What the Sunday papers said

Sunday papers 17.9.06

The former business partner of Alan Bowes, chairman of the collapsed hotels and pubs company Swallow Group has bought more than a third of the company's assets only days after it folded. Flodrive Group, an investment vehicle for property executive Tony Khalastchi bought 240m properties including 68 hotels, 25 managed pubs and 147 tenanted pubs. He already owns the freehold to these properties. Swallow's reputation for aggressive business tactics is said to have included buying freehold properties and renting them to other companies within the group; some say this made the value of the freeholds seem higher than they were. - Mail On Sunday​

Drink-drive accident rates are believed to have soared in Britain since the introduction of 24-hour drinking last year. Official figures aren't published until November, but the Campaign Against Drinking and Driving says the feedback from traffic police has been "negative" and that incidents of drink driving had been going up. A seven-year long survey in Australia found a massive jump in collisions as a direct result of pubs opening longer there. - Mail On Sunday​

Pernod-Ricard is to announce its annual results this Thursday. Analyst JP Morgan expects the French drinks company, which bought Allied Domecq last year for £7bn, to report a good set of figures. - Independent On Sunday​

Wholesale energy prices have fallen but for consumers facing higher fuel bills the picture remains as gloomy as ever. Wholesale gas prices have fallen by 15 per cent over the last four months and electricity by 20 per cent. But suppliers are not just not passing on these savings to customers, they are hiking prices in the same period as well. - Mail On Sunday​

And finally…

A TV ad for Peroni beer has run foul of political correctness in, of all places, Italy. The ad shows a young woman in the 19th century struggling to park her horse and carriage, watched by two beer-swilling men. It zips forward a hundred years and shows the same woman having trouble parking her car, which she leaves jutting out into the road. The same beer drinking males swig from a bottle of Peroni while a voice over remarks: "Fortunately some things don't change." A group of female lawyers, who described the ad as "completely ridiculing women", has made history by suing the company. Peroni was not available for comment. - Sunday Telegraph​