Amid a raft of good news from Corus yesterday, there was a little noticed but remarkable piece of information.
Corus is one of those companies dwarfed by its own pension fund, in the ordinary way a dismal state of affairs for its shareholders, dispiriting for its managers and unsettling for members of the pension scheme - witness British Airways.
On the face of it Corus is an extreme case. Even after yesterday's surge in the shares their market value is only £3.8 billion, while the old British Steel pension scheme, dating back to before the merger with the Dutch Hoogoven, is worth some £19 billion. In these days of crushing pension deficits that should spell heroic trouble.
Not a bit of it. This colossal scheme is still in surplus after a three-yearly valuation - by the new international accounting standard too. It has never been closed to new members.
True, the surplus is now a wafer-thin £67 million and Corus decided that the time has come to end its long contributions holiday. From next month it will start paying in ten per cent of its active members' pay, a bearable £50 million a year. In return, the unions have agreed to higher contributions from employees.
The result is a one-off boost of £90 million to Corus's first-quarter profits this year.
Some of this rare success is attributed to an early decision to shift a slug of the fund into bonds while they were still good value, before the herd joined in. But that cannot be the whole story.
Somebody has done a good job - and shown up a lot of others as over-paid nincompoops.
* Meantime, while the Parliamentary Ombudsman has castigated the Government for giving flawed pension advice, Walter Merricks, the Financial Ombudsman has been spelling out his approach to disputes when an investor complains he was given bad advice and a firm claims it was acting on an execution-only basis.
This sometimes turns out to be not so, but firms still try to wriggle out on the grounds that their advice was "limited".
In one instance a man contacted a financial adviser saying he wanted to invest £300,000 in a "precipice" bond he had seen advertised. The IFA sent him an application form and a letter saying the deal was done on the basis of "limited advice".
When the bond turned out badly, the investor complained he had never been warned about the risk and took his case to Mr Merricks. The firm countered that it had given only a general opinion on an investment chosen by the client.
Later, when it sent him a list of similar bonds for an equally ill-fated follow-up investment, it had "simply offered a few suggestions for Mr J to research for himself".
Mr Merricks would have none of it. There is no such thing as "limited advice", he ruled. Either the deal is a straight "execution only" transaction, or the adviser is deemed to have given proper professional advice.
Pity nobody told the Department of Work and Pensions.
