PORTRAIT OF THE WEEK
Your life in their hands Mr Geoffrey Robinson, the Paymaster General, insisted there was nothing wrong about his being a discretionary beneficiary of a £12.75 million trust fund in Guernsey set up by a late friend, Madame Joska Bourgeois; before the election, Mr Gordon Brown, then shadow Chancellor, had said: `A Labour Chancellor will not permit tax reliefs to millionaires in offshore tax havens.' Mr Robinson said, 'There was no, nor could there have been any, UK tax avoidance.' He said that he had paid no assets into the trust, but it emerged that the trust had bought, from a company owned by Mr Robinson, options to buy shares worth £9 million in another company. From 1999 the government is to replace Tessas and PEPs with an Individual Savings Account, which will have a ceiling of £50,000. Government grants to local authorities are to change in ways too com- plicated to summarise; this will lead to rises in council tax, notably in Westminster. A Private Member's Bill introduced by Mr Michael Foster, the Labour member for Worcester, to make illegal hunting with hounds was passed by 411 to 151 votes; 'It is our aim to have the ban in place by the millennium,' a government source said. Welsh farmers dumped 40 tons of beef- burgers from Ireland into the sea in protest against imports of cheap Irish beef. RIB, the coal producers, facing cheap imports of electricity from France, considered closing eight more pits, with the loss of 5,000 jobs; Midlands Mining might buy some of the mines. Parts from the eyes of a dead woman were transplanted into three people before it was discovered that she died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. The Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport called for the resignation of the board of the Royal Opera House. Mr Mohamed Fayed dropped a libel action against the American magazine Vanity Fair. After a much-publicised hearing in Cape Town, Earl and Countess Spencer agreed a divorce settlement in which he is to pay her L2 million and other benefits. Shirley Crab- tree, the wrestler Big Daddy, died, aged 64. Journalists continued to doubt if a cat pro- duced for photographers by the govern- ment to prove he had not been put down was in fact Humphrey the cat that used to live in Downing Street.
VACLAV KLAUS resigned as the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic at the sug- gestion of President Vaclav Havel, in the middle of a financial scandal over party funds. Mr Inder Kumar Gujral resigned as Prime Minister of India. The army in Pak- istan stood by, poised to seize power, until President Farooq Leghari resigned, allow- ing Mr Nawaz Sharif to continue as Prime Minister. The homestead of Mr Ian Smith, who led Rhodesia into a Unilateral Decla- ration of Independence, was among the 1,503 farms to be seized by the Zimbab- wean government and handed over to land- less blacks. Two bombs exploded in a mar- ket in New Delhi, killing three and injuring 40. The Princess Royal toured a drug reha- bilitation centre in Cali, Colombia. The Pope condemned the plague of kidnap- pings in Colombia and appealed for the release of an abducted bishop. Local authorities in Ekaterinburg refused to let the remains of the last Tsar and his family go to Moscow for tests. In Hong Kong 144 babies were given toxic mouthwash instead of anti-fever syrup. An outbreak of cholera struck Kuala Lumpur. Hundreds of dead fish were washed onto the beach at Corpus Christi, Texas; they were said to have been killed by red tide, a kind of algae fatal to fish in high concentrations. Bush fires threatened Sydney. Stephane Grappelli, the French jazz violinist, died, aged 89. CSH
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