Business Diary: Compass get its money's worth

Full marks to Compass, the catering services company, which has been entertaining friends and business partners this Wimbledon fortnight. Other companies are not ashamed to admit the day out is an unabashed jolly for guests, but not Compass. Once lunch is finished, its guests are whisked off on a two-hour tour of the catering facilities Compass provides to the tournament – whatever matches that means them missing.

King takes his office to centre court

Also missing a good deal of tennis is Mervyn King, the Bank of England Governor. Though he spent Monday at Wimbledon, our spies tell us that he had only half an eye on Centre Court, spending every spare minute ploughing through spreadsheets he'd brought from the Bank. No doubt Andy Murray's gritty performance also gave him inspiration for the battles ahead with the Treasury.

Gazprom's marketing team is in trouble

When the Russian energy giant Gazprom launched a joint venture with a Nigerian firm, it couldn't be bothered to think of a swanky name for the company, so it simply chose an amalgamation of its name and that of the African country, reports Brand Republic. Unfortunately, Nigaz has certain connotations in some of the markets in which Gazprom does business.

Clarkson drives into more hot water

Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble again, this time with car insurers. In a recent Top Gear, Clarkson suggested that parents baulking at the cost of insuring their children's cars register the motors in their names and add the kids as named drivers. This practice, known as "fronting", is "a common fraud", warns a furious Hayley Parsons, of the insurance website Gocompare.com.

Turkey teaches us how to do things properly

Think Britain had a tough first quarter of the year with, we learnt yesterday, a 2.4 per cent decline in the value of the economy? Spare a thought for Turkey, whose GDP decline came in at 13.8 per cent over the same three-month period. Now that's a proper recession.

Number of the day: 198

The number of quarters since the UK had a worse economic growth figure than 2009's first-quarter -2.4 per cent.