They cannot achieve this if they are only prepared to circulate details of properties to, and forward offers from, a preferred group of buyers,” Mr Bridgeman said.. “Agents should take note that if I have evidence that they are failing to meet their obligations I can ban them from practising,” he added.Mr Bridgeman said he could recommend the Government ban the offering of “linked services” by estate agents if they failed to meet their obligations.The “undesirable practices” creeping in included:telling buyers that if they do not take linked financial services, or use the agent to sell their own property, they will not be put on a “preferential service list”;telling buyers that their offer would not be passed on until it has been “qualified” by the agency’s financial adviser;telling sellers that the law requires them to sign agreements with an agent when there is no such obligation;using “for sale” boards incorrectly.”Estate agents have a fiduciary duty to do the best for their client. The OFT said some estate agents were bullying housebuyers into accepting extra financial services, withholding information, or misleading sellers into agreeing contracts they were not obliged to sign up to.
“It is extremely disappointing that some undesirable practices are making a comeback,” said John Bridgeman, the director-general of Fair Trading. ESTATE AGENTS who exploit Britain’s buoyant property market to take housebuyers for a ride could be banned, the Office of Fair Trading said yesterday. The gloomy warning came on the eve of publication by the IMF of considerably more upbeat forecasts for the world economy.The violence in East Timor and the potential need for aid for peacekeeping and reconstruction will also be discussed.The latest humanitarian emergency follows in the wake of a string of disasters, human and natural, including Hurricane Mitch and Kosovo.. The dollar remained steady at just above 106 yesterday.The G7 is also due to consider the economic situation in two hotspots, Russia and Indonesia, at Saturday’s meeting.Both countries have borrowed extensively from the IMF and, in both cases, there are grave concerns about possible fraud.A report issued yesterday by the UN Conference on Trade and Development warned that the economic crisis in Asia was not over. After that episode of intervention the dollar climbed from a postwar low of 82.66, peaking at 146.31 in August 1998.

He predicted the prospect of such huge losses would tip the debate within the Bank of Japan.”Currency market intervention is futile unless other changes are implemented at the same time to support the move,” he said.US and Japanese officials have held several meetings in the run-up to next weekend’s G7 session.The last time the G7 tried – and succeeded – to turn around the currency markets was April 1995. Her style, her fashionable clothes, her high-profile visibility were the antithesis of everything traditionally associated with Soviet leaders’ wives – creatures usually invisible but, if the camera did for some reason stray upon them, to be seen only in dowdy floral prints and the safest of scarves, uttering not a word.Not so Raisa. The clothes were by Tamara Mokeyeva and Vyacheslav Zaitsev (who thanks to her patronage became a global celebrity in his turn), the hairstyle immaculate, and the views intelligent, lively and informed. As far as foreigners were concerned, nothing similar had ever burst from the fastnesses of mother Russia. More even than her husband, Raisa was instrumental in making the world believe for an instant that the Communist superpower might be normal after all.

“The image of the Soviet Union has changed by virtue of a woman’s face,” Paris-Match gushed after she travelled with her husband to Paris in 1985.But the United States, not France, was the Soviet Union’s appointed competitor in every field – including first ladies. Raisa Gorbachev will be above all remembered for “the other Cold War”, between herself and Nancy Reagan. The two first met in November 1985, on the sidelines of their husbands’ first summit in Geneva A couple of stiff formal tea-parties set the tone. Nancy reportedly found Raisa “pedantic and inflexible”, and a “dogmatic Marxist”. The Russian, as her body language made abundantly clear, considered her American counterpart vapid and foolish.The following year, she infuriated Mrs Reagan by at the last moment attending the summit in Reykjavik after signalling she would not go Raisa had the field to herself; Nancy was left smarting. In 1987, it was Helena Shultz, the wife of the Secretary of State, not Mrs Reagan, who showed Raisa around during the next US- Soviet summit in Washington.By that time, the Nancy-Raisa standoff was making headlines as large as the treaty to abolish an entire category of nuclear weapons, and the rivalry continued through the Reagans’ return visit to Moscow, in May 1988. There was no feud, Mrs Reagan’s press secretary lamely insisted, “but the two are from different worlds”.

Sadly for the gossip columnists, Raisa had a far better relationship with Barbara Bush, after George Bush took over the White House in 1989. But by then, in any case, the decline in the fortunes of herself, her husband and the Soviet Union had already begun.The last Soviet first lady was born Raisa Maksimovna Titorenko, daughter of a Siberian railway worker. Though the family moved to Stavropol, the town in the Northern Caucasus where Mikhail Gorbachev’s political career began, she only met her husband when they were students living in the same hostel at Moscow State University, the most prestigious academic institution in the country, where Raisa studied Marxist-Leninist philosophy She was impressed by his zest, his ambition and refinement. He was smitten by her vivacity and intellect.They married in 1955, shortly before Raisa graduated, and returned to Stavropol where he was named first secretary of the local branch of Komsomol, or Young Communist League. There she worked as a schoolteacher, produced the couple’s daughter Irina, and a doctoral thesis entitled “Emergence of New Characteristics in the Daily Lives of the Collective Farm Peasantry”.