Bollor?s chairman of a major competitor in the form of the French advertising group Havas it is totally unacceptable

Bollor?s chairman of a major competitor in the form of the French advertising group, Havas, it is totally unacceptable.The potential for conflict of interest is only too apparent As members of the Aegis board, M. Bollor? two directors would have access to the company’s innermost secrets – its strategy, its pitches, its acquisition targets and its management accounts. It would be naive to think that both the outline and the detail of these commercial confidences wouldn’t go straight back to M. Bollor?who with his other hat on would use them to instruct his plans at Havas.It is still unclear what M Bollor? ultimate intentions might be with Aegis. Even those who have talked to him about it are none the wiser His position is one of Gallic inscrutability.

Yet presumably they are eventually to bring about a merger of Havas and Aegis, however illogical this might seem from Aegis’s point of view Here again, M Bollor? presence on the board would be an unhelpful one. If he’s got a merger proposal that would be in the interests of all Aegis shareholders, then he should put it.What he really wants to do, it would seem, is use his minority shareholding to control the company. This is still a perfectly acceptable, relatively common modus operandi on the French corporate scene. Yet for obvious reasons, it is very much frowned upon on our Anglo-Saxon shores.Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP is out of Takeover Panel purdah next week, when the advertising Goliath becomes free again to bid for Aegis. This is an advertising soap with a lot more mileage in it yet.So farewell then, John StudzinskiJohn Studzinski has looked destined to move on from HSBC from the moment his co-head of investment banking, Stuart Gulliver, was given responsibility for most of the job. The ambassadorial, advisory role that Studs was given as a sop was all very well, but he’s still too young, ambitious and addicted to his trade to be put out to pasture. The new position was never going to satisfy such a consummate networker and workaholic.Now he’s off to Blackstone, leaving everyone wondering what is to become of HSBC’s ambitions in investment banking once he’s gone.

Recruited three or four years back from Morgan Stanley, his brief was to use HSBC’s global reach, contacts and balance sheet to build the investment banking operation into a force to be reckoned with – an advisory business that could stand alongside the best of them. Citigroup, the only other truly global bank, has managed it, so why not HSBC?Ironically, there have been a number of signs recently of the strategy paying dividends. HSBC is currently involved in a number of Europe’s biggest takeover battles, including Lakshmi Mittal’s bid for Arcelor, E.ON’s proposed takeover of Endesa, and Ferrovial’s bid for BAA. Yet I’m not altogether sure HSBC ever really had the stomach for what it would take to join the bulge-bracket firms of Wall Street, or was prepared to make the necessary investment. Nor is it entirely clear what an investment bank really is any longer, with the boundaries between advice, securities trading, private-equity, structured finance and conventional corporate lending increasingly blurred.

The high-profile bit of investment banking -straight mergers and acquisitions advice – is these days a comparatively minor part of the genre.It is in this part of the garden – persuading clients to do deals – that Studs’s talents really lie. Was HSBC ever prepared to pay the mega salaries, or tolerate the the overblown egos, necessary to excel at these rarefied heights of the investment banking game? Now that Studs is going, Mr Gulliver can be relied on to run a ship more in keeping with HSBC’s parsimonious culture. That doesn’t mean that HSBC is abandoning the chase, but it will undoubtedly be a less exuberant approach, more firmly based on the trading side of investment banking, from here on in.j.warner independent.co.uk. Corporate activity rumours have returned to the insurance sector, although judging by the reaction in the market most traders have given up hope of any deals being struck. After months of betting that the French insurance giant AXA would make a play for Prudential, the story doing the rounds yesterday was that AXA has changed its target and is considering making an offer for Aviva, the UK’s largest general insurance group.
Some analysts believe Aviva makes a better fit for AXA than Prudential, even if it does mean a bid would have to be about 25 per cent more than it would have had to pay for Prudential.If a bid does come for Aviva, traders expect to see the price of Prudential shares fall by at least 10 per cent, as the stock has been boosted by a bid premium for several months.