Mr LeBow was forced to turn to Michael Milken an old friend

Mr LeBow was forced to turn to Michael Milken, an old friend, who sold junk bonds for the company just to keep it afloat.New Valley continued to struggle, however, as facsimile technology replaced telex. To avoid bankruptcy in 1991, Mr LeBow merged Liggett Tobacco, in which he had a 84 per cent stake and which he still controls, into New Valley, enraging other Liggett shareholders. In the meantime, he renamed his overall holding company the Brooke Group.New Valley finally went belly-up in 1993. Mr LeBow was essentially saved, however, by the company's money transfer business.

Still operating under the Western Union name, it had quietly been expanding and growing in profitability.Mr LeBow successfully sold it to First Financial Management a year ago for $1.2bn in cash. It is money from that windfall that has allowed him to begin buying into RJR Nabisco.Mr LeBow and Mr Icahn will not easily be dismissed by RJR. Analysts forecast last week that at the very least, the company will need to raise the dividend for its shareholders from the present $1.50 a share to $2 to buy their loyalty."This will force RJR management to either complete the Nabisco spin-off, or raise the dividend," a Sanford Bernstein analyst, Gary Black, predicted.. YOU MAY have spotted that the Learmont report on prisons quoted the words of the satirist Gaius Petronius.

Writing in AD66, he said: "It seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams we would be reorganised. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganising, and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation." This quotation comes up regularly, and there are doubts over its authenticity (I have seen one claim that it was written in 1945). But I would like to believe that Mr P wrote it, and that "Business Process Re-engineering" was doing the rounds 1,900 years ago. I wonder for what else those Roman management consultants can be held responsible. Caligula making his horse a consul? Someone had told him to push responsibility down to the lowest level - the core of Total Quality Management. Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned? Good hands-off management style. Caesar dividing Gaul into three parts? Something to do with matrix management.Then there was that ultimate deconglomeratisation in the fifth century.

I can reveal that leveraged buy-out specialists GVO (Goth, Visigoth and Ostragoth) maximised shareholder value by taking over the Roman Empire and breaking it up. It plunged Europe into a 500-year recession, but I gather GVO's consultants earned terrific fees.By the way, Petronius was forced to commit suicide. It's risky, taking on the consultants.READERS have continued to send me examples of ancient bits of British machinery that are still working. NR Lines of Walsall wrote to say that the lift cars and winding gear of Eiffel's tower in Lisbon carry the name Wayland & Co, Falmouth Rd, London SE, and are dated 1902.

"I would be interested to know if the company still exists, or what became of it," Mr Lines says.Well, I've been down Falmouth Road, near the Elephant and Castle No factories there I've looked up companies called Wayland. The most promising was Wayland Sheet Metal Engineers of Hornchurch, Essex - but the people there denied any link. I've been told that Wayland was a blacksmith who appears in ancient legends, including Beowulf - and that Wayland's Smithy is a neolithic tomb on the Berkshire Downs. The legend is that if you go in there with a piece of ironwork and leave a sixpence, your repair will be done for you or your horse will be shod This is interesting, but does not answer Mr Lines' question. Maybe a reader can help?Vegetable matterONE DAY, someone will write a PhD thesis on The Cultural Implications of the Building Society and Bank Merger Boom of the 1990s. It should be interesting because many building society executives (most of whom are Yorkshiremen) are uneasy with their flashy new banking colleagues.