Booker said the sector already faced strong competition from the supermarket groups.
Booker’s offer has the agreement of the founding Peacock family which controls a 28 per cent share. Manufacturers can inflate the statistics in the last few days of the month by registering cars to dealers, so they count as a “sale” in the data before they find a genuine buyer. On the penultimate day of August 1995, 45,000 cars were registered, 10 per cent of the month’s total, though most had not probably been “bought”.”In a way it’s a more rational August this year,” said Jay Nagley, an expert on the car market with Marketing Systems “The sales look more genuine this year. That takes us over 1988’s total,” Mr Pulham said.Another factor was the lower number of so-called “pre-registrations”. However, Rover’s sales brought its share to around 10 per cent.By far the biggest winner in August was Volkswagen, which registered 27,000 cars, grabbing 6 per cent of the entire market.

VW has seen huge interest from private buyers in its Polo “super-mini”.Alan Pulham, from the National Franchised Dealers Association, said: “If you price a product right people will buy it and Volkswagen are definitely pricing their cars right.They’ve corrected the main problem they had, which was that their cars were perceived as being too expensive.”Yesterday industry analysts suggested the outcome was not as bad as it seemed, partly because August this year included one less selling day than last year “It still gives us the second-biggest August ever. Vauxhall’s slice was just 13 per cent, with industry sources suggesting demand for the Vectra, the replacement for Cavalier, had not matched expectations. They also suggest the recent improvement in consumer confidence has not been sufficient to bring a sustained boost to the car market.Ford had a particularly bad month with its share of the total market dropping to 18.5 per cent. Manufacturers had predicted a much more buoyant August,with a forecast rise of around 5 per cent to 490,000.
The figures dash hopes that sales could surge through the 500,000 barrier for the first time since 1989. The statistics will also show a bad month for the traditional market leaders, Ford and Vauxhall, and a continuing boom in sales of imported cars.

Registration data, which was being collated last night, suggests that unless manufacturers dump thousands of cars on dealers at the last minute, around 475,000 new cars were sold last month, compared with 469,000 in August 1990. Sales of P-registration cars in August look set to show a disappointing increase of little more than 1 per cent over last year, when the industry announces the final figures today. Christopher Woodgate, chairman of the eight-partner boutique, said it had been hired in July to value “certain assets”.Meanwhile, all large fund managers are tightening up their control systems, according to senior executives in the industry, who said the Morgan Grenfell problem underlined the need for perpetual vigilance.The Association of Unit Trusts and Investment Funds welcomed Morgan Grenfell’s promise that no investor would lose money.Philip Warland, chief executive, said: “No unit trust investor has ever lost any money as a result of irregularities.”However, many of the 90,000 investors in the two unit trusts and the fund at the centre of the investigation have been flooding their financial advisers with calls.Comment, page 21. He said he had been told not to make any comments about the Morgan Grenfell affair.The home remained empty throughout the day. There were signs that its occupants have only recently moved in. Electrical work to the gates is still not completed and the lawn appears to have been freshly planted.Dealing in the funds, suspended while investigations were conducted into “potential irregularities in the valuation of unquoted securities”, was due to resume today.But in an effort to instill investor confidence in the funds, Deutsche Bank, which owns Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, bought up many of these unlisted securities at a price estimated to have cost the German banking giant at least pounds 150m.Mr Young, 38, ran two of the funds suspended at the start of the week – Morgan Grenfell European Growth Trust, a unit trust, and Dublin-listed Morgan Grenfell European Capital Growth Fund.

The third fund, Morgan Grenfell Europa, is run by Stewart Armer, who has not been suspended and is not under investigation.Carnegie, the broker cited in the European Growth Trust annual report as having taken 10 per cent of the broking commissions paid out by the fund last year, declined to comment.It also emerged that Ice Securities, hired to value some of the securities in the fund, had been visited by the regulator. “He seems like quite a nice person but we haven’t seen anything of him or his children yet, so it’s hard to make a judgement.”Mr Young left home at 10.30am yesterday with his wife. He added that NSM specialised, among other things, in fraud detection. But he said: “I wouldn’t read anything into that.”Neighbours at Mr Young’s newly built, luxury detached home in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, said they were mystified by what had happened to the latest arrival in their small, exclusive close.One person, who refused to be named, said Mr Young had barely moved into his pounds 400,000 home a few weeks earlier.

An injunction was taken out in conjunction with Royal Bank of Scotland, trustee to the two funds he ran. Morgan Grenfell declined to comment when asked if this should be taken as an allegation that Mr Young was suspected of using the funds’ assets for personal gain or fraud.Lawyers acting for Morgan Grenfell have also engaged specialist financial investigators to help their inquiries into the mystery surrounding the three European investment funds.A senior executive from Network Security Management (NSM), a subsidiary of Hambros, the merchant bankers, called yesterday at the home of Mr Young, to arrange a meeting with him.Allan McDonagh, deputy managing director of NSM, confirmed that his firm was working on behalf of Morgan Grenfell. It is thought that regulators are focusing on several mysterious unlisted companies, many of them Norwegian, in which Peter Young, a fund manager suspended by Morgan Grenfell Asset Management, had invested money belonging to some 90,000 investors.
Inquiries among eight Norwegian specialist analysts yesterday failed to find any who recognised the names of some of the firms in which Mr Young had invested.The European Growth Trust, one of the funds he managed, staked 1.31 per cent and 1.00 per cent respectively of its assets in Norwegian companies Syteminvest and Waferprof Holding, neither of which rang any bells with the specialists.One market source speculated that Mr Young could have been using some of the unlisted firms to buy his investments in other companies, which had become unprofitable after stocks in the companies plunged this year.Among the recognised Norwegian-quoted companies, the share price of Sysdeco Group, in which the European Capital Growth Fund had invested 8.17 per cent of its assets, had fallen to around 45 crowns yesterday from levels around 225 crowns in late February – an 80 per cent slump.Morgan Grenfell Asset Management last night moved to freeze the assets of Mr Young as part of its investigation into suspected irregularities in three funds in which pounds 1.4bn is invested. This is the biggest campaign in more than 20 years,” said the official at the anti-social-evils department Reuter – Hanoi. Investigators trying to unravel the affairs of three Morgan Grenfell investment funds believe the funds may have fallen victim to a complex fraud involving a “byzantine” web of transactions in a series of mysterious overseas companies.