Outlook: It's a beautiful game if you can last to the final whistle, Adam

Allan Leighton, Leeds United fanatic and part-time Royal Mail chairman, is in the director's box with his new management team, delivering a pep talk.

"I think you'll be over the moon at the salary, Adam, it's twice what the last chief exec earned. Got to get results, of course. But this is a big club, see, and if we're going to win back the fans, then it's a job for more than one man and certainly not a woman. Like I told the select committee the other week, it's not just the playing field that ain't level. They've taken away the ball and our boots as well.

I guess you thought that Premier League chairmen play dirty. Well, just wait until you meet the postal regulator. Bowyer wouldn't stamp on his face, I can tell you.

Anyway, I know I said the job was going to be a solo effort but I've decided you could use a little help. This is a game of two halves. You've got one half of the job and someone else has got the other half. Meet Elmar Toime, your new deputy chairman. Crazy name, crazy guy. He's from Italy actually but he's spent most of his life running the postal service for the Kiwis so he knows how to lick stamps. Think of him as director of coaching.

Naturally, the lad from TNT was gutted when I told him the transfer was off but I'd heard he wasn't a team player anyway. While you're resting, as they say in the game. One other thing, Adam. You've got my full support. Just ask Elmar."

Napier's challenge

The scores on the door for the corporate restructuring expert John Napier are won one, lost one. He was generally regarded as a success as chairman of Booker, helping Stuart rose to turn the cash and carry business around and then flog it to Iceland. His last assignment, Kelda, did not go to plan, however. The idea of selling Yorkshire Water back to its customers and then handing all the proceeds plus the management contract to shareholders might have been a cute piece of financial engineering. But it went down like a lead balloon with the regulator and the tykes fancied it even less.

Now he has been parachuted into Royal & SunAlliance, which is his biggest basket case to date. Napier is unknown in the insurance industry which need not bother him. The previous management under Patrick Gillam and Bob Mendolsohn professed to know all about it and look what's happened since.

What is a little more disturbing is that RSA's new chief executive, Andy Haste, is also an unknown quantity and he has been around the insurance industry for years, most recently as head of Axa Sun Life.

Napier's mission is simple enough. He has to shrink the business by about £3.5bn a year in order to raise enough money to recapitalise what is left. This will entail floating the Australian general insurance business and getting out of its commodity insurance business in the US which has left RSA with, among other things, a big asbestos cloud hanging over it.

If he succeeds, then he won't need to resurrect the rights issue that was scrapped a couple of months ago in favour of shrinking the business out of trouble. If he fails then he will need to go back to shareholders but with his credibility shot to pieces. Nobody said it was going to be easy but then Napier enjoys a challenge.

CSFB fine

Mislead investors at your risk, but mislead a regulator at your peril. To put the £4m fine meted out yesterday to Credit Suisse First Boston into perspective, it is three times the amount Royal & SunAlliance was fined for mis-selling pensions. Or, to take another comparison, it is five times the penalty handed down to Royal Bank of Scotland for letting money-launderers open accounts.

What on earth can CSFB have done then to merit such terrible punishment? How many widows and orphans were left destitute by its cavalier behaviour? Did it single-handedly wreck a nation's economy?

Not exactly. In a nutshell, CSFB fibbed to the Japanese authorities about the extent of its business operations in Japan, in order to avoid having to be licensed. It even bought a shredder to dispose of incriminating documents but there is no evidence it was ever used. Compared to the misery and hardship inflicted on thousands, if not millions, by pensions and endowment mis-selling, there do not appear to have been any victims of CSFB's behaviour as far as we can tell. Nor did it pose any systemic threat to the Japanese financial system. The bank's transgression appears to have had more to do with avoiding paying tax, for which the Japanese authorities have fined it a more modest $334,000.

Hardly a hanging offence, you might have thought. The FSA clearly does not see it that way and since the arm of the bank responsible for the violations comes under UK jurisdiction, it has decided to throw the book at the CSFB.

"The unprecedented size of the fine makes it clear that we consider any attempt to mislead regulators and other authorities, whether in the UK or other countries, to be an extremely serious issue," thunders the FSA's aptly named managing director of enforcement, Carol Sergeant.

CSFB took its punishment like a man, explaining that those responsible for the "aberration" were no longer with the firm. "We are pleased to resolve this matter and put it behind us," CSFB's general counsel Gary Lynch said. You bet he is. The bank has bigger things to worry about – starting with a possible $200m fine from the New York District Attorney Elliot Spitzer for stock research abuses.

For the record, the FSA doesn't reckon the UK has too much to worry about on this score, even though large numbers of dot.com stocks were pumped to investors at vastly inflated prices at the height of the bubble. How angry would the FSA be if it found evidence to the contrary? That would depend on whether it had been misled.

Hunter on prowl

What a difference eight hours makes. Yesterday morning Terry Green, the former Debenhams and Bhs boss, was cock-a-hoop. Having worked through the night he had landed his catch; a £158m agreed bid for Allders, the perennial under-achiever of the department store sector. But by tea-time the air had somewhat escaped from his balloon. What looked like a nice little earner, with a 10 per cent stake in the business for an investment of just £125,000, had gone sour. The reason: the looming shadow of Tom Hunter, the Scottish retail entrepreneur who is stalking House of Fraser.

Mr Hunter, who is enjoying the rather excellent snow in Val d'Isere at the moment, had increased his stake in Allders to 2.78 per cent and says he will buy more in the market. Allders shares have now risen above the level of Terry Green's offer, indicating a possible bid battle. As we asked yesterday: what is Mr Hunter up to?

He could mount a rival bid and simply write a cheque from his own account. He may be betting on other bidders entering the fray, enabling him to make a turn on his current shareholding. Or he could build his stake to just over 10 per cent, which would prevent the Minerva-Terry Green group from being able to compulsorily purchase the remaining shares. Though Minerva could still delist Allders, Mr Hunter would apparently have some rights as a minority shareholder. And as a private investor, with no trustees to answer to, he would find this easier than a financial institution in the same position.

But Mr Hunter's end-game still looks like a merger of Allders and House of Fraser, the rival department store group where he has made an indicative offer and taken a near 7 per cent stake. He believes neither has much of a future on its own. But the route towards this possible union could be very complicated indeed.

m.harrison@independent.co.uk