Business View: Bloomer may soon start to wilt if he can't put the Pru in the pink

Over lunch the other day, a senior financier was telling me why Jonathan Bloomer was much better suited to being chief executive of the Pru than his predecessor, Sir Peter Davies. Being a former accountant, Mr Bloomer was more qualified to get to grips with the complex financial and actuarial concepts than Sir Peter - a marketing man. Mr Bloomer also pays more attention to detail. Being much lower profile, he avoids putting himself in the sights of MPs and regulators who are only too willing to take a pop at the Pru. And similarly, his large ego does not rub people up the wrong way, as the current Sainsbury's boss has been known to.

"That said," he added, "he's just not convincing. I can't see Bloomer lasting."

Last week, when the Pru announced some pretty disappointing new business figures, I called the financier. "The knives will be dripping with blood soon," he said. Certainly Mr Bloomer looked a little forlorn as he talked about regulatory uncertainty putting off potential purchasers of Pru products in the UK. It might have washed but for Aviva (that's Norwich Union to you and me) coming over all bullish earlier on in the week.

He couldn't even announce the sale of the Pru's controlling stake in Egg as a distraction. Talks, believed to be with either Royal Bank of Scotland or MBNA or both, have not come to any conclusion. Critics of the Pru, and there are more than a few, point out that Egg never became the revolutionary internet bank it was meant to be, ending up as a credit card and savings business whose competitive advantage was price rather than branding or efficiency.

The next few weeks could be critical. With a new chairman, Sir David Clementi, breathing down his neck, institutions still smarting over last year's dividend cut and the weak dollar making the growth of the Pru's Asian business less important to the bottom line, he really needs to deliver something encouraging. Or else he will find that being an improvement on his predecessor is not enough.

Penrose is no Hutton

As we heralded four months ago, the findings of the Penrose inquiry into Equitable Life show there is something for the Serious Fraud Office to investigate. All will hinge on whether the £700m reinsurance contract, which Equitable struck with a subsidiary of GE in its last few months before it collapsed, was a genuine deal or a cynical attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the auditors and regulators.

The fact that the Treasury is the one to call in the SFO is significant. It has everything to gain if fraud can be proven. This will show that the regulators were not at fault and so the policyholders (of which I am one, I must confess) are not entitled to a penny of compensation.

It will also let the Financial Services Authority off the hook, which is crucial, as Gordon Brown is promoting our regulator as the template for how watchdogs should keep European financiers in check. He has ensured that the new Committee of European Banking Supervisors will be based in London. Though it will be chaired by a Spaniard, the betting is that the director general will be from the UK, with either FSA chairman Callum McCarthy or his oppo John Tiner looking like good candidates.

The Penrose inquiry was never going to be Hutton, however much critics of Mr Brown try to spin it. And the Chancellor has now neutered what little damage it could have caused.

Why so coy, Mr Green?

The usually garrulous Philip Green has been rather quite recently. Last January, he was proclaiming that Arcadia - the Dorothy Perkins, Top Shop and Burtons chain he had just bought - was soundly beating the competition over Christmas, and that his other business, the downmarket Bhs, was more than holding its own.

This January, he has been rather quiet. Everyone from Marks & Sparks to Woolies via Safeway (all of whom he has tried to buy) has fessed up about how good or bad the festive season was. But not Mr Green. I emailed him to ask why (he has decided not to speak to me in person since I revealed he wasn't actually going to bid for Safeway). And he replied: "When you are private, you don't have to publish information."

Some might interpret this as suggesting he only shouts from the rooftops when he has good news. I merely think that modesty's the new black in his part of the fashion industry.

j.nisse@independent.co.uk