To play with the big boys, you need the efficiencies of scale. The market leaders are now fully entrenched, and it’s become hard to impossible to catch them up.Go back 10 years, there were more than 100 separate life funds writing new business. Today there may be as few as 25, and out of these only five really count. Why are their present owners so keen to give it away?The disaster of Equitable Life has given the closed life fund an extraordinarily bad name, yet the reality is that quite a few of these funds – so called because they have ceased writing new business – are relatively well capitalised and quite capable of delivering as promised to their policyholders. The reason they’ve been closed is that their owners no longer think it worth the candle to devote capital and management time to them. In virtually every respect, Britannic Group’s decision to merge with its main rival as a consolidator of closed life funds, Resolution Life Group, makes perfect sense.

Up until now, the two have found themselves fierce competitors for any closed life fund that comes on to the market. By merging, they cancel each other out, leaving the financier Hugh Osmond as the only other serious acquirer of these businesses.
They also achieve quite considerable synergies in the costs of administration, fund management and capital. They are Tom Freston, who heads Viacom’s faster-growing cable television and film business, and Leslie Moonves, in charge of the mature radio and television arm. The two were made co-presidents last summer after Mel Karmazin resigned from the job.Viacom would not comment on when its board meeting is taking place or what was on the agenda.. Ms Redstone, 51, who trained as a lawyer, runs her family’s privately held cinema chain, National Amusements.Her central role at Viacom will be watched closely by two senior executives whom her father is playing off against each other to succeed him in the day-to-day running of the company.

Shari Redstone, the daughter of the octogenarian media mogul Sumner Redstone, is set to be appointed vice-chairman of her father’s company, Viacom, at board meeting next week.
The move marks the growing prominence of Ms Redstone within the New York-based media company, whose assets include the music cable channel MTV and Paramount Pictures film studios.Mr Redstone, 82, the chairman and chief executive of Viacom, has indicated in the past that his daughter would succeed him as chairman. State of disaster declared over worsening food shortages.* 2005: Mugabe’s party, Zanu-PF, wins a parliamentary poll, enabling him to change the constitution The opposition cries fraud.. So he stands around and squints in the direction of town, waiting for the police and the bulldozers to come. Her husband has already left to find a day’s work somewhere.Julius, like his neighbours, has no rural retreat to go to. At the hut next door, Thenkiwe and her seven children are boiling some water but have nothing to put in it.