Changing it at the worst of times when markets are dire cash-flow weak borrowings high morale low and shareholders restive becomes infinitely

Changing it at the worst of times, when markets are dire, cash-flow weak, borrowings high, morale low and shareholders restive, becomes infinitely more so.In that regard he does have the advantage of an investor register so pummelled with bad news over the past three years, so weakened by dipping deep for rights issue funds to flush down the drain, that in terms of sentiment things can only get better. Hardly any wonder, cynics note, when there weren't any to pass on in the first place.What Mr Rich is faced with at Trafs is a group in complete disarray, rightly named Britain's worst-managed company in a recent business magazine poll.His problem is that changing a whole corporate culture is difficult enough at the best of times. There appears to have been a complete absence of communication between the centre and the provinces and an unwillingness to co-operate when head-office wallahs descended from on high to disturb the glorious isolation which the subsidiaries had previously enjoyed.The Davy and Sofresid acquisitions in the early 1990s were left, it appears, to run themselves with no attempt being made to integrate the new operations in the group as a whole or to instil any new disciplines or reporting systems. Arguably when the market is expecting you to lose pounds 200m, another pounds 120m is neither here nor there, so it was little surprise that the shares, an unqualified disaster over the past 10 years or so, slipped just 2p to 24.5p. More of a weary shrug than the outrage that might have been expected. Even so, the picture Nigel Rich paints of the company he inherited as chief executive 15 months ago is an extremely worrying one. The extent of restructuring provisions at NFC and Laporte surprised the market, but nothing could have prepared it for the bombshell which Trafalgar House dropped yesterday. He argued that he had paid for the policy and its arrangement was a contractual arrangement which entitled him to the proceeds.The judge ruled that although he paid for the policy, he was not the beneficiary of it..

It has been quite a month for kitchen sink accounting, the well- worn management technique of blaming it all on the previous regime, lobbing in a barrowload of provisions and hoping to hell that you've done enough to create a solid floor for earnings growth. The house was repossesed about 2 years ago and eventually sold for pounds 52,000, leaving pounds 73,000 outstanding.Woolwich received pounds 22,000 from the indemnity policy, but claimed the full amount owed from Mr Brown. We do not see why a minority of people should be able to walk away when we try to recover the debt."The judgment dismissed a claim by Iain Brown, the borrower and a former Woolwich employee, that he should not be liable for the full pounds 73,000 debt because he was the legal beneficiary of the indemnity policy.At a hearing earlier this month, specifically called to test the law on this issue, the Court heard that Mr Brown borrowed almost pounds 88,000 on a 100 per cent mortgage to buy a house in 1988.Woolwich lent him the money on condition that he pay for a indemnity policy to the value of some pounds 22,000, a quarter of the loan's value.Mr Brown fell behind in his payments and his debt mounted to pounds 125,000. A claim that borrowers should be allowed to offset their mortgage indemnity insurance policies against any debts incurred when the value of their homes falls were rejected by the landmark ruling. The judgment, by Mr Justice Waller, means that Woolwich Building Society, which brought the case, is legally entitled to claim the full amount of pounds 73,000 it claims to be owed it by a former borrower.Frank Bartlett, head of lending at the Woolwich welcomed the decision: "We have laid a stake in the ground for many millions of people who pay their mortgages and meet their obligations. Net banking income had fallen 6 per cent in 1994 and 7 per cent in the first half of 1995 - a nosedive unprecedented since the war.. Hundreds of thousands of people who have had their homes repossesed because they were unable to pay their mortgages were dealt a blow yesterday by a High Court judgment saying they are still liable for their debts, writes Nic Cicutti. This would make it unlikely that France could conform with the criterion of 3 per cent or less in 1997 set by the Maastricht Treaty for eligibility to monetary union.An extremely sharp decline in west German manufacturing orders in October suggested that France was unlikely to receive much stimulus from an early pick-up in the stalled German economy.

Total orders fell 4.5 per cent in October.On the brighter side, a survey of business confidence in western Germany by IFO for November showed the first rise in confidence since May.The need for steps to revive the French economy was highlighted by a pessimistic report about the health of French banks from AFB, the French banking association. Until the currency crisis of the spring, the French central bank had maintained a margin of 20 basis points above the repo rate."But even the interest rate cuts that are possible won't be enough to revive the economy," warned Julian Jessop, economist at HSBC Markets, which is projecting growth of about 1.5 per cent next year.As a result, he said, the budget deficit next year could be as high as 4.7 per cent rather than the 4 per cent targeted by the French government. Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the central bank, said the cut had been made "because the franc is stable, inflation has been contained and the monetary aggregates are developing favourably".With the intervention rate still 70 basis points above the new German repo rate of 3.75 per cent, analysts said there was scope for a further reduction of half a per cent. The franc strengthened by a centime against the mark to close at 3.44, but the stock market lost some of the gains it had made on Thursday with the CAC-40 index ending 16 points down at 1859.25.The Bank of France cut the intervention rate, which sets a floor to money market rates, from 4.7 to 4.45 per cent.