So, Citigroup is to buy Egg, the online bank, from Prudential for £575m. In late 2005, Pru bought back the remaining 21% of Egg for £200m. So in little over a year, Egg has lost almost half the value that Pru executives put on the business. A simplistic view, but no doubt telling.

Despite Purudential winning contracts to provide life assurance products to Citigroup's consumer banking customers in Thailand, Indonesia and the Philipines, it seems that Pru still got its maths wrong.

As Citibank looks for a new chief financial officer, chief executive Chuck Prince has said that he wants the headhunters’ search to focus on candidates who could succeed him in the top job, says today’s FT.

There is, of course, quite a history of FDs succeeding their bosses to the top slot, but we struggle to think of a case where an FD is recruited with the specific intention that they become CEO in due course.

Readers who have been with Financial Director for a while may remember that we conducted a piece of analysis back in 2003 to see whether CEOs who had been FDs were any good in the top job. It’s an interesting question because, while obviously the FD knows everything that’s going on in a business, the FD isn’t necessarily the prime candidate to lead it.

We looked at the FTSE-350 and found 58 chief execs who had been FD, either at that company or elsewhere. Of the 58, 34 had outperformed the market in total shareholder returns – pretty compelling evidence, we think, that FDs do indeed make good CEOs. Moreover, of the 24 who had underperformed, half a dozen of them had done so by less than 4%.

But if you look at the league table carefully, you find an interesting thing: the companies where FDs-turned-CEOs had done best were companies such as Man Group, Amlin, Pillar Property, and other businesses where the emphasis is strongly on ‘the numbers’ rather than marketing or engineering. Top of the list was Paul Walker at Sage, the business that makes software for… accountants! Bottom of the list? Martin Sorrell at advertising giant WPP, if only because he’d destroyed so much value in the late 1980s that he had yet to make it up again.

So it looks good for whoever the next CFO of Citibank is going to be.

In the wake of Enron's collapse, financial regulators around the world decided - quite rightly - to sharpen up their acts. It wasn't just an improvement of processes that was required but a vast improvement in public and investor confidence. Sarbanes-Oxley was introduced in the US; combined codes published in the UK.

The Financial Reporting Council was  tasked with regulating the accounting profession. One of the FRC's organisations, the Accountancy Investigation and Discipline Board, was tasked with disciplining accountants deemed to have acted negligently with, for the first time, the power to conduct tribunals in the public gaze.

So to the AIDB's first tribunal since its conception in 2003.  It had laid complaints against former Mayflower finance director, David Donnelly, and the collapsed bus-maker's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers. However, yesterday those complaints were unceremoniously dumped by the tribunal.

Unfortunately, we can't get to the bottom of the decision - as we write this, the AIDB was debating which parts of the judgment to make available to the public and which to keep private. It seems it has a different understanding of the word public than most!

While the AIDB says that hearings will be made in the public eye, except in "exceptional circumstances" where the tribunal decides this will not be in the interests of justice, could the decision not to publish the entire judgment - which acccoring to the Financial Times criticises the AIDB - have more to do with saving AIDB blushes than justice?

For a first attempt at a public tribunal, the AIDB could have done a lot better.

Those of you caught up in the pre-Christmas travel chaos brought about by the freezing fog conditions which engulfed the UK have our sympathies. Nothing worse than hanging around in airports for days on end, especially when there's a nice glass of sherry and a mince pie at the other end of the flight.

Indeed, some of you may have checked the BAA website to see how certain flights were affected. Those who did would have noticed the rather bizarre message on a holding page which claimed that the BAA website was unreachable due to, wait for it...bad weather.

Some foggy thinking was involved in that particular excuse!