9am, so millions who were converted to rugby during the World Cup were deprived of the pre-match build-up. And advertisers lost a chance to appeal to this new audience.

Short-sighted ITV bosses didn't think to buy footage from the BBC, which used to cover rugby, or Sky to cobble together documentaries about how our lads made it to the final, the history of England vs Australia...you get the picture.

But there again you didn't. So roll on someone with vision to head our premier commercial broadcaster.

No gusto, no glory
RETAIL group GUS last week put the lie to a widely held belief that conglomerates are inefficient and have had their day.

Firing on all cylinders and with a 44% rise in interim profits to £354 million, GUS demonstrated that without its corporate structure, Burberry would have been the victim of a takeover and investors would have missed out on its stellar turnround. The reinvention of Argos, now outperforming competitors, would not have taken place and the Experian financial business might have stalled.

GUS shares are still at a discount because it is a conglomerate. But there is nothing wrong with conglomerates per se - only with those who manage some of them.