It's good to see that reason has prevailed in some of the market's ongoing disputes and that Merrill Lynch and Sumitomo have finally come to an agreement over the copper-trading debacle of a few years ago.
If you remember, one of Sumitomo's traders, Mr Yasuo Hamanaka, racked up losses of about $2.6 billion (€2.77 billion) in unauthorised trades. (It pales into insignificance beside Nick Leeson's losses of course, but someone has to be the benchmark for rogue trading.)
Basically, Sumitomo claimed that Merrill, as well as other firms, should have known that the trades were not legitimate ones. The case has dragged on (as anything to do with the legal world does) despite the fact that Hamanaka has been in prison for the past two years.
It's interesting that the trader got done for fraud and forgery fairly quickly, but the companies still slugged it out in apportioning blame.
Obviously, an important point, since $2.6 billion means a lot to any Japanese bank given the performance of that sector over the past 10 years.
Anyway Merrill has not admitted any wrongdoing but it has paid a $275 million settlement - which probably just about covers the legal costs.
Naturally, not admitting anything was extremely important as far as Merrill was concerned. It was, after all, rather like a publican who's just served 20 pints to a well-built 14 year old - full of regret that it happened but, well, how was he to know that the customer shouldn't have been there in the first place?
Meanwhile, a more recent dispute and one of which I'd only vaguely been aware, has also been settled. This was between Oneview.net, a service provider, (sooner or later the dot.coms had to get their hands dirty in the real world too) and its parent company Freecom.net.
Back in March, Oneview accepted a takeover bid from Freecom.net but, since then, some "differences of opinion" arose between both sets of directors about the direction of the business. Interestingly, though, for legal and regulatory reasons they couldn't put the offer document on the website. People who were interested had to use the time-honoured snail-mail method of writing for it, which kind of defeats the purpose of having everything at the click of a switch, I'd have imagined.
The roots of the dispute seem to date from the initial takeover where Freecom.net thought it was getting a customer base of 6,000 long-term accounts, only to find out it turned out to be rather less than that. Some of the accounts duplicated customers so Freecom.net ended up short a few thousand customers relative to its expectations.
The Oneview directors resigned and eventually agreed to hand back nine million Freecom.net shares which they had received in exchange for their original Oneview shares. The shares, at the time they handed them back, were worth about £15 million (€19 million) so it's not surprising things got a bit heated.
There's always a difficulty, I suppose, in assessing whether you're buying a pig in a poke when you're bidding for another company, particularly in the history-less dot.com sector. If you don't ask the right questions, nobody is going to give you the right answers. (How often has that upset people, me included!) It's interesting that corporate companies can be somewhat economical with the information they supply to prospective buyers but, with so much money at stake these days, nobody is going to just sit back and lick their wounds without trying to do something about it.
I suppose poor Bob Ayling is licking his wounds too at the moment. Actually, I don't know why I say "poor" Bob Ayling because, of course, he got a whacking great settlement from BA when it put him out to pasture. But of course he didn't get a settlement for his early retirement from the management board of the Dome given that his position there was unpaid.
It's a constant source of amazement to me that people like Ayling are feted for their disasters. He "took the rap" for BA's decline and was immortalised into unpopularity when Lady Thatcher covered up the newly painted tailfin on a model BA plane with a hanky. Actually, I thought painting the tailfins was the one rather nice idea he had. Never mind, though, on to the Dome, which has caused enough outpourings of grief from the British print media to fell a small forest.
The Dome should be allowed to sink without trace but it's become such a political hot-potato that sinking without trace couldn't be an option. Ayling has taken the rap for that one too and, even if the chalice were poisoned, the business media seems to have oodles of sympathy for him.
Why? He's been at the helm of at least two companies which have performed abysmally and, in a personal sense, has done OK out of it.
I've no doubt that the Dome was always going to be a disaster (why did politicians think that people gave a toss about the Millennium other than to party on January 1st and hope that their computers would work the next day?), but BA is an excellent franchise. However, new chief executive Rod Eddington is probably wondering how exactly he managed to preside over a 98 per cent fall in profits this year.
I suppose that Bob will bob back again as a director of another company - he's lost passengers, he's lost visitors, maybe he could get a job in London Transport's lost property office next?
No new jobs for the former directors of Boo.com in the Bright Station company which has bought its technology. I nearly fell off my chair when I read that the technology had cost Dan Wagner £250,000 to buy, but it had cost Boo.com £70 million to develop. Talk about getting a bargain - it's a pity Boo.com hadn't been showing value like that on its site, it would never have gone bust.
Hopefully, Bright Station can get whatever it bought working, in contrast to Boo.com's efforts. It goes to show that, amid the ruins, there's always something worthwhile to be found.
