Now Roman feels the chill in Siberia
* ROMAN Abramovich may have had to cancel his party at his opulent ski lodge in the Rockies, but that is nothing compared with the hardship endured by the employees of Evraz, the steelmaker he part-owns in Siberia.
Workers at its Novokuznetsk steel complex, which has cut output by 20% from pre-credit-crunch levels, have been forced to take a one-third wage cut, and 10,000 or so retired workers face having their benefits slashed in the new year.
Alexei Yurev, the plant's general director, says: "In the three months we have been feeling the crisis, we have managed to retain our entire workforce. We also have 10,500 retired ex-workers, substantially more than we have workers, and we also haven't cut their social programmes." But he adds ominously: "We can't be completely certain everything will remain as it is now." Chelsea - you could be next.
* SPOTTED in Tesco: a grocery item at £1.47 or "two for £3".
* THOUGHTS turn to summer and the sun and beaches. So what of TUI, the biggest holiday operator and owner of Thomson and First Choice? A mess is the description that springs to mind. The German parent's dividend for 2008 was nil, and the UK arm made a loss of £267 million against a profit of £7 million previously. Currently, the UK end has no fewer than four "head" offices - two in Crawley and one each in Luton and Coventry (despite ceasing flights from there) plus customer services in Salford. At Luton alone, it has eight PR officers...
* HOW we were. Remember when Sir Tom Hunter invited the BBC to his villa at Cap Ferrat, and the Scottish entrepreneur told how he was going to give away £1 billion of his fortune? The BBC went overboard with the tale, trumpeting it as the single biggest philanthropic pledge made by a Briton. Er, since then, Hunter has lost heavily on housebuilder Crest Nicholson, retirement homes developer McCarthy & Stone and Wyevale Garden Centres. This week, he took the less-than-charitable decision to seek a pre-pack administration for his USC designer clothing chain - putting 58 stores into the hands of accountants PKF, immediately buying back 43 and leaving 15, which employ 300 people, to find a buyer or close. Oh, and the villa has been sold as well.
* BUT it's not all up for Hunter. "I am tightening my belt like everybody else," he said at the weekend. "Yes, I still have the private jet but we have sold our house in the South of France. Everybody is looking at their costs, and everybody I speak to is more pessimistic about 2009. I haven't really met anyone who is immune to all this." Don't you just love the reference to the private jet?
