The telecommunications sector has never been known as the most entertaining in the City – the products are technical and so are the jokes – but there has always been something mildly intriguing about MegaFon, Russia's second largest telecoms group, which counts Arsenal investor Alisher Usmanov as a top shareholder.
You'll recall it's the firm that caused a bit of a fuss 18 months ago by floating on the London stock exchange – an offer that proved too sensational for the investment bank Goldman Sachs, which withdrew as an adviser after supposedly feeling rushed over its due diligence. Simultaneously, Usmanov assuaged investor concerns by stressing it would be the giant oligarch himself – rather than his partners Vladimir Skoch and Farhad Moshiri – who would control MegaFon votes.
Anyway, the company announces numbers this week, before again meeting shareholders at an extraordinary general meeting in early June, when it is asking for permission to do a deal with Usmanov.
That will be the sixth MegaFon EGM in nine months, so they're not wildly extraordinary. Meanwhile, it also provides MegaFon non-exec Lord Myners with a fresh challenge, now he's concluded his musings on the Co-op's unorthodox governance. Who says these people don't have a sense of humour?
Nuts and bolts of housing market
Another week, another unavoidable of debate about the UK's housing market which – after the weather and debating which A-road to take to avoid the traffic on some gyratory – seems to be the favoured conversation topic of one corner of England.
We will get the Nationwide house prices survey, data from the Bank of England on the funding for lending scheme and – in perhaps slightly less trailed news – there is also Wednesday's AGM at Travis Perkins, the building materials group that sounds more like a pair of butlers.
Strangely, after all the talk of a boom and a stellar 2013 for Travis shares, investors have suffered 11% losses this year. Still, analysts at Westhouse reckon the company is less susceptible than housebuilders to two big risks: the timing and speed of interest-rate rises and any change to the Help to Buy scheme should Labour win power.
Meanwhile, there is also plenty of sympathy that – for the moment – talk of corrective action in the housing market may be premature and that the so-called bubble is a problem only in the south-east. That's in terms of prices and constantly talking about it.
Tricky call for Glencore
Swiss Toni, the appalling car salesman from comedy sketch programme The Fast Show, used to love comparing everything to sex. "Having therapy is very much like making love to a beautiful woman," he would say. "You get on the couch, string 'em along with some half-lies and evasions … and then hand over all your money."
He was deliberately a dinosaur even when the show first aired, 20 years ago, but the corporate world insists on persevering with real-life versions, such as the executives inhabiting the boardroom at commodity trader Glencore – the last FTSE company to maintain an all-male board.
Last week, at its base in Zug, Switzerland, the company held its annual general meeting, at which new chairman "Swiss" Tony Hayward reiterated the company's previous pledges to hire a female director (although not necessarily much before the end of the year).
The excuse for its inaction so far has been that there are not many female candidates suitable for a company like Glencore – and it is certainly tricky to name many women who can boast a CV comparable to those of the current directors, who have presided over a 38% decline in share price and a £5bn writedown. Still, the search for that elusive beast continues this week.
