He has no plans to sell, only plans to expand."BA said that Roger Maynard, its director of investments, is returning from a trip to Australia to discuss the bmi-Virgin talks with Rod Eddington, the chief executive.A spokesman for BA said: "We will be looking where we fit in, whether we should fit in, and whether we should take steps to make sure we fit in.". The campaign against excessive boardroom pay yesterday scored another victory when Kingfisher, which owns Comet and B&Q, said it had scrapped controversial two-year contracts for three of its directors. The retail giant has also beefed up the criteria which trigger the lucrative share option scheme given to Gerry Murphy, the new chief executive. The culmination will be the annual general meeting of HSBC on Friday where the bank is likely to be grilled over the $37.5m (£25m) three-year deal granted to William Aldinger, head of the recently acquired Household International.Kingfisher unveiled its revised plan in a letter to shareholders last Thursday. It hopes the new arrangements will head off a repeat of the vicious attacks on executive pay which have dominated other companies' annual meetings with shareholders. The Kingfisher agm is a week on Wednesday.A recent series of introductory meetings with Kingfisher's largest shareholders left Mr Murphy in no doubt that two-year contracts are becoming increasingly unpopular in the City. Investors also warned him they were opposed to using ambiguous "rolling periods" for assessing share price performance when setting bonuses.As a consequence, the company has sliced in half the two-year notice period of its finance director, Helen Weir, and two other executive directors, Ian Cheshire and Bill Whiting.Severance terms which award a director more than 12-months' money - known as "golden goodbyes" - are one of the main focuses of discontent among shareholders because they could be a huge "payment for failure".Mr Murphy, who joined in February from Carlton Communications, has also agreed to base his pay-out from share options on Kingfisher's share price from when he joined.

This is more rigorous than the original arrangement, which entitled Mr Murphy to pick any three-year period.Corporate governance lobbyists fear that companies which bow to this year's unprecedented backlash against "fat cat" rewards will quietly compensate their senior executives in other ways.However, Kingfisher confirmed that Mr Murphy, who is on a basic salary of £800,000 plus up to £1.6m in annual bonuses, would not be compensated for strengthening the performance criteria of his share options. Nor would the three executive directors be compensated for moving to one-year contracts.Kingfisher's climb-down comes less than a month after it provoked the wrath of shareholders with news that its former chief executive, Sir Geoff Mulcahy, had amassed a £15m pension pot.GlaxoSmithKline became the most high-profile victim of shareholder activism so far when it suffered a landmark defeat at its agm over the pay packet of its chief executive, Jean-Pierre Garnier.This week, Rolls Royce, Collins Stewart, Rentokil Initial, Aegis and HSBC are facing a showdown with shareholders. Tomorrow Vodafone is expected to say Sir Christopher Gent, its chief executive, who is retiring in the summer, was paid £5m for his last full year. Vodafone, still one of the most generous payers in the FTSE 100, was one of the first major UK companies to bow to pressure on executive pay.

When I tell a friend that I'm going off to meet Jean Paul Gaultier, he says, with what may or may not be postmodern irony: "That fat gay bloke? Has he done anything since the pointy bras?" When I tell a friend that I'm going off to meet Jean Paul Gaultier, he says, with what may or may not be postmodern irony: "That fat gay bloke? Has he done anything since the pointy bras?" Personally, I blame Eurotrash. Channel 4's cult sleaze-fest began in 1993, and Gaultier - co-hosting with Antoine de Caunes - became, overnight, everyone's favourite French queen. The dizzy blond to Antoine's wily brunette, one's sense of him as a creator shrank with every naughty-but-nice gag (he didn't write the scripts, and later declared that he found many of them homophobic) This erstwhile enfant terrible was left looking simply... terrible.Anyway, since retreating from that harsh spotlight, he's done fine. The stark black dress that Nicole Kidman wore to the Oscars; Madonna's clothes for her Drowned World tour; the perfume bottles shaped like a va-va-voom woman; the line in haute couture (now backed, in part, by Herm?, which ticks along very nicely Don't get me wrong. I'm still fond of those conical boulder-holders, so famously showcased by Madonna.