Champagne corks round an Aussie hat

The 225p-a-share bid represents a 34 per cent premium to Halladale's closing price on Tuesday night.

It marks an even heftier profit on the 50p that investors had to cough up for each Halladale share when the firm braved a stock market flotation back in April 2001.

The company's board, headed by founder David Lockhart and property director Ken Lindsay, has backed the takeover deal, as have institutional investors including major shareholder Moscow Narodny Bank, which also put its weight behind a 15m share placing in 2004.

Halladale - named after one of Lockhart's favoured salmon rivers in the Pentland Hills - has undergone massive expansion since its inception in 1991. Growth that has culminated in a property portfolio close on the 1 billion mark.

In taking his company to the next level, Lockhart will have faced a number of options.

By tying the knot with one of Australia's most-respected property businesses, the 60-something Scot appears to have played a winning card.

Among the many positives are access to fresh capital and the ability to tap into Stockland's expertise in managing large-scale residential and mixed-use projects. Oh, and there's likely to be the opportunity for the odd trip down under as well.

Although nowhere near the scale of Spanish utility giant's near-12bn swoop on ScottishPower, yesterday's proposed property marriage shares something in common with the former headline-grabbing deal.

Namely, in both cases the suitors have little or no existing exposure in the UK. Stockland, with its ambition to grow a substantial foothold in Britain and beyond, is more likely to bolster operations than wield the axe.

It has been prepared to pay a top-rate price to secure the right staff and goodwill that goes with that. Expect an acceleration in activity as Scots sagacity meets antipodean grit.

Variety the key

SIR Robert Smith, a past president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland, made an interesting aside in his ICAS Aileen Beattie Memorial Lecture earlier this week.

He said that, when he was chairman of the FRC committee on audit committee guidance, a pole star of its thinking was that different types of companies needed different types of audit committee membership depending on their specific risks.

Discussing the wider role of ethics in accountancy, Smith said: "Overall we stressed that the human qualities of the people who were to be committee members - independence of mind, toughness and persistence - were more important in many cases than qualifications in accounting and finance." Just so.

As in the child and the Emperor's clothes, it is often a plain, direct, "unsophisticated" question on a company's audit that can unravel what needs to be.

There will always be an important place for technical financial expertise in any audit operation.

But so too is there a need for rough-hewn non-technical intelligence allied to a robust questioning spirit. Smith is right on the money (so to speak).

Take a bow

FLOTATION? Pah, we'll do it in our spare time, let's focus on the day job.

Further proof apparently from Standard Life that business can ebb and flow, depending on the trading backdrop and the skill of the company, whatever the underlying corporate structure.

In the year of its float, when Standard Life could be forgiven for rolling out excuses for anything lacklustre, it has lifted sales by an eyebrow-raising 47 per cent to well over 14bn.

The lion's share of the lolly has been in Britain, where sales soared nearly 70 per cent to 11.4bn.

There have been some worse opening bows in the publicly-quoted theatre.