Business Diary: Survival claims to have scared off Vedanta

Is Anil Agarwal, the billionaire owner of mining giant Vedanta Resources, running scared? Survival International, the campaigning charity that has had Vedanta in its sights for some time, claims Agarwal pulled out of a conference at London Business School just because it announced it was intending to picket the event. The Vedanta boss withdrew only two days after Survival revealed its intentions, the charity points out.

Goldman enjoys a 63-day winning streak

So much for the tough times at crisis-hit Goldman Sachs: the investment bank has just recorded the first "perfect quarter" in its 140-year history, not sustaining a trading loss on a single day of the period. On each of the 63 trading days of the first quarter of the year, Goldman's traders made a profit of at least $25m (£16.8m) – and on more than half of those days, the profit came in at $100m (£67m) or more.

BNP's analyst and his subjective views

Alan Clarke, a strategist at BNP Paribas, has been more gloomy than most about the prospects for the UK's public finances, warning yesterday that a Labour coalition with the Liberal Democrats would likely lead to a credit downgrade. So what is eating Mr Clarke? We note that BNP Paribas adds an interesting little regulatory notice to the bottom of his updates: "This is not classified as objective research".

Back from the stars to make some money

Captain Kirk is a rich man these days. Star Trek actor William Shatner is the public face of Priceline, an online travel agency that is big in North America, and he likes the business so much he has a large stake in it. Those shares are now worth $582m (£390m), according to the Toronto Sun. That should buy a few phasers. There is no word yet on whether Spock followed Kirk's logic and made a mint too.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk