UFO Info Week-End

Headed by the highly regarded Sanford Weill Travelers offers financial services ranging from life property and casualty

Headed by the highly regarded Sanford Weill, Travelers offers financial services ranging from life, property and casualty insurance to annuities and mutual funds.”The complementary strengths of these two organisations … Salomon employs 1,500 in Europe, compared with Smith Barney’s 250.Travelers, with its red umbrella logo, has long been publicly parading its desire to find new partners and extend its operations. He was promoted by Salomon’s biggest shareholder, investment guru Warren Buffett, after the firm was found to have rigged US treasury bond auctions in 1991, the low point of a turbulent 10 years for the bank.Mr Maughan took over as chairman and chief executive following the departure of three of Salomon’s most high-profile directors, legendary chairman John Gutfreund, Salomon’s president Thomas Strauss and trader John Meriwether.Mr Maughan was seen then as the epitome of the new squeaky clean image Mr Buffet wanted to foster following a famous description of the bank as “rotten to the core”.He was dubbed “Mr Integrity” by the Salomon staff who dominated the American bond market in the late 1980s and served as role models for the “Masters of the Universe” in Tom Wolfe’s novel, Bonfire of the Vanities.Mr Maughan worked in the British Treasury between 1969 and 1979 before being seconded to investment bank Goldman Sachs in London, where he stayed for four years before being lured over to Salomon in 1983.In 1986, he went to Japan for five years building up the group’s highly profitable Tokyo operation and had just returned to New York when the treasury scandal blew up.Peter Middleton, the former monk who unexpectedly quit Lloyd’s of London to head up the bank’s European operation, has been named head of the combined business in Europe. News of the merger came as a complete surprise in London where only a handful of senior Salomons employees were aware of the takeover.The agreement also sees the departure of Robert Denham, chairman and chief executive of Salomon, and confirms the rise and rise of Deryck Maughan, the 49-year old British chief executive of Salomon Brothers, who will serve as co-chief executive of the new firm alongside James Dimon, 41, chief executive of Smith Barney.Mr Maughan’s promotion is the culmination of a meteoric rise for the son of a Durham miner, who spent 10 years in the Treasury before moving into investment banking. Its creation is certain to trigger extensive lay-offs at both companies to eliminate overlapping, especially among fixed-income traders and analysts. The after-shocks for Wall Street are expected to be monumental, establishing Travelers, and its retail stockbroker Smith Barney, as a new Goliath on the securities landscape.

It elevates the enlarged firm to the mega-institution status of rivals such as Merrill Lynch and the recently merged Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
The new company will be called Salomon Smith Barney Holdings. The latest in a series of giant mergers was unveiled on Wall Street yesterday as Salomon Incorporated, the parent of investment bank Salomon Brothers, said it had agreed to an all-share buyout by the financial services giant, Travelers Group. That is an admission that with the setting up by the Tory government of the Welsh Language Board chaired by Lord Elis-Thomas, a former nationalist MP, cultural peace has broken out.None of this distracts the nationalists from concentrating on 1999 when elections to both the Welsh Assembly and the European Parliament are due.Dafydd Wigley MP, the party president, is optimistic: “We start from a good performance at the general election when against the huge Labour tidal wave sweeping Wales we held our four seats and increased our vote in target constituencies.”. There are calls for a minimum wage of pounds 4.26 an hour, the decommissioning of Trident and a revision of immigration laws.None of the 39 resolutions for debate at the mid-Wales resort in the next 48 hours mentions the Welsh language. This is our opportunity to seize the Welsh political agenda,” he declared yesterday.Some of the conference’s own agenda would find approval with the Labour left.

The script is about an assembly taking office in Cardiff in a couple of years’ time. Plaid Cymru’s part in securing a “yes” vote in last week’s devolution referendum – when voters in traditional nationalist areas and Labour strongholds in the valleys combined to deliver a slim majority for an elected assembly – is cited with satisfaction by Marc Phillips, the party chairman.
Speaking on the eve of the conference in Aberystwyth, Mr Phillips, 43, a moderniser and pragmatist looked forward to a change in the political weather “Plaid Cymru is now operating in a different atmosphere. The time is right for Plaid Cymru to seize the Welsh political agenda, the party’s leadership said yesterday. If the parties could agree on procedures such as working hours and scrutiny of proposals rather than point-scoring, then Scotland’s first parliament in 300 years need not spend its first six months navel-gazing, Mr Salmond said.The four-day conference would begin the process of developing what Mr Salmond called a “radical and exciting policy agenda” for the first elections to the Scottish parliament in 1999.. Party officials were quick to liken the scene to the mood of the party. This year has seen the SNP double its number of MPs to six, despite the Labour tide, and a more convincing than expected vote of approval for a Scottish parliament.
But with a possible place in the coalition that will run as Scotland’s first home-rule administration, assuming PR elections result in no party having overall control, Mr Salmond is playing a cautious game.At a press conference yesterday he indicated an interest in collaborating with the Liberal Democrats in a Scottish parliament while also defending Donald Dewar, Secretary of State for Scotland, against suggestions that he should have been aware of the troubles within Glasgow Labour Party.Mr Salmond announced he was writing to Mr Dewar and other party leaders in Scotland proposing formal talks on how the new parliament should operate.

As he greeted colleagues getting off the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry from the mainland, a piper played (Scotland the Brave, inevitably) and the glistening Firth of Clyde was millpond calm. To the casual observer at Rothesay pier yesterday Alex Salmond must have looked like a political leader who had independence in his grasp. Four others who were suspended from all roles in the party were: Elaine Smith, Deirdre Gaughan, Heather Ritchie and Jim Sharkey.In a separate move the Labour NEC also endorsed the suspension of the Labour MP, Tommy Graham, following the allegations of a smear campaign in a suicide note by Gordon McMaster, the MP for Paisley South.. The others were Bob Gould, the Labour group leader; Gordon Macdiarmid, Alex Mosson, and Jim Mutter, the parks and recreation convener. The nine councillors will be given a hearing, but those found guilty of bringing the party into disrepute could be expelled.Mr Lally was among five councillors who were suspended from the Labour group, but not from all posts in the party.