The sad news came yesterday that Sir Derek Higgs, one of the great masters of the British corporate governance regime, died suddenly at the age of just 64. A Price Waterhouse-qualified accountant with a long history in investment banking (or, as it was known when he started out in his career, merchant banking), he was chairman of Alliance and Leicester for the last two-and-a-half years.

But he is best known, of course, for the Higgs report - the Review of the role and effectiveness of non-executive directors. While criticised by some for allegedly trying to impose uniform boardroom structures across all companies, it was attacked by others as its recommendations were not mandatory. Rather, they fell into a "comply or explain" model that upset many who preferred their checklists and tick boxes to be nice and neat.

To give you an example of how Higgs himself seemed to permit exceptions to his 'rules', here's an item we first published just a few months after his report was released...

British Land was an easy target for the media when Derek Higgs published his report on the role of non-executive directors: Higgs sits on the board at the company where the chairman and chief executive are one and the same man, property colossus John Ritblat. So the recent announcement that the company is going to split the top job by the 2004 AGM earns top marks. Well, up to a point.

Section A.3.7 of Higgs’s proposed code of best practice says that, unless the company concerned is small, no individual should sit on all three principal board committees at the same time. But in British Land’s case, Lord Burns, David Michels and Dr Chris Gibson-Smith will all be serving on British Land’s audit, remuneration and nomination committees.

Chris Gibson-Smith? The new chairman of the London Stock Exchange? Indeed, the very same. Little wonder, perhaps, that, two days after his appointment was announced, the LSE issued a statement arguing that Higgs’s proposals should be translated into principles rather than hard-and-fast rules. -- From Extraordinary Items, Financial Director, May 2003

By the way, to give you an example of how Higgs didn't intend for his recommendations to be compulsory, we've spotted that the phrase "should not" was used 28 times and "must not" just once - and even then he was quoting Walter Bagehot.

"Sometimes, even with the best brains available to government, there are inadvertent consequences of changes and we put our hands up to that." -- Jack Straw expresses his surprise that abolishing the 10p tax band hurt low-income earners. BBC Radio 5 Live 28 April 2008

No further comment required, I don't think...

Our Caribbean correspondent came across evidence that the credit crunch is even hitting the sunniest climes. A small shop in Antigua had a sign reading: “Our credit manager is Helen Waite. If you want credit, go to Helen Waite.”

Read it out loud. You’ll get it, then…

We're told that the Office of Fair Trading has launched a pilot programme by which cash payments will be made to people who provide them with information about cartels. Sounds like an opportunity for an outing of the old joke about there being only one Competition Commission. We claim our crisp fiver, if you please!

Then we read further. According to law firm CMS Cameron McKenna, the OFT's "rewards will be calculated according to a set formula and non-negotiable." Well, THAT'S anti-competitive for a start!

You'll be reading a lot of stuff about the Budget this morning (my favourite in the evening papers: "Drinkers hammered". I mean, I'm not exactly in favour of the 14p on a bottle of wine or the 55p on a bottle of whisky - but compared to a fiver for the vino and the difficulty of finding a decent scotch for less than twenty quid, it's not exactly putting the British boozer into the same league as Norway or Iceland).

But one thing really jars - the repeated comments that this is Alistair Darling's first Budget. There was the pre-Budget report in November, the subsequent announcement that the capital gains tax proposals would be looked at again, the non-dom fiasco and, of course, the sudden increase in public spending to the tune of several tens of billions in order to buy a Geordie bank. So with all the major tax and spending announcements made in the last few months, was this really his first Budget?

Then again, given the 2p cut in the rate of income tax that was actually announced a year ago, was this Darling's first Budget - or Gordon Brown's last?

* One green note: nice to see that the Chancellor who is threatening to tax plastic carriers out of existence decided to reuse Gladstone's old bag to present the Budget rather than the flashier one that his predecessor used. Or maybe he just didn't want to be seen as Gordon Brown's bag carrier.

The good folks at Business Continuity Expo have chosen today to send out a press release listing what it calls “Top ten practical tips” for surviving the floods that are currently swamping coastal areas in the south, southwest and Wales. It includes things like “Ascertain the impact of both a potential loss of water and a loss of electricity on your business activities and respond accordingly” and “If key documents or IT servers are stored in the basement consider moving them to a higher floor”.

It’s not that the advice isn’t useful, it’s just that it’s a bit late, given that the storm started in the middle of last night. So here’s the FD top ten tips instead…

1 – Find out if your employees can swim. If not, give them the day off. Unless they work in credit control in which case give them a phone and make sure they get as much cash from customers as possible: you’re going to need it.

2 – Buy a boat. Preferably a small one that won’t get stranded as soon as the waters recede. Just big enough for you, your PA and - if you're feeling generous - your financial controller.

3 - Make sure there's a TV news crew around when you get flooded so there's lots of free publicity and public sympathy for your company.

4 – Make sure words such as “plucky”, “local heroes” and “Dunkirk spirit” are used in any media coverage.

5 – Attach a very large cork to your keys, mobile phone, etc. The kind of thing that yachtsmen use. A few champagne corks tied together ought to do the trick.

6 – Contact your local BMW dealer so that you’re first in the queue to get your flood-damaged company car replaced.

7 – Buy an OS map. Study it for possible relocation opportunities, either on higher ground or away from seas, oceans, rivers, lakes, etc.

8 – Consider outsourcing absolutely bloody everything to somewhere with a decent climate.

9 – Don’t make jokes about having plenty of liquid assets on the balance sheet. Nobody likes a smart-arse accountant when it’s peeing with rain.

10 - Learn the 10 top tips about surviving a flood before the flood hits, not in the morning right in the middle of the storm.

Andrew Macfarlane was such a successful, well-liked finance director at Land Securities that his colleagues successfully nominated him for the Accountancy Age Awards Blue Chip FD of the Year in 2005 – even though he had already left the company to go to Rentokil Initial.

Despite the huge impact Macfarlane had at the once-sleepy property giant, he decided that he “missed the challenge of working for an international business”. And so he upped sticks and joined the rat-catching and lavatory hand towels company instead.

He joined at a challenging time. The group had just lost its chairman, Sir Clive Thompson, and its chief exec when Macfarlane took up his post two-and-a-half years ago – and now it’s facing very similar problems again: chairman Brian McGowan has said he will retire in May but the City also wants the head of the chief exec, Doug Flynn. That’s the price they’re demanding as Rentokil Initial faces almost certain demotion from the FTSE-100 tomorrow (Tuesday).

Will this be Macfarlane’s chance to shine again? Or will he be forced to walk the plank, too? Either way, he’s surely got a much bigger challenge than the one he first contemplated when the headhunter’s call came through.

Staff at Acas, the advisory, conciliation and arbitration service, have voted overwhelmingly to go on strike in a dispute over pay, says the BBC. Couldn't they just get around a table and - oh, forget it...

Is it me or has the world gone mad? I remember my history teacher telling me that you have to study history – "it's like studying the future. Everything is always replayed," he used to say.

He also used to bang on about the Americans invading our precious traditions, and their empire building. Which of course, we taught 'em.

Which digression brings me to online banking outfit egg, and its recent delisting of customers it deemed to have poor credit. Since it chucked 161,000 customers off its register, it has been revealed that a "substantial amount" of those customers are, in fact, in possession of good credit ratings. And no one was safe from the exodus: even a city worker who earned £1m last year and owns £100,000 in Citibank shares – Citibank is the parent company of egg – received the dreaded letter of poor credit.

Labour MP Nigel Griffiths, former consumer affairs minister, is to meet with the egg chief executive Ian Kerr to find out why they're culling such vast numbers of clients so suddenly. Griffiths has also asked the Office of Fair Trading to investigate complaints made by these so-called poor creditors.

Then, against all the apparent teaching of history that if one pays one's bills on time, one should not come into trouble with one's creditors, Treasury Select Committee chairman John McFall suggested that credit card firms might be withdrawing accounts from people who pay their bills on time. Some say this is because they can't make enough money from good customers, and can make a harder, faster quid from higher rates paid (eventually, or ever) by bad debtors.

If this is true, and egg and other credit card companies are blacklisting good customers in the hopes of making more money off the bad payers, I find it highly entertaining – or is it more terrifying? - that this can be allowed to continue.

Have we not yet learned the lesson from our US counterparts the potential fallout from lending to riskier clients who might not be able to pay you back, who can even file for bankruptcy at last resort - meaning unpaid debts will never see the light of day? What will happen, then, if all the bad debtors are given higher limits on their credit cards by rival providers? And what would then happen in the credit markets if all these borrowers can't keep up repayments? What will UK lenders do with all the debt they have bought and cannot sell on?

Either I was wrong in cussing my teacher's assessment that we replay the same mistakes again and again in spite of the lessons of history - or the credit card companies have got Alzheimer's.

... read this guide to the subprime credit crisis. Truly insightful!

http://tinyurl.com/2nwgtl