City Diary: Gotham City Research sharpens its claws for fresh shortselling attack

Are City dealmakers losing their appetite for exotic nightspots?

Latest accounts for Peter Stringfellow’s gentlemen’s establishments show that group turnover fell 5.3pc pro rata in 2013, resulting in a £229,960 pre-tax loss.

Still, at least the nightclub impresario’s son-in-law, Paul Roberts, is doing alright. He received £22,000 over the year in question “in respect of computer network support services”.

As Mr Stringfellow, 73, recently said of his glitzy haunts: “It’s very much a business environment.”

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Diary was first to bring you the news of Betfair’s unlawful dividend payments between 2011 and 2013, as detailed in this column earlier this summer . Now Pirc, Europe’s largest independent corporate governance adviser, is taking an interest.

Betfair blamed the £60m of share buybacks and dividends that “should not have been paid to shareholders” on changes to technical guidance from accounting body ICAEW.

But, given that ICAEW issued new rules on distributable profits in October 2010, ahead of Betfair’s April 30 2011 year-end accounts, Pirc is querying why the illegal distributions were made “much later in 2011, 2012 and 2013”. “Particularly as the mistake was not a one-off, but repeated five times,” says the investor watchdog.

Tomorrow’s Betfair annual meeting, when Pirc will call on shareholders to reject the bookie’s entire annual report, could be a rough ride.

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Better together, as former Chancellor Alistair Darling has been arguing ahead of the looming Scottish referendum? Not if the wealthy donors funding the opposing factions have their way.

According to the latest Electoral Commission figures, campaigns for the “yes” vote received £178,000 between July 25 and August 21. The pro-unionists, by contrast, received just £75,000.

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Reprieve, the human rights group that last week reported G4S to the Government for accepting a £70.5m contract at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base , has been busier holding Footsie companies to account than Diary first thought.

In recent weeks, the campaigner has also filed a fresh complaint about BT’s “potential complicity” in US drone strikes, after the telecoms company laid a fibre optic cable from a UK RAF base to a US military camp in the Horn of Africa.

BT insists the cable “has not been specifically designed or adapted by BT for military purposes”, and pointed out that an earlier complaint by Reprieve on the same topic was rejected by the UK National Contact Point (NCP).

Interestingly, the NCP is a Government department overseen by former BT CEO Ian (now Lord) Livingston in his new post of trade minister.

But Business Secretary Vince Cable was quick to quash any possible conflict of interest.

In a letter to Reprieve, seen by Diary, he said: “While the trade minister has responsibility for the NCP as part of his broader portfolio… ministers neither take decisions, nor are consulted, on complaints dealt with by the NCP.”

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harriet.dennys@telegraph.co.uk

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