So we are having to circumvent rules to help people keep body and soul together

So we are having to circumvent rules to help people keep body and soul together. We did not tolerate racism when there was white rule here, and we will not tolerate this.”* Lovemore Madhuku, the 34-year-old law professor who was arrested while trying to organise a demonstration on Tuesday in Harare, was set yesterday to spend a second night in police custody. Pro-democracy campaigners said he had still not been charged or allowed to see a lawyer.. The German telecoms company, Deutsche Telekom, which owns the One2One mobile phone operator, yesterday warned it expected to post a loss for the year but said it still planned to pay a dividend.

It is expected to be floated some point next year.T-Mobile, which includes the One2One business, said it gained 3.7 million new subscribers in the third quarter, bringing the total to 62.4 million.In the third quarter, that division recorded underlying, or Ebitda, profit of 807m euros compared with a 354m euro profit in the same period last year.Deutsche Telekom also reiterated previous guidance that it expected group revenues to grow by more than 15 per cent for 2001 with an underlying profit margin of about 30 per cent.. If ever there was a company that reflected the buoyancy and boundless self-confidence of George Bush as he embarked on his presidency last January, it was the Enron Corporation of Houston. The one-time oil and gas pipeline company had branched into a field of apparently limitless profit opportunities – energy trading – and continued to enjoy dizzyingly rapid growth, as well as the adulation of the stock market, long after the dot s had started to crash and burn. Its various assets in the UK include Wessex Water, run by Sir Nicholas Hood.George Bush’s accession to the White House held the promise of further riches, as well as considerable influence.Kenneth Lay, Enron’s chairman, was one of Mr Bush’s oldest friends and the single biggest contributor to his political campaigns. Having been a pioneer of electricity deregulation around the country, Mr Lay was now all set to push his new policy priorities: corporate tax cuts and the aggressive pursuit of new energy exploration, particularly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in Alaska. In Washington, Mr Lay was regarded as a de facto energy secretary, much to the irritation of the man actually appointed to that post, the former Michigan senator, Spencer Abraham.What could possibly go wrong with such a cosy arrangement? As it turns out, just about everything. Over the past month, Enron, where Mr Lay shared control with the chief executive, Jeffrey Skilling, was forced to acknowledge a number of gaping holes in its accounting procedures – holes that led to an overstatement of its profits over the past four years of $586m (£413m).

The Securities and Exchange Commission has opened investigations into Enron’s book-keeping, in particular its relationship with a number of limited-partnership companies headed by former Enron executives. The share price has plummeted so far that the company’s capitalisation has been all but wiped out. A $60bn company, as it was valued a year ago, is now worth less than $3bn, with assets vanishing all the time. Yesterday, Enron stock was at $1.20 when trading was suspended, down from a 12-month high of $84.88 last December.That, in turn, has had a knock-on effect on servicing company debt, which stands at well over $10bn.

Enron disclosed two weeks ago that it was facing an imminent payment of $690m, which it could not meet; the deadline has now been postponed until next month pending frantic negotiations to find a buyer to bail out the company.For a while, it looked as though that buyer would be Enron’s erstwhile Houston rival, Dynegy. A deal was actually on the table a couple of weeks ago, with Dynegy offering $9bn for a plan that would retain the core energy trading activities and strip out just about everything else. But that was before the most serious accounting problems came to light and the share price, which had already fallen to about $6, plummeted further.At first Dynegy tried to renegotiate the deal, cutting the offer by more than half in the belief that there was still something worth salvaging. But it became increasingly clear that it would take months to unravel Enron’s accounting mysteries, by which time the mounting debt and the rapidly evaporating confidence of the market would have sapped remaining enthusiasm.As Dynegy pulled the plug yesterday, Enron’s bonds were downgraded to “junk” status and its future looked grim. If the US had not been at war, one would have to assume Enron’s “death spiral”, as one analyst described it, would have taken on the proportions of a major scandal. As it is, lawsuits are flying, and the behaviour of Enron’s leading officials, many of whom have left or been fired, has raised troubling questions.Enron’s employees are furious because half of the assets in their retirement plans were made up of company stock, and because those assets were frozen by Enron management in mid-October, just before the flurry of bad news became public.