Business Diary: Ryanair's love-in with Stelios continues

No let-up in Ryanair's attempts to get up the nose of Stelios, the founder of easyJet (with a legal action pending against it after previous insults, you would have thought the Irish airline might see that discretion is the better part of valour). Its launch of flights to Greece are promoted with the line: "Stelios's home market gets really low fares for first time."

Don't vote if you want to sell up

Planning on selling your home over the next couple of months? Start praying for a general election campaign that generates little public interest. Your Move, the estate agent, points out that elections with high turnouts – notably in 1987 and 1992 – are usually accompanied by falls in housing transaction numbers. But 2005, when turnout was low, saw a sharp increase in properties changing hands during the campaign.

When Poundland embraced Europe

Poundland's Northern Irish outlets are about to start accepting euros, in the hope of attracting more customers from south of the border. €1 isn't yet enough to buy you a Poundland product, but the way sterling has been performing, it shouldn't be too long before customers from Eire get change from their purchases.

Time to clock off soon

Reading this during your lunch hour? If so, make sure you take your full 60 minutes, because today is officially "Work your proper hours day". It's aimed at the 50 per cent of British workers who work more than their contractual hours each week, typically without any overtime payments. Chance would be a fine thing, say all those people moved on to short-time working during the recession.

Sheffield United in the medals hunt

Happy days for Sheffield United fans, who might just be about to see their club win something for a change (no offence, Blades). The club has been nominated for the Hollis Awards, gongs handed out in the sponsorship business. Alongside nominees such as Barclays Bank and British Gas, Sheffield United is up for an award for a deal it did with VisitMalta.com. Well, you've got to get away from the steel city occasionally.

Number of the day: £340m

The value of the loan from the European Investment Bank to Jaguar Land Rover, owned by Tata, completed yesterday.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk