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Sooner or later Granada is going to sell its remaining BSkyB shares

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Sooner or later, Granada is going to sell its remaining BSkyB shares. So soon after the float that was plainly not an option.Chargeurs, the French shareholder, is widely seen as too obstreperous to be suitable for the chairmanship, though insiders say it has calmed down since the float. The strongest power is Rupert Murdoch, who holds the position of chief executive through Sam Chisholm - a no-nonsense New Zealander who thinks most Euros are wallies. For Mr Murdoch to nominate his own chairman would make it look like a News International takeover. John Thornton of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, is there to hold the ring, and mighty tough he sometimes finds it too. Frank Barlow, the Pearson man who has chaired BSkyB, brought in Greg Dyke to run Pearson's TV interests. They include BSkyB, but he was hardly qualified as a new boy to go straight to the chairmanship.

That meant Mr Barlow had to step down from the top job to let him on to the board at all.Pearson watchers none the less see plenty of hidden meanings in the move - some believe it to be a subtle way of speeding Mr Barlow towards retirement The politics of the BSkyB board are easier to fathom. With such a collection of egos at the top it is perhaps surprising BSkyB manages to function at all. It also makes for a hotbed of speculation; stories doing the rounds yesterday to explain why Pearson had given up the chairmanship and handed it to Granada only a few weeks after the flotation of the company on the Stock Exchange, were legion. Unfortunately, the most probable explanation is also the most innocuous. The company said the operation would lose £3m in the year to 31 March, compared with a profit of £3.9m in 1993/4.Mr Padovan also warned that profits from distribution services would be substantially below last year's £2.3m, but that the mainstay healthcare businesses continued to perform soundly.AAH shares fell by 21p to 282p yesterday, virtually half the peak 544p of a year ago.. Put Rupert Murdoch's News International, the French group Chargeurs, the British media conglomerate Pearson and the Granada TV and catering firm on the same board, and it is a certainty that the powers involved will find much to disagree about.

We may look to see how a mailbag is received into the building," Mr Padovan said.David Taylor, head of AAH Pharmaceuticals at Runcorn, said it was not yet clear how the cheques had fallen into the wrong hands.Meanwhile, analysts were left wondering whether AAH would continue with its environmental services businesses. "We will be reviewing our banking system and use of postal services. A police spokesman said that a 32-year-old man from Manchester was helping with the inquiry. There were unconfirmed reports last night that a picture of one person paying cheques into a bogus account in Leeds had been captured on the bank's security cameras.John Padovan, chairman of AAH - who also yesterday surprised the City with a warning about losses in AAH's environment services division - said there was "no evidence that any of our staff have participated in this".He also said he had no criticism of the Royal Mail.The mailbag was one of many containing a total of £80m of cheques. The stolen cheques were then, the company believes, paid into possibly 20 different banks where fictitious accounts had been opened under the name of AAH Pharmaceuticals Limited, the otherwise legitimate subsidiary that pays cheques into its local Lloydsbank in Runcorn, Cheshire. An unspecified amount of money is also understood to have been withdrawn from some of the accounts at the banks, most of which were sited close to the M6 motorway from Birmingham, through Manchester and up to Blackpool.

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