One last chance for Forte's furious investors

The Forte-Granada bid battle appears to be ending with a series of whimpers. No sooner has Sir Rocco Forte finished clearing his desk than Granada is moving to neutralise a potentially stormy Forte shareholders' meeting.

Part of the unsuccessful Forte defence was a planned pounds 1.05bn sale of the Happy Eater and Little Chef restaurant chains to Whitbread. An egm in London was expected to approve the deal tommorow morning.

The egm appeared to many observers to provide a perfect arena for dissatisfied Forte shareholders to vent their spleen on the deal and the management's behaviour. Despite Granada's victory the meeting has to go ahead. Granada discovered that the only way legally to stop the Whitbread deal was to hold the egm and immediately adjourn it.

Just to make sure, direct marketing personnel from Granada were last night busily phoning Forte private shareholders to try to persuade them it was not worth turning up. Will the shareholders be silenced? Watch this space.

The BBC World Service is seeking to recruit someone to produce a radio soap opera in Romania which will "increase understanding about business and privatisation among the general population".

The successful applicant would fly out to Bucharest and train a team of local writers and actors to create the series. The World Service has already successfuly produced such soaps in other parts of the post-Communist world, such as a co-production with Radio Russia entitled Dom 7, Podjezd 4, or "House 7, Entrance 4." That soap was intended to "stimulate debate about the values of the wider business scene in Russia," acccording to the Beeb.

Apparently the need for such a soap in Romania is urgent, because the privatisation programme has failed to take off. World Bank loans depend on privatisation targets being met. Yet Romanians failed to understand even the simplest "Tell Sid" type sell-off campaign.

Fewer than 10 per cent of them used free coupons to bid for companies being sold off. Hence the soap. Suggested titles on a postcard please.

Stock market rumours last week which suggested that Royal Bank of Scotland was in talks to buy Mercury Asset Management (MAM) prompted the bank to issue an official denial. But there was a fire under all that smoke.

The canny Scottish bankers have discovered that providing custody services is a dull but highly lucrative business, and were talking to MAM about buying its custody arm. Custody consists of looking after international securities portfolios for insititutions, and MAM had been looking for a buyer for its operation for some time. The talks continue.

The company that produces Del-Boy's favourite motor, the three- wheeled Reliant Robin, may be in administration at the moment. But the Only Fools and Horses character could soon be driving around in a new electrically powered version if Sir Clive Sinclair, developer of the infamous C5 (pictured right), has his way.

Sir Clive began talks with Tamworth-based Reliant about producing a successor to the C5 last year, before administrators were sent in in December Now the inventor plans to restart talks when a a buyer for Reliant is found. The new electric car would travel at up to 50mph and Sir Clive claims it would have a string of benefits for the driver.

"The car would be cheap to buy and extremely cheap to run because the fuel is almost free by comparison to petrol. You would have very little to go wrong and the service costs would be negligible." Lovely jubbly.