The most important thing is that the new finance director is an external candidate

The most important thing is that the new finance director is an external candidate. That independence is absolutely key.”The shareholder added that the retailer, which has a poor record in corporate governance and communicating with the City, desperately needed a senior investor relations director.Another investor added that the departure of long-standing finance director Martin Ackroyd, after the previous warning, had not been in the retailer’s best interests “The one thing we didn’t need to do was to squeeze him out. The fashion chain’s surging success over recent years has hit its rival hard, particularly in the crucial womenswear arena.However, M&S is also understood to be suffering from the gloomy sentiment on the high street.Despite the difficult conditions Next has said it will open a further 50 stores this year.. Investors are calling on Wm Morrison to bring some order to its boardroom after last week’s chaotic profits warning. He is predicting that underlying sales will be down by around 5 per cent.Another analyst, Richard Ratner at Seymour Pierce, is expecting like-for-like sales to be off by around 4 per cent.Next is one of the strongest retail stocks on the market, so any bad news will add to the already depressed sentiment surrounding the sector. “Was my name added to these documents at the time or were they added later? I don’t know who put my name on these documents.

The news surprised the City, coming just weeks after the latest warning and shortly before a planned update at its annual general meeting on 26 May.In addition, newly appointed chief executive Bob Stott was in Italy on holiday. Sources claimed it had been left to deputy chairman David Jones to convene the board meeting and issue the warning, although an insider denied this, saying chairman Sir Ken Morrison was “very much driving this”.The insider also denied it was unusual for a chief executive to be on holiday while his company issued a profits warning, and stressed that he was in constant phone contact.But shareholders were less than pleased. The British Retail Consortium is calling for an urgent interest rate cut to boost spending.The update will compound a poor run for Next so far this year. He had previously spent 20 years at BP.Critics said that Mr Haythornthwaite underestimated the scale of the task ahead of him when he arrived at Invensys in October 2001..

I don’t know much about the other members of the committee, but if you look at his website, the chairman is driving it,” Mr Galloway said.Mr Coleman and his committee may give as good as they get. The six Democrat members, who also signed the report naming Mr Galloway, may bridle at being described, by implication, as Republican “lickspittles”. In their hands is some apparently potent ammunition: four Iraqi oil trading contracts that name Mr Galloway, Fawaz Zureikat and the MP’s anti-sanctions Mariam Appeal as the beneficiaries of 20 million barrels worth of oil vouchers, and testimony from several Iraqi officials that implicates the Bethnal Green and Bow MP in an “oil for influence” scandal.Their report cited allegations by Mr Ramadan, who ran the committee that oversaw Saddam’s oil contracts, that Mr Galloway was given the allocations “because of his opinions about Iraq” and because the MP “want[ed] to lift the embargo against Iraq”. Another unnamed Iraqi official was quoted as claiming that a British MP “benefited tremendously from the illegal trade in oil by Iraq”.Long before last week’s report, Mr Galloway’s politics were anathema to many Americans.

Now notorious for saying to Saddam in 1994 that he “saluted” the dictator’s “courage, strength and indefatigability”, Mr Galloway’s relentless attacks on US-led sanctions against Iraq, his championing of the Palestinian cause, and his prominence in Britain’s anti-war movement, brought him notoriety.Despite his consistent denials and two successful libel actions, the allegations linking Mr Galloway to Iraqi oil deals refuse to die. In 2003, he was hit by newspaper allegations that he had personally been granted oil vouchers by Saddam’s regime. One set of documents used by the respected Christian Science Monitor were found to be forged. The paper quickly settled a libel action.Earlier, documents were uncovered by The Daily Telegraph in the wreckage of Baghdad within days of the city’s capture by US forces. Apparently written by the head of Saddam’s secret service, one set of papers alleged that Mr Galloway had received oil vouchers, claiming £375,000 a year, and wanted more.Last year, Mr Galloway won a libel action against the Telegraph and was awarded £150,000 in damages, with the paper facing £1.2m costs.

He won principally because the paper mishandled its attempts to give Mr Galloway the right of reply, and the way it presented the accusations.The MP repeatedly denied the claims were true, but the authenticity of the documents was not challenged by his team in court. For its part, the Telegraph never insisted in court it believed the documents’ claims were true This particular battle will be fought again. The Telegraph is appealing against the verdict, and a hearing is scheduled to begin on 10 October.At the centre of this latest row are two issues – Saddam’s abuse of the UN oil-for-food programme and Mr Galloway’s campaign against UN sanctions on Iraq. According to Mr Coleman’s committee, the MP’s campaign may have been used to conceal Iraqi oil payments, thanks, it suggests, to one of Mr Galloway’s main allies, a Jordanian businessman called Fawaz Zureikat.The UN’s vast “oil-for-food” initiative, controlled from New York, was designed to ensure sanction-hit Iraq had enough food and essential medical supplies. It has since emerged that Saddam deliberately subverted it, raking off $1.7bn in illegal sales.In 1998, Mr Galloway launched his own campaign against those sanctions, using a four-year-old girl with leukaemia, a frail and extremely ill child called Mariam Hamza, as its figurehead. He raised £900,000, intended to fund her ultimately successful trip for live-saving treatment at Yorkhill hospital in Glasgow and the US, and for Mr Galloway’s frequent trips abroad to lift sanctions.