Finance directors of all the companies on the Stock Exchange can feel justly proud of their London listing - and they should all be raising a glass to LSE chief executive Clara Furse who has just been made a Dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

The LSE was once regarded as little more than an EBay for stocks and shares, and seemed destined to fall into foreign hands - be they Swedish, German or American.

Dame Clara has breathed new life into the market, attracting foreign companies to London. As a result of her efforts, a London listing still means something to the companies traded on it - and certainly much more than if the LSE were just a subsidiary of some foreign bourse.

The recent International Green Hero Award was given to Version One by a UK environmental group, The Green Organisation, which got me thinking about historical carbon offsetting.

Version One has not only reduced its carbon footprint by as much as it can reasonably afford, but also offsets more than it emits. The company estimates that by 2010 it will have offset all the emissions the company has ever produced. The Co-Operative Bank also takes part in historical offsetting.

It made me wonder: would this be something that would get big business excited? The Co-Operative Bank markets itself on its environmental credentials and Version One is a document management systems for accounting and ERP systems, which will enable them to become paperless.

But would Bank of Scotland, for example, want to offset its historical carbon emissions as well as its current? The Governor and Company of Scotland's first bank got together way back in in 1695. That's a lot of emissions to account for!

Call me a cynic but I don't see this as a trend many of the larger corporates will be moving towards.

She's gone - sort of. Lehman Brothers announced today that CFO Erin Callan, who had the grave misfortune to preside over massive losses and an even bigger attmpt to inject new capital into the bank, is "rejoining the investment banking division in a senior capacity" and being replaced by Ian Lowitt - "effective immediately".

Ms Callan, who was only appointed to the role in December - was emphatically not an accountant and had no finance function experience. New man Lowitt has been the bank's co-CAO - chief administrative officer - responsible (says Lehmans) "for the global oversight of corporate real estate, expense and sourcing services, finance, operations, productivity and process improvement, risk management, and technology". He's been CAO of Lehmans Europe and was also global treasurer and global head of tax. He's got a clutch of university degrees - four at the last count - and is ex-McKinsey.

So he's no dumb bunny - mind you, no one ever said Callan was, either - but to what extent it adds up to more solid beancounting experience than his short-lived, flashy, but now embarrassingly-demoted predecessor remains to be seen. It ain't over till it's over.

Deloitte informs us today that many companies are in danger of leaving it far too late to complete their HMRC Form 42 returns by the 6 July deadline date. The form (as if you needed reminding) relates to share-based payments to employees but it's a complex beast, as Deloitte also tells us that only 11% of companies are "very confident" that they have completed it correctly.

Coincidentally, just the other day we met a finance director from a small, Aim-listed company who explained that he was training a new member of  his finance team and asked him to start getting to work on the Form 42. This was a particularly challenging exercise, this FD told us, not least because the guidance notes for this single form are 52 pages long. And oh, by the way, if you're late or you mess it up, it's the director responsible who is liable to HMRC penalties, not the company.

Other examples of bonkers bureaucracy are very welcome...

Well, we didn't have long to wait. Barely three weeks ago we told you about the fawning Wall Street Journal article profiling Lehman Bros CFO Erin Callan. Ms Callan had a number of important attributes that the WSJ wanted to bring to its readers' attention (not least a pair of legs that would grace any of Rupert Murdoch's other titles). A tax lawyer-turned-investment banker, she was, unlike her predecessors, an accountant and - get this- had never worked in the finance department. She was reported to receive ""a slimmer daily financial summary than predecessors", her preferred means of information-gathering being "the trading floor contacts built during her 13-year Lehman career".

A lot of good they've done her. Lehmans has just announced a Q2 loss of $2.8bn - worse than expected, thanks in part to "negative net revenue" (we'll leave it to you accountants to figure out how that's possible). The bank also unveiled plans for a $6bn capital injection - $4bn in shares and $2bn in convertible stock yielding 8.75%. Moreover, Moody's has put Lehman's credit rating on watch, calling into question the bank's risk management practices.

Last month the WSJ quoted Ms Callan as saying, ""Sometimes in hindsight, your forecast will not have been accurate based on the real world outcome." Maybe we're doing her down. Maybe that was a coded warning that Wall Street had it wrong. Or maybe her CFO-lite approach is partly to blame for the bank's undoing.

It's said that one of the best leading indicators for a recession is the ease with which you can flag down a taxi - in the rain.

So this evening was a bit of an eye-opener. During rush hour, when it was peeing with rain, in the half-mile walk between our Soho offices and Leicester Square, we counted no fewer than nine black cabs with their orange lights on.

Oh, sh-------! We're in trouble!

The departure of American Apparel CFO Ken Cieply has to be one of the most preposterous tales I've heard in the business world for a long time. Cieply left the uber-trendy seller of overpriced spandex leggings last week, after CEO and founder Dov Charney incredibly called his CFO "a complete loser" in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, adding that the Canadian had "no credibility" in the retail apparel industry. Presumably he wasn't counting that time when Cieply took Canadian no-brand sweater company Gildan Activewear to market. Smelling blood, WSJ got on the blower to Charney after the story ran and reported that the CEO retracted his comment as "juvenile", adjusting his views to saying that Cieply had "enormous credibility" in the manufacturing world - but lacked extensive retail experience. Announcing Cieply's departure a fortnight after that, Charney went full circle and said of his outgoing CFO that "his impressive pedigree in apparel was a key reason I asked him two years ago to come down to Los Angeles to help take our business to the next level".

This Jekyll-and-Hyde-ism from a listed-company CEO is rare, but seems the stock in trade of the AA founder: he adds foot in mouth disease to alleged sexual harassment of female staff, chronic corporate unreadiness for public life (the company wasn't GAAP ready when it went public last year), and has a knack for scaring off financiers (Charney said auditors of the company that claimed it inflated earnings were "exaggerating". The audit was conducted for potential private investors who would have provided much-needed growth capital).

After the last CFO died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2005, an interim CFO came and went within a week. Cieply's attempts to shore up very shaky finances only exposed AA's weaknesses: perhaps the embarassment was what spurred the CEO's 'loser' comment.

All this will hearten Cieply's successor, William Gochnauer, who leaves his interim CFO role at catalogue gifts company Red Envelope for the same title at AA. Gochnauer's USP, Charney says, is his "extensive experience with SEC reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance" - and this second interim CFO must now build a finance function that can handle its new reporting burden as a public company. AA has stated it intends to hire a permanent CFO in the next six months.