Business Diary: UBS lays down the law – on pants

News reaches us, via Reuters, of what could be a fabulous opportunity in Swiss banking – UBS is going to need some underwear inspectors. The Swiss bank has just introduced a 52-page guide for staff who have face-time with customers, an unhealthy amount of which seems to focus on under-garments. Flesh-coloured underwear and tights are mandatory, for example, and UBS also warns against the dangers of underwear that is too tight. The new rules are being trialled in five branches of the bank, but if this goes global it is going to need policing.

A bailout for the bankers' children

Things are kicking off in Battersea, South-west London, where the GMB union wants the Government to intervene in a row over whether a group of parents should be allowed to set up a new "free school" even though the borough, Wandsworth, has spare school places. The union has noticed many of the school's supporters are employed in the City, with senior bankers from institutions including Barclays, HSBC, Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Rothschild, backing the initiative. It would require £13m of public funds to acquire the site and the GMB is less than impressed. A free school for bankers, the union dubs it.

A pornographic act of revenge?

Are the following two facts connected? Earlier this week, Yahoo told 600 staff they were being made redundant. On the same day, its search engine developed an odd glitch: users looking for almost any image were directed to the same pornographic picture. The glitch was remedied after an hour or so and there's no news on how it happened. But it's never a great idea to announce job losses just before Christmas – people tend to get angry.

We should all skip the ad breaks

This cannot be true. The University of Chicago Business School has sent us research claiming that the vast majority of people do not skip through the adverts when watching recordings they've made on devices such as Sky Plus. We've searched for the small print explaining that the survey is sponsored by the advertising industry, but to no avail. Come on people, this is exactly what Sky Plus was invented for.

businessdiary@independent.co.uk