Business Diary: The BBC decamps to Switzerland en masse

This year's World Economic Forum in Davos is supposed to be a slimmer affair. Delegate numbers are down and media groups have been asked to send fewer journalists. Good to see that the licence-payer funded BBC is complying. Five different journalists from the Beeb – not even beginning to count production staff – had filed stories from Davos before midday yesterday.

Learning the lessons of Cadbury's defence

Here's a seminar worth attending for champions of British business. Roger Carr is to speak at the Said Business School in Oxford on "Hostile Bids and Takeovers". The Cadbury chairman knows a bit about the topic – though he was powerless to stop Kraft buying the chocolate company, Mr Carr has been on the winning side plenty of times – mostly as a hostile bidder.

If at first you don't succeed...

Another run-in for Express Newspapers with the Advertising Standards Authority. The Daily Express, the self-styled "World's greatest newspaper", puffed a promotion with Sainsbury's on its front page but buried the crucial small-print inside. Still, we all learn from our mistakes – and this is only the media group's sixth ASA censure in the past five months.

Ethical group drops the media in the soup

Ping. An email arrives from the Ethical Company Organisation, warning us to disregard various messages it has sent this week on the matter of Cadbury's takeover by Kraft. Apparently, they contained the odd inaccuracy "which might get your publication sued".

Tall stories from the management gurus

It is not for us to say management schools are a waste of time, but their staff do seem a tad under-occupied. How else to explain the paper from the good folk at the Rotterdam School of Management? It explains that taller footballers are penalised more often for fouls than shorter team-mates. "Ambiguous tackles leading to a foul in football are more likely to be attributed to the taller of two players," it concludes.

Number of the day: 2 million

The number of potholes on UK roads, says the RAC, which wants VAT on petrol spent on fixing them.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk