The directors kept the market fully informed and the company had nothing to hide.”A spokesman for Mr Byers said that the FSA inquiry had merely established that Railtrack had no obligation to inform the market of its position while the Government was considering various options for it Nothing else could be read into its findings.. Air travel has recovered from the effects of 11 September according to figures released yesterday showing that passenger numbers through BAA’s seven UK airports rose fractionally in February. Then, it took 10 months for passenger numbers to start to grow again.The recovery in traffic is largely due to the rapid growth of the no-frills airlines and heavy price-cutting on long-haul routes by full-service airlines, particularly on North Atlantic services.BAA said that it handled a total of 8.2 million passengers in February – a 0.3 per cent rise on the same month a year earlier. After the start of the Gulf war in January, 1991, it took until the following October for traffic levels to begin to rise again.One of the biggest increases last month was recorded at Stansted, home to three budget airlines, where passenger numbers rose by 16 per cent compared with February, 2001.Domestic passenger numbers grew by 3.4 per cent and short-haul European traffic was up by 0.5 per cent. Although traffic on the North Atlantic was down by 7.7 per cent, this was a huge improvement on the 31 per cent decline experienced last October, the first full month after the attacks. Other long-haul traffic was down by 1.4 per cent, compared with a decline of 16 per cent last October.The biggest area of growth last month was on routes from the UK to Ireland where a fare war and the launch of additional services helped produce a 14.6 per cent increase in passengers.. Ian Russell, chief executive of ScottishPower, claims to be taking “tough but necessary” action in slashing the energy utility’s dividend.

As they watched the share price plummet yesterday, shareholders would be forgiven for thinking that another piece of tough but necessary action might be to axe Mr Russell as well, for it is hard to see the justification for this latest act of dividend “rebasing”, other than that everyone else is doing it, so hey, why not ScottishPower too.ScottishPower is the second-highest yielding stock in the FTSE 100, which happens to be the primary reason for holding shares in the company. After the dog of an acquisition PacifiCorp has proved to be, it’s hard to think of any other reason for buying them. There was little if any warning of the cut and, indeed, most investors had taken the company’s previously stated aim of raising dividends by 5 per cent a year until March 2003 to mean that the dividend was safe into the indefinite future.That was before Schroders Salomon Smith Barney came along with its wizard wheeze of a plan for helping Vivendi buy Southern Water off ScottishPower. Southern Water belongs to a different generation of corporate empire building when ScottishPower thought the thing to do was to become a multi-utility, taking in electricity, water, gas and anything else you could sell on a meter. When Mr Russell became chief executive, he determined to concentrate only on electricity and he has been trying to sell Southern Water ever since.The first efforts failed, so Mr Russell settled on a refinancing instead, releasing £1.7bn of cash No mention of the need for a dividend cut then. Imagine Mr Russell’s delight when out of the blue up pops SSSB with an apparently snag-free way of taking Southern Water off his hands for £2.05bn altogether. The price is the same as the company’s regulated asset value, the transaction has been constructed in a way that involves little if any regulatory risk to ScottishPower, and Mr Russell will be rid of Southern altogether.Only one drawback.

By getting rid of Southern Water, Scottish Power also gets rid of a big chunk of reliable earnings Hence the need for the dividend cut. Shareholders might reasonably think they would have been better off with the original refinancing. Mr Russell insists that the dividend has to be cut so as to give a better level of cover going forward.What’s more, the company needs more cover because once shorn of water, it must rely on a more risky, shock prone earnings stream from electricity It seems like a circular argument and none of it convinces. The only reason the company’s earnings have become so prone to shocks is because of ScottishPower’s disastrous acquisition of PacifiCorp on the West Coast of America, which is produced more shocks than the San Andreas Fault.Mr Russell says he needs the dividend cut to enable him to invest more in electricity generation and distribution projects going forward. On the evidence of PacifiCorp it doesn’t look like a great use for the money.Interbrew stupidityRegular readers of this column will know what a poor opinion we have of Interbrew and its management. As if to prove our case, the Belgium brewer has taken on the massed ranks of the British press, including The Independent, in a characteristically ill-judged legal bid to force disclosure of documents that explored a possible takeover bid by Interbrew for South African Breweries.The attempt has already cost a lot of money and all Interbrew is certain to achieve is further alienation of an already hostile British media. Interbrew is an arrogant organisation with a well chronicled history of market abuse in Belgium, where it is a dominant supplier of beer.

Its pursuit of these documents is typically inept and narrow minded, and it would be well advised to give up the chase before it does itself any further damage.The documents in question were the normal sort of guff that investment bankers produce when a client asks for preparatory work to be undertaken on a takeover – relative market shares, possible synergies, method of bid execution, regulatory risk and the like – and caused great embarrassment to Interbrew when they were anonymously sent to the press. Copies of confidential corporate briefings are invariably “marked” in an encrypted way so that if they do leak, the source can be traced. Ergo, Interbrew wants the copies back.Our position is a somewhat curious one in that we were not included in the initial round robin of the documents, but took steps to obtain copies after it became apparent they were circulating in the City. We thus know where we got our documents from but not who the initial source was. The reason we are resisting handing over the documents is the obvious one that our source, and possibly the initial source as well, would become known to Interbrew.