L&G blunder forces early update

Legal & General yesterday had to rush out a sketchy trading update two weeks ahead of schedule after accidentally emailing market-sensitive figures to analysts the night before.

The insurer was sending details of last year's third-quarter numbers along with other background information to brokers to help them to prepare for the results. A member of the investor relations team inadvertently put numbers for the most recent quarter into a spreadsheet that was sent to some of the analysts. An L&G spokesman said: "We made an error last night by sending data and wecorrected it first thing this morning."

The figures showed that L&G's new business increased 27 per cent to £1.35bn in the first nine months of the year.