They set out stories of midnight fire-bombings, the daubing of graffiti and leafleting of neighbours.Thirteen companies ceased trading with the life sciences industry in the last three months of 2003, and 12 more stopped in the first two months of this year. Suppliers, advisers and contractors are giving up dealing with the life sciences industry at the rate of one a week because of increased intimidation from animal rights extremists.
The figures, collated by the pharmaceuticals industry, show a rise in the number of attacks and come as victims lobbied Parliament yesterday for a new law to crack down on anti-vivisection violence. Mr Arnold, formerly at UBS, has made personal financial services core to Abbey’s recovery. However, yesterday he had to admit that profits had been hurt because of a range of problems.. You can stand three doors down from a branch and not see it.”Another shareholder, Veronica Hosking, said she had been foxed in her attempts to find her local Abbey outlet because “it looked more like a dress shop than a branch”.Luqman Arnold, who was recruited in October 2002 to try to return Abbey to profitability, defended the decision to change its image as well as working on improving its products and levels of service.”When you have a situation where a company has really lost its way and you need to make a call to arms to your 25,000 people, the name is a symbol of everything else you do,” he said.Abbey is just under half-way into a planned three-year turnaround.

Shareholders in Abbey National launched a savage attack on the high street bank yesterday over its £11m rebranding last year, saying it had failed to revitalise the struggling business.
The deluge of criticism at Abbey’s annual meeting in London came as it was forced to hand out more bad news to investors, warning that profits in its core personal financial services division were “moderately weaker” than originally expected Abbey’s shares fell 15p to 420p. Yesterday’s share price decline follows weeks of below-par performance during which time the shares have fallen from a high of 596.5p.Shareholders at the meeting said Abbey’s decision to drop “National” from its title and to ditch its traditional red umbrella for more modern pastel shades had made it a non-entity on the high street.Norman Edwards, a private shareholder, said: “You’ve done the most magnificent job of camouflage since the Second World War. Sources close to the Channel Tunnel operator said Mr Burge no longer felt he could work credibly with the new all-French board led by chairman Jacques Maillot, the founder of the leisure group Nouvelles Fronti?s and chief executive Jean-Louis Raymond, a former retailer.”Roger met the new board and made a judgement as to whether he could work with them,” said a friend of the former finance director.There had been doubts about whether Mr Burge would stay following the removal of Eurotunnel’s former chief executive Richard Shirrefs, particularly in view of his strong association with the rescue plan, Project Galaxie, put forward by the previous board.His departure will raise concerns that other senior management within Eurotunnel may chose to leave the company. If any others among the executive team were to leave – notably Alain Bertrand the infrastructure director, Dave Pointon, the technical director, Daniel Spinath, the director of passenger services, or Bill Dix, the director of solutions – it would blow a hole in the operational management of the tunnel A source said: “Uncertainty is rife There is a surreal atmosphere about the place.”.

Eurotunnel was dealt a fresh blow last night after its finance director quit following the shareholder rebellion that saw the entire board of the company ousted a fortnight ago. “Huge increases experienced in the past three years cannot be sustained,” she said. “If consumers believe there will be further base-rate increases, take-up for short-term, fixed-rate mortgages will increase, thus restricting remortgaging.”The CML said variable rate mortgages account for three-quarters of all home loans, up from 50 per cent last summer.Unsecured lending also rose according to the BBA, up £1.4bn, including a £500m increase in credit card borrowing.. However, Karina Purang, the report’s author, believes the growth of remortgaging will now start to slow.

However, he said it would be wrong to raise rates to shock consumers, especially with inflation well below the MPC’s upper limit of 2 per cent.The Council of Mortgage Lenders said gross advances for March totalled £24.5bn, up from £20.5bn in February, and 25 per cent higher than the same month last year.The number of first-time buyers also showed signs of recovery, with a 13 per cent increase on a year ago, according to the CML. However, first-time buyers still represent only 31 per cent of overall mortgage lending, down from a high of almost 50 per cent six years ago.Remortgaging accounts for 41 per cent of all mortgage lending, as an increasing number of homeowners switch lenders to secure cheaper rates. Seven years ago, just 18 per cent of home loans were remortgages.A report by Datamonitor, the financial analyst, yesterday, predicts remortgaging will represent half of the UK mortgage market by 2008. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, insisted yesterday that he would hit the “golden rule” that governs the public finances as official figures showed that borrowing turned out significantly better last year than he predicted in last month’s Budget.
Public borrowing was £34.8bn in the year to March 2004, the Office for National Statistics said.