Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • A54

Business Like us on Facebook facebook.com/eveningstandard 54 Mond 21 2011 Who could have doubted that advertising buyers are the most saintly individuals in the whole of the business world? Advertising group Aegis has just won the Transparency in Governance Award for Best Sustainability and Stakeholder Disclosure throughout the FTSE 250 index of companies. The awards are not open for nomination and are independently judged by the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators and is testament to what has so far been achieved on our journey of consistently improving our sustainability disclosure and of taking positive action as a responsible corporate says Aegis. What cuddly, gentle folk those media buyers are. A little nugget from an insider with links to the Foreign Press Association, which hosts annual awards tomorrow night. as long as i can remember, one of the sponsors has been the Bahraini government.

this year, they seem to have absented themselves. i wonder why. indeed, one of the short-listed entries covers events in Ah, the pitfalls of the Arab Spring. MEhDI hasan, politics editor at the New Statesman and Ed Miliband cheerleader, discovers Twitter is not all cracked up to be. that Twitter a forum for intelligent debate on important geopolitical he says sorry, tweets.

of fact-free bluster and silly Clearly hasan is fed up with being on the receiving end of some bluster and insults. happily, that stopped US investors putting a $10 billion-plus valuation on Aegis makes bid for sainthood PR man Prideaux to quit in a puff of smoke Ian and Sa ron to tie the knot official. Buried in the Daily Forthcoming Marriages column, this snippet: engagement is announced between Ian Wace and saffron Ian Wace of Marshall Wace hedge fund fame and saffron Aldridge the model. As is well-known in the City, Wace suffered terrible heartache when his family was killed in a road crash in 1994. so he and Aldridge deserve best wishes.

cityspy Send us your City Spy stories cityspy Send us your City Spy stories Love story: model Aldridge is to marry Wace of hedge fund fame Forstmann dies at 71 ThEoDoRE Forstmann, a Wall Street tycoon and private equity pioneer seen by some as a real-life Gordon Gekko, has died from brain cancer at the age of 71. he all-but invented the concept of leveraged buyouts taking over companies with borrowed debt. Famously, Forstmann coined a phrase that came to stand for much of the finance most aggressive behaviour, the words being turned into the title of a book and later film. he was playing golf with Bristol Myers chairman Richard Gelb in the 1980s who asked what the surge in debt-led takeovers meant. Forstmann said: means the barbarians are at the gate.

And be coming for you Barbarians at The Gate became a book and a film about the notorious takeover battle for RJR Nabisco. Forstmann was the senior founding partner of Forstmann Little Co, which took over and resold dozens of companies including Dr Pepper and Gulfstream Aerospace. AND so farewell to Michael Prideaux, the smooth-talking PR man finally stepping down from British American Tobacco after 23 years of defending the seemingly indefensible with charm and, we regret to admit, strong arguments. Prideaux was the consummate professional, always on top of his brief, and few hacks ever got the better of him, not even Jeremy Paxman. The man from BAT is 61 but not relevant as, like many in his line of work, Prideaux can expect to live forever.

The ex-Eton and Cambridge man announces he will retire next June, though he is, inevitably, staying on in a thiS is from a speech that Prideaux gave in 2004, entitled Corporate Social Responsibility Mainstream or Sidestream: case any of you are not totally familiar with the tobacco business, is what comes from the tip of the cigarette, whereas is what the smoker actually inhales. i intend to show you how, at British American tobacco, we have definitely decided to inhale Corporate Social Responsibility. Bearing in mind the example of former president Clinton, we never trust a man who says he You can see why Prideaux will be sorely missed. ThE Times is keen to trumpet the fact it costs only £1 on weekdays, compared with rivals the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph, which are £1.20. But Rupert paper is raising the cost of its home delivery service.

A subscriber reports that the monthly cost of The Times and Sunday Times seven days a week will rise from £34.80 to £39. The Times also wants subscribers to pay in advance, not arrears, from December, so on December 28 or thereabouts, there will be a double debit. Just as the Christmas credit-card bill lands. Star circles: Forstmann with Liz Hurley.