The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 2

2 NEWS The Guardian Wednesday September 4 1996 Dealing in Morgan Grenfell funds expected to resume after German rescuer offers 1 50m package out investors Otley stands up to be discounted Bank to bail Richard Miles and Pauline Sprlngett within 12 But other fund managers were flabbergasted at this defence, with some of the most experienced claiming it had never heard of this rule. One said: "I am staggered by this. Morgan Grenfell is one of the premier investment managers." An independent financical expert, who had advised many of his clients to invest in the Morgan Grenfell funds, said he spotted the growth in unlisted stocks in May and had advised his clients to pull out. "You just don't expect this size of holding in unlisted stock." Details and City Notebook, page 16 potentially high-risk investments in companies not listed on any stock exchange. These holdings account for a little over 10 per cent of the portfolio, but in May they represented nearly a third of all investments, many in Scandinavian companies.

The rules for unit trusts set by the chief City watchdog, the Securities and Investments Board, impose a 10 per cent limit on "unapproved typically unlisted stock. Morgan Grenfell Asset Management last night denied it had broken any rules, citing a get-out clause which it said permitted it to exceed the 10 per cent limit so long as the companies "were thought to be coming to market culties over insider trading and its role in the Guinness scandal. The three Morgan Grenfell trusts, which all invest in European shares, were suspended on Monday after Morgan Grenfell-Asset Management said it was investigating "possible The German bank said that it had bought a large number of high risk shares held commonly by the three MG European funds for its own portfolio, at a cost believed to be close to 150 million. It became clear yesterday that Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, one of the City's most respected institutions, kept investors in the dark for three months while another scandal would further dent the City's reputation after the collapse of Barings merchant bank last year. Before the rescue package was announced.

City commentators had feared that as much as 500 million might have been needed to pay compensation to investors when dealing resumed in the three funds, which also include the Europa Fund and the European Capital Growth Fund. Imro is still investigating whether Peter Young, the high-flying manager of two of the suspended funds, overestimated the value of the high-risk stocks which Deutsche Bank has now bought. Imro is concentrating on the value of the European Growth Trust's it bickered with the funds' supervisors over whether it had breached UK investment rules. It emerged that UK insurer General Accident had resigned as trustee of the largest fund, the 778 million European Growth Trust, in June because it was unhappy about the way the fund was being run. GA refused to comment.

A spokesman for Morgan Grenfell Asset Management insisted GA's resignation was part of a year-long programme to replace the insurer with the Royal Bank of Scotland as the trustee of all its unit trust funds. The Bank of England is understood to have monitored developments, concerned that DEUTSCHE Bank last night announced a surprise 150 million rescue package to bail out the 90,000 investors in the stricken Morgan Grenfell investment funds. The rescue package, agreed late yesterday with Imro, the City watchdog responsible for monitoring investment managers, is expected to permit the resumption of dealing in the 1.4 billion funds tomorrow. The leading German bank bought Morgan Grenfell seven years ago after the City-based firm had run into diffi Brewer denies childish appeal of its tangerine 'alcopop' which retails, just the one cigar, for 34.50. "Um, does an establishment like this really need an Otleycard?" Oh yes, though not for customers from all over the country who took Mr Barber's Havana turnover to more than 100,000 last year.

"I am very happy to support the idea if it keeps Otley people shopping in Otley," he says. "I'm not at all opposed to joining a discount scheme, if it's reckoned to benefit the community of traders here." The town's formidable sense of community also appeared to be holding good among the sceptical young. Three students from the comprehensive had their doubts about the small, cobbled town as a fun shopping venue. "But," said Rachel Campey, looking down at her plastic carrier, "look at me. I'm always buying things here." Like comparable towns across the country, Otley is vulnerable to better ranges of goods in the cities nearby.

"Clothes especially," said Rachel's friend Liz Neale. "There's only one place here, Wild Thing, where you can get fashion clothes." Besides, added Daniel Gasper, third of the trio, there was much more going on in Leeds to make a shopping visit fun. The Chamber of Trade met again last night to take the issue forward. "Certainly," said another trader, "it's likely to help more than National Shop Locally Day that was yesterday, you know. No? Well, I'm not surprised.

My only worry is that discounting could lead to an Otley price war, say if all five butchers join and start out-discounting one another." Civil war? And memories of 1648, when Cromwell's Ironsides deliberately drank the Black Bull dry? Specialist pork butchers Weegmans weren't worried about plastic turning into poison. "It can only be a good thing in the long run," said Nigel Stringwell, cleaning his slicer under a splendid picture of the shop decked out in 1883 "Success to Agriculture" in meat products and flowers to mark a royal visit. A picture, like James Barber's of the record 1889 tobacco consignment from Kentucky, which may become another illustration for what could be a highly collectible card. Martin Wainwright NO TOWN whose economic base once included eyelickers alternative medics whose saliva was supposed to ease out cataracts is going to take a nasty run of shop closures lying down. So few local eyebrows were raised at the challenge issued yesterday from the banks of the Wharfe in the lower Yorkshire Dales.

Look out SainsTescSafe-Asda here comes Otleycard; loyalty plastic which the market town of Otley, vulnerably close to the huge ring-road shopping malls of Leeds and Bradford, is planning to issue to its citizens. "We've been talking about it for months, but we don't like to talk here so much as get things done," said councillor Dawn Merrick, preparing to tackle another day's economic regeneration. "I think we might have a nice picture of the Buttercross on it, or maybe Thomas Chippendale, our most famous son." Otleycard shopping, with information and probable discounts for holders, won an immediate welcome in the Market Square, where the eyelickers practised their trade once a week in the years before the first world war. An exile newly returned from London, Portia Bell Ryott, paused in her search for a doormat to exclaim: "What a good idea! Mind you, provided I can get a doormat I like, I'm already finding Otley better for shopping than Ealing." That was certainly the case just down Kirkgate, where a modest tobacconist's shop-front leads to "probably the best cigar humidor outside London," according to James Barber. Under a sepia portrait of his great-grandfather in the Barber Tobacco Plantation, Kentucky, he pulled out a Montecristo A from a shelf in the humidor an entire, temperature-controlled room whHh stubble or take some hair away.

"Firstly the code is voluntary. Secondly it is not a vetting procedure, it is there to respond to people's complaints. We have pre-empted that to go to the group to get the label checked. We have acted totally responsibly." Concern about teenage drinking has been highlighted by the popularity of fruit-flavoured alcoholic drinks or Since they were first marketed last year they have become the fastest growing sector of the alcohol market, with more than 2 per cent of off-licence trade. Nigel Griffiths, Labour's consumer affairs spokesman, accused Carslberg-Tetley of astonishing arrogance in ignoring the Portman Group's recommendations.

"We have got to stop young people's drinking reaching epidemic levels some parts of the country. We are clearly getting no support from some of the big players in the business," he said. "This is the last chance the industry has to regulate itself. They are making parliamentary action inevitable." Alcohol advisory groups called for an independent inquiry into alcopops and for Thickhead to be taken off the shelves until the label is changed. Mark Bennett, of Alcohol Concern, said: "Products like this, which are more clearly based on childish culture than any of the other alcopops, are going to appeal to children.

It should be withdrawn immediately." He said the brewery's failure to contact the Portman Group before Friday was a clear sign that self-regulation was not working. "If one of the Portman Group's own members cannot get the label right it doesn't bode well for the brave new future of self-regulation," he said. Alex Bellos THE makers of a new "alcopop" last night defended their decision to put half a million bottles in shops and bars, despite protests that the labelling would encourage underage drinking. Carlsberg-Tetley ignored demands to withdraw the first batch of Thickhead 4.9 per cent proof, tangerine-flavoured and with the consistency of hair gel although it said it would change the label in the future. The Portman Group, the drinks industry's voluntary regulator, said the image on the bottle of a man pulling a face contravened its code of practice because he could be under 18.

It also said the word "alcoholic" was not prominent enough. Tom Wright, Carlsberg-Tetley development director, said these were minor criticisms as private research had shown that 97 per cent of people thought the drink was marketed to adults. He said: "The changes the Portman Group want are relatively small. The guy in the photograph is 30. We will make his expression flatter, or might give him some Alcopops Share of the market, off-licence trade Alcopops Others, including 2 cider sparkling wine 18 Total value of UK Market: E7bn Source: StatMR Poliakoff makes shining return some fear will encourage underage drinking 'A drink like vomit-textured fruit gums, which wants to be regarded by the young as hip, classless, ugly and gauche' Malcolm Gluck on a sickly brew squidgy thing that it is difficult to get a firm grasp on and which is almost entirely a matter of perspective.

Al may convince himself that the colour coded evidence he keeps in plastic bags constitute the real story of what happened but, as Elinor points out, you cannot reduce everything to nice neat patterns. We never know for certain that Christopher's discovery was fraudulent, and in the wake of what becomes known as "the Al prospers, building a successful career as a popular science pundit. He ends up destroying the past while paying lip service to its traditions. The old chemistry lab is pulled down to make way for a department of media studies. On its simplest level, Poliakoff tells a gripping story of scientific fraudulence and the changing face of modern research in a free market economy where ideas and discoveries only have any currency if they are marketable.

But the play goes far deeper than that, investigating the selective nature of memory and the relativity of truth, and serving as a metaphor for the way we make biased selections from, or falsify, the past in order to construct an acceptable future for ourselves. It is beautifully acted by Frances de la Tour as the ageing Elinor, a woman who has become a dinosaur in the new scientific world, Duncan Bell as the suave, self-deceiving Christopher and most of all by Douglas Hodge who suggests that behind Al's flabby exterior and lazy vowels there may be a steely brain. A welcome return to the National and form for Poliakoff. Lyn Gardner Blinded by the Sun Cottesloe THERE is something positively Jacobean about Stephen Poliakoff latest play, half mystery thriller and half revenge tragedy and always wholly compelling even when it seems intent on winding itself into intricate knots. The Latin inscription at the entrance to Magdalen College Oxford's old Daubeney science laboratory "without experiment it is not possible to know anything adequately" dominates the stage, conjuring up a university's shabby chemistry department with a glorious past but uncertain future.

In a final act of either inspiration or revenge, the retiring head of department appoints Al, an unsuccessful scientist but efficient administrator, as his successor. Al's mission is to reinvent the department, attracting sponsorship and students. But he doesn't count on the intransigence of Christopher and Elinor who pursue their own scientific research with an apparent ruthless purity of purpose. Scientists, suggests one character, are the conjuror's favourite audience because they believe everything they see. So it proves as Christopher announces he has developed the sun battery an endless source of non-polluting energy.

Everyone has reasons for wanting to believe him, but it is Al who turns detective and unravels a kind of truth. A kind of truth because, as in all Poliakoff work, the truth is a slippery. Books PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID SILLITOE cealed in the pocket of the interview clothes worn by the applicant to Balliol. Thickhead is ambitious to be regarded as hip, classless, ugly and gauche. Thickhead, in other words, is one more transparent package of unconventional-ity to help the conventional young to stomach the awful-ness of not-yet-adulthood.

tax rate which recent modifications had turned into "a steeplechase of The Prime Minister said he had "taken tough decisions, some of them politically Labour, by contrast, was "singing the tune people want to hear, to promise new rights, new conditions at work, new minimum wages. It's easy but dangerous." Thickhead, whose marketing IT IS impossible to imagine anyone of any developed palate enjoying the sight or the taste of Thickhead, but therein lies its delicious and deadly appeal. Thickhead is a tangerine-flavoured, half-set jelly thick, gruesomely coloured drink which purports to be soft in its packaging yet is much stronger, at nearly 5 In an effort to re-assure business leaders, it states: "We will not tax for its own sake or seek to punish business and the wealthy with penal marginal tax rates." The prospectus also details five "early pledges" of action which intended to illustrate Labour's desire to allow business to flourish. Representatives of more than 90 of the top 100 compa ible who, its concocters hope, will then regard the stuff as a symbol rather like liquidised Beavis and Butthead. Thickhead would like to be the silver stud punched into the lip of the kid who accompanies the man who repairs the washing machine.

Its aim is to be the copy of Viz magazine con to 1 5pc political fray yestrerday with an apocalyptic warning to voters that Labour's "soft sell" policies would ruin economic recovery and destroy inward investment. Speaking in Glasgow, he coupled his claim that hard-won gains of the 1990s "can be thrown away if Britain takes the wrong turning" with a scathing attack on Labour's devolution plans for Scotland per cent alcohol, than some strong lagers. Drinking it is like consuming vomit-textured fruit gums. But it is not as a drink that one can analyse the stuff. Thickhead is merely a means to an end: to get pissed and feel iconoclastic.

For Thickhead is designed to be swallowed by the gull nies in the country are expected to attend today's launch with Mr Blair and the party's economic team. Labour's announcement will put additional pressure on the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, to ignore growing concern about the level of government borrowing and to announce big tax cuts in his November Budget. John Major returned to the announces commitment Labour Lawrence Donegan and Michael White LABOUR is today expected to break its long silence over specific taxation policy with a firm commitment to a starting rate of income tax of 15p in the pound, eventually falling to lOp. The proposal is made in a "business prospectus" due to be launched in the City today by Tony Blair. It signals Labour's determination to wrest the Conservatives' grip on its claim to be the party of low taxation.

The prospectus, which is understood to have been circulated to 10,000 "top business says the 15 pence rate would encourage job creation. For a shopping day, a relaxing stay or for immediate access to Calais with sea. DOVERCALAIS OVER 140 CROSSINGS DAILY BY EUROPEAN FERRIES, STENA LINE, SEAFRANCE HOVERSPEED. Cruise to Calais in RELAX and just cruise across from Dover to Calais the shortest sea route to France. Large, luxurious car ferries with shops, restaurants and entertainment on board, plus hovercraft, provide rapid, comfortable crossings with a departure every thirty minutes.

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