Home Retail Group endured a choppy session last night, falling back despite a buoyant market trend.

Outlook So congratulations on the new job, Dr Nigel Wilson. The finance chief at United Business Media is to take on the same role at a rather bigger beast: Legal & General. How long that beast can thrive in the wild, though, is open to question. It wasn't so long ago that L&G was a tiger – sleek, fit and dynamic. Under Sir David Prosser it made a habit of defying City expectations on the upside. His strategy was simple: focus the company on doing its job better than rivals and ignore the siren calls of investment bankers. It worked, too, and L&G significantly grew its market share at the expense of rivals who either fell by the wayside or concentrated on doing deals rather than serving their customers.

With the rain putting the dampeners on the one-day cricket series against Australia, it appears that we will not see a repeat of the "Cricket in the Park" bashes that the Test sponsor Npower dubbed "the next best thing to being at the match". No bad thing, given the way it all ended. Fans were turned away by security staff who claimed that the event was over at 5pm, despite Australia's final wicket falling 45 minutes later. Diary can now reveal that this was because staff simply lost count of the number of spectators and had to close it on health and safety grounds. Let's hope Npower do rather better at keeping count of energy bills.

Q. My wife had a policy with Friends Provident. But on maturity the proceeds were not paid to her, but seem to have been claimed by an employee of the First Trust Bank, with an employee forging my wife's signature. I have complained to the bank and the Financial Ombudsman Service. FOS ruled in the bank's favour, but only because my wife and I wrongly presented our case. Our only option now seems to be to take a legal action against the bank employee, which is prohibitively expensive. AN, Northern Ireland.

Clive Cowdery, the insurance entrepreneur who bought Friends Provident last week, has met with Treasury officials who assured him that the offshore structure of his company, the Guernsey-based Resolution, won't hamper his attempts to buy insurance assets up for sale by Lloyds Banking Group.

Investors bought into Cookson yesterday and the engineering group rose by almost 4 per cent amid hopes of some short-term strength in its share price.

The world's second-largest communications services group, WPP, eased back by 3.1 per cent, or 14.5p, to 460.7p last night after UBS highlighted potential for near-term weakness in the company's stock, which has been performing strongly of late.

Having pocketed a fortune of close to £150m after the sale of the first incarnation of Resolution to Pearl for £5bn, Clive Cowdery is back in the hunt for a second.

The Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, Vince Cable, called yesterday for Sir David Walker's inquiry into banking governance to be extended in the wake of Friends Provident's capitulation to Clive Cowdery's Guernsey-based investment company Resolution under pressure from its institutional shareholders.

Outlook: And so Liechtenstein has surrendered. Following on from the tax information exchange deal with the US comes a similar one with the UK. There will be an amnesty for around 5,000 account holders who could have stashed up to £3bn in the tiny principality, together with a tacit assurance that they won't be prosecuted if they agree to assume the position and pay up. They'd be well advised to do so because it is more than people in other tax havens may be offered.