Outlook: C&W welcomes Signor Caio with £750,000 golden hello

Lloyd's of London; Direct TV/BSkyB

Richard Lapthorne, chairman of Cable & Wireless, has finally got his man, or rather two of them. Instead of one chief executive to restore the fortunes of the beleaguered telecoms group, there are to be two, with Kevin Loosemore as chief operating officer alongside Francesco Caio, who fills the first among equals slot as the chief executive. Unfortunately this is not quite two for the price of one. Mr Caio pockets a golden hello worth a potential £750,000 for merely turning up at the office with a cheery ciao bello. Both new recruits come with gold-plated remuneration packages, but then no one's pretending that returning C&W to former glories is going to be easy.

By most accounts, Mr Caio is an excellent choice, though given his pedigree, established during the boom years of the telecoms industry at Omnitel Pronto and other once high-flying companies, it's a bit hard to figure out why he still needs to work for a living. Still, not all insiders managed to cash in on the telecoms bubble. It just seems like most of them did. Mr Caio must have been one of the unlucky ones and, by the time he formed Netscalibur, the boom was already over.

A faintly dishevelled character, he's said to be a creative genius of the type that you rarely find at the top of big organisations. As such he ought to be well complemented by Mr Loosemore, who will take care of the nuts and bolts of running the show while Mr Caio concentrates on the strategy and marketing.

He's already promising a full update in early June, when I imagine the company will formally abandon the division it currently makes between Regional and Global. Mr Caio joins at what must be the bottom of the cycle, even for the telecoms industry, where the bottom sometimes seems as unfathomable as the Marianas Trench.

All the same, he may struggle to impose unity and purpose on this far flung hotchpotch of telecom and internet assets.

The test will be in the dividend, slashed by the previous regime by two-thirds to 5.5p net. Mr Lapthorne will already have been told by the institutional shareholders that put him in place that these days investors expect to get their return as much through dividends as capital growth, so I think it unlikely he'll cut. But will the board feel confident enough to be able to declare a progressive dividend policy going forward?

That's a much tougher call with the restructuring necessary to return Global to profitability eating through the group's free cash reserves at a rate of knots. A first task, then, will be to improve retention for the benefit of shareholders. Investors will expect nothing less for the Golden Ciao Mr Caio has just received. Otherwise it might be a very different kind of ciao rather sooner than he would want.

Lloyd's of London

"Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated," said Mark Twain on reading his own obituary. Lloyd's of London must have known how he felt amid the predictions of its own imminent demise in the immediate aftermath of 11 September.

This is a dead parrot if ever there was one, many people said. Lloyd's had survived earthquakes, scandal, incompetence, crookery, asbestos and the enforced bankcrupcy of great swathes of its unlimited liability names, but the suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington was one calamity it would not outlive.

As we now know, not only did it survive, but today it seems in better financial fettle than it's been in decades. According to figures released yesterday, last year was a record one for profits, again demonstrating what an extraordinarily resiliant and adaptable beast Lloyd's of London really is. Of course, the £834m pro forma profit announced yesterday doesn't compensate for the £3.1bn lost in 2001, when Lloyd's took a £2bn hit on the World Trade Centre atrocities.

Even so, it must say something about the market's underlying attractions that it was able to commandeer £3.5bn of new capital last year, thereby allowing participants fully to benefit from the substantial upswing in premium rates that followed 11 September. Falling equity markets have hammered the capital reserves of many large insurers and re-insurers at a time when they have in any case been forced to reserve heavily against past but previously unrecognised claims, some of them dating back years.

Throughout the late 1990s, Lloyd's was perhaps more upfront in recognising these liabilities than others, so it now finds itself with proportionately more capital than many rivals and therefore able to ride the updraft in premium rates that much more profitably. Lloyd's said yesterday that six big reinsurers were refusing to pay up on a policy concerning unrecoverable losses to its Central Fund, an eventuality which says more about ability to pay than the terms of the policy.

On all fronts, Lloyd's seems to be outperforming. Claims and expenses amounted to only 98.6 per cent of premium income, against 121 per cent for US reinsurers, 105 per cent for European reinsurers, and 108 per cent for US general insurers.

It's an old truism in markets and business that just when things are at their most rosy is the time to get worried, and nowhere has that historically been more so than at Lloyd's, a specialist insurer ever willing to underwrite the risks that nobody else wants. There always seems to be something unpleasant lurking just beneath the surface at Lloyd's, and all too often these unsuspected monsters wreak a terrible revenge.

None the less, the reforms of recent years do genuinely seem to have to have improved the market's ability to cope with the calamities that constantly assail it. There could be no better a testimonial than Warren Buffett, who has sizeably increased his presence in the market over the past year.

Direct TV/BSkyB

All of a sudden, Rupert Murdoch finds himself the only buyer left in town for DirecTV, the US satellite TV company. If General Motors still wants to sell at all, it has no option but to sell to Mr Murdoch, and at what will effectively be a much lower price than that previously touted before the intervention of EchoStar Communications. Mr Murdoch has quietly bided his time, knowing that EchoStar would never successfully navigate the regulators, and it now looks as if the prize is about to fall into his lap.

When Mr Murdoch first tried to buy General Motors' controlling stake in DirecTV, it was under a complex deal that would have put all News Corp's satellite TV interests including BSkyB into a single company, Sky Global Networks. Tony Ball, chief executive of BSkyB, would have been parachuted in to run the new behemoth.

Whether that would still be true today is another matter. Relations between Mr Ball and Mr Murdoch are said by some to have soured since Mr Murdoch's son, James, was appointed to the board, and if that's the case, then Mr Ball won't be much longer for the job. It's part of a well established pattern for BSkyB CEOs. Eventually, they begin to tire of the constant interference and phone calls, not to mention the irritatingly persistent references to "Mr Murdoch's BSkyB". This is my show, not Mr Murdoch's, and we are an independent FTSE100 company, the CEO will start to say with growing conviction. There then follows a doomed attempt to declare UDI, followed inevitably by a summary execution.

Mr Ball, already widely recognised as Britain's most accomplished media executive, will presumably hang around long enough to claim his £7.5m free shares bonus, but after that it's doubtful Mr Murdoch will be able to keep him, even if he had wanted to. By then, Carlton and Granada may have merged, and the job of making the new company sing will have fallen vacant. Mr Ball once said that ITV couldn't run a bath. Shareholders would be only too pleased if he would run it for them.

jeremy.warner@independent.co.uk