Business and City in Brief

PIA SEEKS REVIEW OF STANDARDS

The Personal Investment Authority, the proposed regulator headed by Sir Gordon Downey, has asked Sir Brian Jenkins, a Coopers & Lybrand partner and former Lord Mayor of London, to review the membership criteria and standards that it should apply.

Sir Brian will talk to banks, building societies, life offices and consumer groups before delivering his report.

LUCAS LOSSES

Lucas Industries is cutting 510 jobs at its diesel engine pump factories in Gillingham and Rochester and closing the Rochester site. The cuts form part of the 2,750 redundancies announced last October.

DAF ON TRACK

GKN last night agreed to resume supplies to Leyland DAF's truck and van plants after three days of negotiations with the receivers. The move should help to get production restarted.

SHAW MOVE

Arthur Shaw, the engineering company whose chairman was unseated by dissident shareholders at an extraordinary meeting on Monday, has appointed Peter Ryan as non-executive chairman. He is already non-executive chairman of Protean and Torday & Carlisle.

OPEC ACCORD

Talks in Vienna among Opec members ended yesterday with an agreement to cut oil output from 25m bpd to 23.6m bpd. The Saudi Arabian quota will be 8m bpd, down by 400,000 bpd. The deal returns Kuwait to a quota for the first time since the Gulf war.

GPA MAN QUITS

Nigel Wilson has resigned as GPA Group's chief executive- corporate ahead of an expected management reshuffle at the aircraft leasing company.

WEEKLY CLOSURES

The Thomson Corporation is to close some of its 75 free weekly papers in the UK as part of a worldwide restructuring of its newspaper business. Thomson, based in Canada, said dollars 170m ( pounds 114m) would be set aside to allow for the reorganisation.

TORRAS REJECTED

A Spanish high court judge has turned down an appeal by the Kuwait Investment Office-controlled Grupo Torras against his previous ruling rejecting its criminal lawsuit against seven former executives.

BEAR IN LONDON

London Stock Exchange membership was yesterday granted to Bear Stearns International Trading, the US securities trading house, which joins a growing number of American firms registered as market-makers in UK securities.

PARIS POST

(First Edition)

Paris postal workers are to strike from today and unions expect widespread disruption.

WORLD MARKETS

HONG KONG: Hopes of an end to the dispute between Britain and China pushed the Hang Seng index up 16.18 points to 6,065.62.

SYDNEY: Expectations of a change of government in next month's election sparked active foreign buying, leaving the All- Ordinaries index up 15.6 points at 1,612.1.

TOKYO: Featureless trading left the Nikkei 225 index 201.67 points lower at 16,916.32.

PARIS: Wall Street's morning slide pulled the CAC-40 index down by 21.32 points to 1,878.17.

FRANKFURT: Investors were cautious ahead of tomorrow's Bundesbank council meeting. The DAX index closed 0.49 points lower at 1,664.22.

MILAN: Rumours about the involvement of a minister in judicial investigations sent the MIB index down before it recovered to close unchanged at 1,105.

ZURICH: In lacklustre trading prices edged lower with the index 14.4 down at 2,130.4.

LONDON: Report, page 23.