Mr Bloomer had only just got back from a four-day conference in Hong Kong of his top 120 executives

Mr Bloomer had only just got back from a four-day conference in Hong Kong of his top 120 executives in which plans for the future were breathlessly rehearsed when he was hauled off to the gallows.To make matters worse, the man being brought in to do Mr Bloomer’s job, Mark Tucker, is a former Prudential lifer and longstanding pretender to the throne. His current contractual arrangements, which in the past have been subject to criticism from City corporate governance experts, are due to expire at the end of August, leaving him and the company without an agreement over his future employment.However from 1 April, Sir Martin will be employed directly by WPP for the first time in years. Until now his services as CEO have been provided through JMS Financial Services, a management company which receives a fee from WPP and then pays Sir Martin. That arrangement is to cease as the perks enjoyed through service companies have disappeared under consecutive Budgets in which Gordon Brown has sought to close various loopholes.Sir Martin is winding up JMS but in doing so has triggered a number of share option awards made by WPP over the past 12 years but which have also crystallised a £9m tax liability.The net effect is that he is reducing his total holding in WPP while raising £6.89m in the process. His interest in 313,976 shares granted under the WPP Performance Share Plans dating back to 1999 have also been realised, raising a further £2m to help fund the tax bill. Poor old Jonathan Bloomer.

However, he said there had been no bad feeling over the decision. “Personally, it’s quite liberating, because it gives me the opportunity to sit back and see what I’d like to do,” he said.. “But I thought that was not a good time to be making a decision. I was not willing to yield to pressure at that time.”I think a number of institutional shareholders are much milder now than they were in the autumn. But the attitude was that they would in due course want to see change, and that was very much my view.”He said that although he had looked at a number of potential replacements for Mr Bloomer, Mr Tucker was “top of our list”.Mr Bloomer admitted he was disappointed with the board’s decision, but said it was “part of the ups and downs of corporate life”. He then joined HBOS last April, taking over as the group’s finance director just three months ago.

He will take up his new position on 6 May.Sir David Clementi, Prudential’s chairman, conceded that he had been looking for a successor to Mr Bloomer since last autumn’s rights issue, when several of the company’s largest shareholders made public calls for the chief executive’s head.”It’s true that there was a clamour at the end of last year, and a number of institutional shareholders who saw me made it clear they were unhappy,” he said. He paid with his job for a catalogue of mistakes made towards the end of his tenure. Jonathan Bloomer, the embattled chief executive of Prudential who has been under fire since surprising the City with a £1bn rights issue last October, was finally ousted from the group yesterday. It looks as if both in the fourth quarter of last year and again in the first quarter of this year that consumer spending will not be growing at anywhere near the rate that it was.”Mr Lambert said: “Consumer spending had slowed in the fourth quarter and as far as we can tell it has remained rather fragile in the early months of the year.”. “When I speak to businesses there’s greater flexibility that they have to meet shortages by allowing flexible working patterns for women with children,” she said.Mr King added that the 130,000 workers who have come from Eastern Europe in the eight months since EU enlargement were “not trivial” in keeping wages under control.All the MPC members before the committee, which also included Richard Lambert, Steve Nickell and Paul Tucker, said the path for consumer spending was a key risk.Mr King said: “At least in the near term, the pace of consumer spending has slowed quite markedly from what it was and what we thought it was going to be. Now the Colombian and the US police really help me, using computers and fingerprinting to identify the bodies. Relatives in Colombia will call me when someone goes missing – sometimes they are right, sometimes they are wrong and the person they are looking for is still in Colombia.”Tobon’s relationship with the New York police wasn’t always so convivial.

“At first they were very suspicious of me,” he says with a smile. “I had problems with the police, and the FBI started to investigate me, searching my place at four in the morning, but I didn’t care because what I was doing was a good thing: it was what I need to do and I was innocent. Eventually, they realised this, though, and thanked me for what I was doing. Now they give me all the help they can.”Tobon attributes his benevolence to his mother “She liked to help people all the time, like crazy.