City People

A COLLEAGUE was playing the American version of Trivial Pursuit when he espied a question about Barclay Knapp, a famous US Air Force General who led a negotiating team to Korea in 1969. During the meeting General Knapp out-stared a North Korean General over a period of eleven hours.

The Trivial Pursuit question was: "What did General Knapp say to the North Korean General?" The answer: "Nothing."

My colleague wondered whether the General could possibly be related to Barclay Knapp, 42, president and chief executive officer of NTL, the US telecoms giant, who was in London yesterday to announce the pounds 8bn takeover of CWC's residential cable subsidiary.

Indeed he was: the late General was the NTL man's dad.

THE SECOND annual report on the Government's performance, published, yesterday cost pounds 2.99 - down from pounds 5.99 last year. Is this a testament to the Government's conquest of inflation - or to lack of demand for the report?

JUST OVER a year after leaving Citibank to set up his own consultancy advising hedge funds, Neil MacKinnon is taking his currency strategy skills back to a bank, this time Merrill Lynch.

Mr MacKinnon admits of his hedge-fund advisory service: "Unfortunately it was probably not a good time to set it up with all those financial time bombs going off, the Asia downturn and the hedge fund crisis. It just proved too difficult to continue."

Mr MacKinnon replaces Mike Rosenberg, the previous senior currency strategist at Merrills who left recently for Deutsche Bank. Mr MacKinnon says his role will be slightly different in that he will be dedicated solely to foreign exchange strategy.

Despite the turmoil, he is convinced that hedge funds aren't finished. With stricter regulations now in place, "hedge funds are alive and well and have a great future".

TOAD, the car alarms maker, is reporting its first-half results on 11 August - the same day as the solar eclipse.

The company is so worried about analysts and journalists disappearing off to Cornwall to view the eclipse - and missing its announcement - that it has decided to hold its own "Eclipse Viewing" at the Tower Hotel in London. The company is promising bubbly, croissants and pairs of dark glasses.

Toad is not alone in suffering eclipse anxiety. One telecoms consultancy, AxiComis, is shipping all 50 of its staff to a prime site in France to see the eclipse - which coincides with its annual corporate get-together.

As for the other big companies announcing their results on 11 August, BSkyB says: "Our results will eclipse everyone else that day anyway," and CGU admits it is not doing anything because it is a "boring company", while Colt Telecom wouldn't answer the phone when I called them.

Looks like Toad has the jump on the rest of them.

THE TRUSTEES who guard the independence of Reuters, the global news agency, have appointed Swedish businessman Pehr Gyllenhammar as their new chairman. The 18-strong board, set up in 1984, holds a "golden share" to protect the agency's independence.

Mr Gyllenhammar, 64, ran Volvo for 22 years up to 1993 and now chairs Britain's biggest composite insurer CGU (the boring one - see above).