If someone gets £1m but he’s actually generated £4m or £5m in fees, is that wrong? No.”Though Mr Adams himself owns 1,000 acres in Oxfordshire, he fights hard against the “posh” tag often applied to the company’s agents.”I don’t think they’re posh at all. We need to pay incentives to ensure we have the very best people … If he’s paid twice what I am, then jolly good luck to him.”He points out that Savills is a “very” profitable business and that £800,000 bonuses would be a “pittance” in City terms.”Is it right? That’s not for me to judge I’m running a business. An accountant by background, he joined Savills 14 years ago, just at the point of the last crash, and became chief executive in 2000.He does not mind the fact that some of his agents make far more than the £570,000 he took home last year.”If we’ve got a fantastic producer, he should be jolly well paid. A few months ago it sold a house in Kensington for a record £70m to Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon.However, to meet Mr Adams is not to enter the world of “sell, sell, sell” at all but to be enveloped in a sense of gentlemanly capitalism.”I’ve never sold a home in my life,” says Mr Adams, a courteous, articulate man, with a very reassuring manner. Aubrey Adams runs the most profitable estate agency business in the world, bar none.

Unless ministers have experienced a blinding flash on the road to Damascus, we can expect only further vacillation when finally they come to make their statement.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk. But this too has encountered fierce opposition, not least from the Office of Fair Trading, which refused to agree the measure would increase competition for audits and describes the present system as a “discipline on audit quality”. Some big partnerships might decide to pull out of audit services altogether.Objections to proportionality, under which auditors would be held liable only for their share of the blame for a loss, led to the alternative proposal that auditors’ liability be capped at a level agreed by companies’ shareholders. Without change, the growing trend among auditors to exit high-risk companies will further accelerate. Few will insure auditors against an open-ended liability to losses primarily caused by someone else This in turn makes it harder to recruit audit partners. Even in cases where the main cause of loss lies with the directors, creditors will come after the auditors because they are the people with the deeper pockets.

It is therefore important to get any changes right.The case for change is that joint and several liability has made it virtually impossible to get professional indemnity insurance. Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat and other corporate scandals have given the audit profession a bad name, yet the concept of audited accounts remains a cornerstone of the capitalist system without which fraud and confusion would run amok. Limit their liability, and the quality of the audit might deteriorate. Large institutional shareholders have meanwhile actively lobbied against any change, this mainly on the grounds that joint and several liability helps keep auditors on their toes by providing a powerful deterrent against negligence.

Last year, the DTI published a consultation document on possible reform of the law on joint and several liability, but this very much put the onus on auditors to demonstrate that a change from the status quo would be of public benefit The subtext was one of scepticism. Government and profession have been batting these issues back and forth for years, and up until now ministers have strongly resisted the accountants’ demands. At the Department of Trade and Industry, a statement is promised “very soon”, possibly as early as next Tuesday. This is the day on which the “little” Companies Bill comes back to the Commons for its second reading.