If at the start of 2004 you had decided to follow our tips and invest in The Independent on Sunday portfolio of six stocks, you would have lost money over the year

There is never an easy way to break bad news. The US Food and Drug Administration has already warned AstraZeneca over adverts it took out repudiating the view expressed by a senior FDA official, David Graham, that the drug might not be safe. In Japan the drug’s introduction into the market is likely to be delayed. This is because regulators want AstraZeneca to draw up a study plan to show the effects of the treatment, once it has gone on sale, which may take some months to design.Worldwide, prescriptions of the drug have fallen and investors will be seeking more information on how badly Crestor has been harmed by negative publicity.Finally, investors will want convincing that no more of AstraZeneca’s most promising drugs will fail to get to market. Sir Tom has said the figure will not be material, but investors will be concerned if it seems to be larger than they have been led to believe.They will also keep a close watch on what is happening with Crestor. The fear is that it may be withdrawn from sale in the States.

But I will never be in the way if it is better for the company to move forward with someone else.”Sir Tom’s future will be determined by AstraZeneca’s full-year results announcement on 27 January, when investors will want to see if he can avoid any more problems.Shareholders will initially want to know how much the group is going to have to write off because of the Iressa and Exanta setbacks. If that was better served by someone else being chief executive of AstraZeneca, that would happen in a moment.”It’s just, you know that question has not been raised and I will continue to serve the company for as long as it wants me to serve in that role. “The changes may buy him a bit of time, but one more slip and that’ll be it.”"We don’t want any more hiccups,” said a third substantial shareholder.In a media conference call shortly after the Iressa news, Sir Tom said: “My interest is really serving the company, doing the best for its shareholders and for patients. Brewin Dolphin is paying £5m, while Collins Stewart Tullett, another broker, which is said to have held up the final settlement while it argued about legal issues, is paying £10m.Four firms – Exeter Fund Managers, BFS Investments, BC Asset Management and Teather & Greenwood – refused to join the deal. Eighteen City firms have agreed to pay £194m into a fund to compensate investors who lost money in the split-capital trust scandal.
In a deal that has taken the Financial Services Authority most of the year to broker, up to 40,000 investors may receive up to 80 per cent of the money they lost when the highly geared trusts collapsed as a result of falling stock markets between 2001 and 2003.The FSA has agreed to take no further action against the firms that joined the settlement, or the individuals who worked for them. However, some of the architects of the scandal have accepted bans that in effect mean they will never work in the City again.Christopher Fishwick, a director of Aberdeen Asset Management, which was the biggest backer of split-capital trusts, has agreed not to work in the City for seven years.David Thomas, who worked for Brewin Dolphin, stockbrokers to many of the trusts, has agreed to retire from the market.Aberdeen was the largest contributor to the fund, paying out some £78.3m before legal costs. It reviewed this during December and, detecting no improvement, launched a formal investigation on Thursday.”Based on all available information, including advice from Vodafone, the ACA is satisfied that Vodafone is continuing to contravene the industry code,” said Bob Horton, acting chairman of the ACA.

Vodafone faces fines potentially running into millions of Australian dollars after an investigation was launched into complaints that the telecoms giant has been harming competition in the Australian mobile phone market.
Three local rivals – Telstra, Optus and Hutchison – have all complained to the Australian Communications Agency that Vodafone has not been complying with rules that allow subscribers to keep their mobile phone numbers when they swap to another provider. The Australian industry code of practice calls for 90 per cent of phone numbers to be transferred within three hours and 99 per cent within two business days.The ACA warned Vodafone on 25 November that it was not meeting these standards. These could be as high as A$250,000 (£100,000) a day, running from the original warning To date, this would mean A$8m in fines for the company.. “We’re unfortunately experiencing some teething problems, and this can contribute to the delays that some customers are experiencing with porting their number. Resolving this issue is a key priority for Vodafone.”The investigation is expected to take a month, and if the ACA finds that Vodafone has deliberately blocked portability or has been slow in solving the problems, it is likely to levy fines. “Any unnecessary delays in number portability are simply unacceptable.”Vodafone said the problem was technical and that it was working to sort out the situation.”We’ve been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new technology and are currently in the implementation stage,” said Grahame Maher, chief executive of Vodafone Australia. Khartoum accuses the charities of disseminating anti-government propaganda, and recently sought to expel the heads of operation of Save the Children and Oxfam.

The Oxfam official was eventually forced to leave for alleged visa irregularities.Officials from Care International were arrested after an employee was stabbed to death at Kalma camp by refugees who accused him of being a member of the Janjaweed. Sudanese authorities claimed the agency was criminally negligent in taking the man to Kalma.The government-run Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC) is supposed to co-ordinate relief efforts. But it has been used in attempts to control aid, rewarding “friendly” – predominantly Arab – communities while trying to deny assistance to Africans deemed to be favouring the rebels. The government is also accused of setting up “front” charities to undermine the work of the international organisations.

Two such groups, Sugya and Ayya, are said to have approached refugees in areas such as Kass in south Darfur, asking them how much relief they received from international groups then offering them huge sums of cash to return to their villages. Arab charities, mainly from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, have also offered money to refugees to return to their homes.For long periods the government, through HAC, refused the UN and international agencies permission to provide humanitarian aid to makeshift camps which had sprung up around Nyala, the capital of south Darfur. The 50,000 dispossessed in the camps lived in huts of twigs and leaves. They did not have food distribution, toilets, drainage, medical facilities or water. The government insisted that the camps could not be made permanent, as they would be breeding grounds for diseases.Troops and police have also carried out violent raids on the camps, purportedly to search for weapons and arrest criminals, but, according to the refugees, the constant theme is that they should go back to their villages. Those who did so, however, either because they took money or were forced to go, say they were sent back to the guns and knives of the Janjaweed and the Sudanese military.The aid agencies are wary of criticising the Sudanese government in public, but a senior official said: “We are going to continue to see the humanitarian organisations drawing back It is simply too dangerous. This means that the Sudanese government is effectively winning in its campaign to keep independent observers out of Darfur.