Pembroke: Back in the black

THE FORMER arbitrageur Ivan Boesky will not, after all, live out the rest of his days in abject poverty. It emerges that Mr Boesky, who paid US securities regulators dollars 100m to settle insider-trading charges, stashed just a little money in his wife's bank accounts before entering prison for two years in 1989.

Now Mr Boesky, 56, will get it back, although his wife, Seema, appeared less than keen to return it to him. After a six-week divorce trial, more details are emerging of the couple's settlement, reached this week, which will see Mrs Boesky surrender dollars 20m in cash and a dollars 2.5m home in La Jolla, California, to her former husband, and pay him dollars 2m a year for life.

Mr Boesky's claim to the money was somewhat problematic, since his settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission supposedly represented all of his worldly wealth. During the trial, therefore, his lawyers argued not that the assets were his, but that his activities - legal and otherwise - had made Mrs Boesky, heiress to the Beverly Hills Hotel, 'rich beyond her imagination'. Mr Boesky, they argued, was thus entitled to half her surviving fortune, about dollars 50m. Tricksy, huh?

The SEC has admitted defeat. It says it will not seek disgorgement of Mr Boesky's new-found fortune.

THE ROTATING door at Hill Samuel Investment Management just won't stop spinning. No sooner is Alan Greenhorn bedded in at State Street, the US fund managers, after six months' gardening leave, than Bruce Pullman, who replaced him at HSIM, ups and goes - 'amicably' according to HSIM - after just eight weeks in the job.

ARGUABLY THE most gruesome video to circulate the City since Robert Maxwell - The Autopsy is on view at the Lloyd's insurance market. Distressed underwriting members have gone before the cameras to plead their imminent destitution; the result is What Price Fidentia, prepared by that arch ginger group, the Lloyd's Names Action Groups' Working Party.

The 15-minute film is peopled by a collection of suits and a serious-looking woman whose eyes follow the autocue with all the spontaneity of the 'Chin-up Mr Cholmondeley-Warner' Mercury commercials acted by Harry Enfield. It is larded with titles such as 'The Failure of Regulation at Lloyd's', 'Living with the consequences' and 'Sharing the costs'.

Our correspondent was invited to share the cost by paying the working party pounds 7 for access to the video. He grubbed a free copy elsewhere.