This could revolve around the relative merits of cash, shares, or additional bonuses added to the ultimate value of the policies. Preserving jobs in Scotland, however, will be only a secondary consideration.The offers differed significantly in detail, but headline figures were misleading, Warburg said yesterday. Cash in hand is not the same as a loan.Abbey National’s initial offer made in January consisted of pounds 400m in cash or shares for Scot Am’s 1.1 million policyholders plus anything from pounds 700m to pounds 1bn for the embedded value of the policies. Abbey National said it was willing to increase its sighting offer but it is still not known if it has done so.Prudential’s last public statement on its offer promised pounds 400m in cash and pounds 400m in bonuses for policyholders, plus a loan of pounds 1.1bn from Pru’s life fund into the ScotAm fund.Prudential also promises to make ScotAm the focus of its operations, selling policies through independent financial advisers.. Central banks in Italy and Spain were forced to intervene in currency markets yesterday to support the lira and peseta after rumours that Germany was about to announce a delay in the timetable for monetary union.

Jitters that a single currency might be delayed resulted in dealers selling Italian bonds and buying German debt instead. There were repercussions for bonds and currencies across Europe.
Traders said the Bank of Italy and the Bank of Spain both intervened to defend the lira and the peseta against the mark. The lira fell to its lowest level against the mark since rejoining the ERM in November.Rumours that the Bundesbank was about to announce a two-year delay to EMU were denied by Bundesbank officials. Nevertheless, traders’ confidence in a broad-based euro beginning in 1999 continued to fall, and Italy bore the brunt of the market reaction Italian futures contracts ended 2.29 points down at 127.50. Spanish, Swedish, Finnish and Irish government bonds softened too.The mark strengthened against the lira and the peseta during the day.

Traders said the Bank of Italy intervened when the exchange rate reached 998.50 lira to the mark. The currency fell during the day through the psychological barrier of 1,000 lira per mark to reach 1,001.50, its lowest level since it rejoined the ERM at a central parity of 990 lira to the mark on 25 November last year.Some dealers suggested that the rumours were begun by traders in an attempt to get the markets moving. But jitters were also fuelled by Bundesbank board member Peter Schmidhuber, who said yesterday morning that “hectic” attempts to meet the deficit criteria were causing only the appearance of convergence.. This may sound a bit naive, but aren’t shareholders entitled to equal access to price-sensitive information?

If a quoted company has an announcement to make about material things like current trading, changes in senior management, or a significant deal it must notify the Stock Exchange. Otherwise a false market could be created in the shares.
But yesterday investors would have scoured their screens in vain to find out why shares in VideoLogic, the computer chip designer, had suddenly flickered into life. They closed 10p higher at 60.5p on hefty volume of 2.7 million shares, valuing the company at pounds 90m. By the close of play, though, there was no still news, no nothing.Thankfully the Internet – that indispensable information source – came to the rescue, carrying a press release, dated Thursday, 27 February, bearing the headline “NEC invests $25m in PowerVR Games Program”.In a joint statement Japan’s leading producer of microchips revealed it would spend $25m (pounds 15m) this year developing VideoLogic’s PowerVR chip which enables personal computers to run 3D graphics.There was also a broad hint that several other big computer companies would take orders for the chips this year.All interesting stuff, but why weren’t shareholders told? VideoLogic argues some of the information about the NEC deal was already known and that it decided against making an announcement to the Stock Exchange after talking to SBC Warburg, its broker and financial adviser.

For its part, the Stock Exchange is understood to be investigating an apparent breach of disclosure rules.VideoLogic’s shares could hit 75p on the latest news and Keith Woolcock, electronics analyst at Merrill Lynch, thinks the shares remain a steal on forecast profits of pounds 5.4m for the year to March 1998, implying a p/e ratio of 16.Those electronics companies that actually bothered to tell the Stock Exchange what was going on also fared well. Shares in Eidos, the computer games group, soared 75p to a record high of 1045p on news of a third-quarter pre-tax profit of pounds 7.8m versus a pounds 1m loss in the corresponding period last year.Also breaking new ground was accountancy software firm Sage, whose shares jumped 31p to 617.5p after securing a foothold in the German software market, the largest in Europe, with a pounds 40.1m acquisition.Wall Street influences dominated sentiment for most of the session after traders shrugged off Labour’s easy win in the Wirral South by-election.The FTSE 100 managed to stay above the psychologically significant 4,300 mark, but closed just off the day’s low at 4308.9, down 30.9.The main talking point was NatWest, whose shares are set to open sharply lower on Monday after announcing shortly after the market closed that it would take a pounds 50m charge against first-half results after discovering errors in its interest rate options book. A senior trader has been suspended pending the conclusion of an internal inquiry. Earlier, NatWest’s shares had closed 0.5p lower at 758.5p.Shares in drugs group Zeneca tumbled following news that the US Food and Drugs Administration had issued a warning to the company following an inspection at one of Zeneca’s plants in Macclesfield, Cheshire.The FDA said it would not recommend approval of any new applications which list Zeneca as the manufacturer of sterile pharmaceuticals until the problems identified at the plant had been resolved. The sterile manufacturing area subject to the FDA inspection is a sophisticated plant responsible exclusively for a cancer treatment called Zoladex.Zeneca’s shares crashed by as much as 50.5p before recovering to close at 1805p, down 33.5p on the day.Banks with interests in the Far East stood out.