Miller the diplomat must be careful not to play into rebel hands

Published on Saturday 5 January 2008 15:18

KEITH Miller will need more than his usual dollop of diplomacy when he presents a trading update for his family's building empire this week.

It seems likely that the figures will show a steady rise in turnover and profits, if the most recent interim statement was anything to go by. A good set of results will strengthen the hand of rebel family shareholders, led by Keith's cousin James Miller, who want to be able to flog their shares on the open market.

Analysts predict 2008 will be a year of mergers and acquisitions in the house building sector as companies seek to huddle together to protect themselves from economic trouble.

Better to cash in while the company is doing well, some may argue, than take the risk that the housing and commercial property markets will take a simultaneous nosedive that could destroy any premium.

On the other hand, any bad news in the Miller Group figures could allow the same shareholders to accuse the boss of mismanaging the company and demand that he be replaced.

I suspect Keith Miller, who is arguably the driving force behind the company's excellent record over the past decade, will present 2007's results in a good light, but will warn of trouble ahead and the need to pull together.

That is unlikely to calm down the shareholders who have been campaigning on this issue for nearly two years. They are not happy with the price put on their shares by the company's internal market mechanism.

Ernst & Young, the accountancy firm that is advising James Miller's Aligned Shareholder Group, may come up with a buyer with a better price. If that happens, diplomacy will become irrelevant and market forces are likely to take over.

Change may be blowing in the wind

WIND farms provoke negative reactions from two overlapping groups of people: those who believe the farms are ugly, and those who believe they do not make economic sense.

The second lot will be asking themselves some serious questions this weekend with the news that Scottish & Southern Energy (SSE) is to splash out more than 1bn for Irish wind farm group Airtricity.

SSE chief executive Iain Marchant is a canny type and not given to dishing out cash on big vanity projects. So the assumption has to be that wind farm economics stack up.

The deal will make SSE the UK's biggest windfarm operator and give it a route into European markets and, inevitably, China.

It will pit SSE directly against Iberdrola, the Spanish energy group which last year swallowed up SSE's rival, ScottishPower, which is a global leader in renewable power.

If wind farms do not make economic sense, then a multibillion-pound international delusion has taken hold.

That just leaves the first group of objectors, those who think wind farms don't fit in with the scenery.

Their fears of a landscape covered in whirring turbines are made worse by the fact that applications are dealt with one by one, with no apparent strategic direction from Holyrood.

A better idea would be to establish national no-wind farm zones in large scenic areas, for example the Highlands north of the Great Glen.

Applications for farms outside the scenic areas could then be fast-tracked without doing serious damage to Scotland's image.

Royal Mail needs to get it sorted

A CAUTIONARY tale for anyone tempted to send an urgent item via the Royal Mail.

I ordered a phone from T-Mobile nine days ago which was meant to arrive on the Monday. The postie tried to deliver it on the Saturday, but I was out, so he slipped one of those red cards through the letterbox.

The handset was sent by so-called "Special Delivery", so you might expect it would get some sort of priority treatment. I went to the delivery office on the Monday, but was told it was out at the depot and would reappear in due course.

I tried again after trudging through the snow on Thursday, and was told it was still out.

But here's the weird bit – it turns out that it had been redelivered, wrongly, to T-Mobile at 7.40 that morning. Of course the Royal Mail could not tell me the precise address. So the thing is untraceable now.

Anecdotal evidence and comments from the delivery office suggest this was not an isolated case.

For an organisation in the communication industry, the Royal Mail has a lot of sorting out to do.