With everything going 'green' at the moment taxes were bound to enter into the equation. Despite this, a spokesperson for the Treasury has told Financial Director that green taxes would not go solely towards environmental causes, but rather into a consolidated fund.

While things need to be done by the government to speed up the reduction of greenhouse gases, is tax really the solution? For example, Ken Livingstone has now increased the London congestion charge to £8 a day and in the last year hybrid cars, which still emit GHGs but to a lesser extent than their petrol counterparts, have been made exempt from that charge. However also in the last year 1,000 new traffic lights have been installed in London, which seems at odds with reducing congestion and emissions.

Does this not lead companies, and the general public alike, to conclude that we are only being taxed because there is no environmental gain from the congestion charge. At every good environmental turn there seems to be a revenue gaining ulterior motive.

The real issue for 'green policies' should not be taxes but environmentally friendly alternatives.

DSG International plc has announced that it is pulling out of its PC City operation in France, as it tries to close or sell its 11 outlets. Analysts as Merrill Lynch believe the enterprise is losing £15m-20m.

We wonder what Lord Kalms makes of this news. Back in the last century when the business was known as Dixons and the then-Sir Stanley was its chairman, the business’s only exposure on the continent was as an investor in retail property.

But the arch Eurosceptic – who also gain notoriety as a leading light in the anti-EMU pressure group, Business for Sterling - wouldn’t stoop so low as to actually try to open shops there or to sell anything to the French.

Having given up the chairmanship for the essentially honorary position of ‘President’, Lord Kalms has spent the last five years watching his successors expand into the continent. He must now be wondering if his long-held UK-centric strategy wasn’t the right one after all.

As it is, we look forward to hearing exactly how DSG plans to extricate itself from France – a country harder for companies to get out of than for armies to exit Iraq.

Forget Bill Gate's Windows Vista release, the real "wow" factor this year has come out of Hitachi's science fiction-like labs in Tokyo. The company has just showed off its latest radio frequencey ID tags which are no larger than a fleck of dust (0.05mm x 0.05mm to be precise). You can see a photograph on the Wired website here which shows the chips being dwarfed by a single crystal of sugar.

Expect tracking chips to be embedded in bank notes, tickets, clothes and, god forbid, even food in the not-too-distant future.

It seems we are getting closer to a world where everything can be tracked, identified and controlled.

21/03/2007. Remember that date. It's the day on which Gordon Brown will deliver his final Budget speech, or so the smart money says.

Expect a raft of environmental meassures; the odd bit of fudging on the economy and some sweeteners for business in the form of regulatory and red tape simplification.

Remarkable, isn’t it. Here we are with a pensions crisis on our hands that promises gloom and misery for many millions of people. An ageing population, hence an ultimately declining tax base, untold strain on the public purse being threatened, combined with a private sector pensions system that has been beleaguered with one stupid decision after another over the years (our favourite: the rule that used to forbid pension schemes from having too much money!). Oh, and let’s add a skills shortage and the globalisation of competition for jobs. So what do we do to bring about industrial regeneration while helping people use their spare cash to make themselves wealthier? We let Manchester build a super-casino.

What’s been long-forgotten by many people, we’re sure, is that Manchester used to have a super-casino that did, indeed, help with financing industrial growth and provide for the future wealth of the people. So did Liverpool and Glasgow, for that matter.

But they weren’t called super-casinos. They were called stock exchanges.

You can’t help but admire and congratulate Clara Furse’s team at the London Stock Exchange who have seen off yet another takeover bid. Nasdaq received just 0.41% acceptances for its hostile approach which, added with the 28.75% stake it had bought in the market, left it nowhere near the 50% level needed to win control.

Nasdaq has made absolutely no impression on fund managers, whereas the LSE has convinced its shareholders that it has a bright future as a high-tech platform with a more British approach to securities regulation. Despite the legislative steps that the government took to try to prevent the import of SEC-style rulebooks, listed companies couldn’t have been looking forward with any joy to the prospect of a Nasdaq-owned London stockmarket. FDs can sleep a little more easily tonight.

Sainsbury's, we read, is considering doing a sale-and-leaseback of its property portfolio as a way of generating value for shareholders to fend off a hostile bid from a private equity consortium led by CVC.

Little Chef, we read a few weeks ago, ran into trouble because a downturn in trading left it unable to meet its property lease commitments after doing a sale-and-leaseback of its property portfolio.

Discuss. (50 marks - time allowed: 45 minutes)