James Murdoch could earn at least £10m over the next three years under the deal.The market had expected a low subscriber number for the first three months of 2004 but the news that Sky had added only a net 66,000 customers was well below expectations Sky shares closed down 5 per cent at 621p. It is due to take delivery of a further 26 this year and is bidding for a contract in Yorkshire that would require up to 200 buses.Mr Lockhead said the group, which is bidding for another four UK rail franchises, could afford to borrow up to £250m if the right takeover opportunity came along.. Shareholders in Marks & Spencer reacted furiously yesterday to the revelation that the retailer’s non-executive directors had raised concerns about Luc Vandevelde’s role as non-executive chairman 18 months ago. After failing to persuade his fellow non-executive directors that there was an issue, Mr Ball resigned, sources said.One top 10 investor said Mr Ball had failed in his contractual obligations as a non-executive director by not disclosing what had prompted his early departure from the board.”If he resigned on a matter of principle then he has a moral obligation, if not a legal obligation, to say why he’s resigning We are quite fed up about it You can’t just resign and walk away,” the shareholder said. “We pay our non-executive directors to act in shareholders’ interests.”Mr Ball is understood to have been particularly concerned over Mr Vandevelde’s role at Change Capital, the private equity group he heads. The vehicles will be built in the UK and will be a fraction of the price of trams, which cost about £2m each, and light rail schemes, which have been experimented with in a number of large conurbations.First is the UK’s largest bus operator with a market share of 23 per cent and a fleet of 9,300 buses carrying some 2.8 million passengers a day.

In theory Mr Vandevelde, who is paid entirely in shares, could receive £450,000according to the terms of his 12-month contract.. Investors said the fact that not all the board had backed Mr Vandevelde’s pay package should help the remuneration committee limit any potential compensation. The firm recently acquired an unrelated European retailer – also called M&S.The struggling UK retailer is looking for a new chairman after Mr Vandevelde opted to step down. Concern that Mr Vandevelde was failing to spend enough time at M&S had intensified in recent weeks, sparked by the group’s sliding clothing and food sales.M&S yesterday insisted that Mr Ball had resigned early because of “his other work commitments”. A spokeswoman said: “What he’s saying now isn’t what he was saying 18 months ago.” Mr Ball was unavailable to comment.It is understood that Kevin Lomax, the executive chairman of Misys who also sits on M&S’s board, was the only non-executive director to share Mr Ball’s concerns. Moir Lockhead, the company’s chief executive, declined to go into the details of the Yorkshire experiment but he said: “If it works, it will be a model we can use throughout the country.”He was speaking as First reported a small increase in underlying pre-tax profits last year to £161m, boosted by a strong performance from its North American school bus and public transit businesses.Turnover in North America, where First is the second biggest operator of the familiar yellow school buses, rose 17 per cent to just over $1bn but the weakness of the US currency sliced about £4m from reported profits.The company is pressing ahead with its attempts to introduce yellow school buses into the UK. The bus and rail operator First Group is planning a revolutionary new approach to urban transport involving the use of vehicles that are half-tram and half-bus and operate along guided bus ways giving them priority over other traffic.
First intends to experiment with the new vehicles in the Yorkshire cities of Leeds and Sheffield early next year and, if successful, introduce the new system nationwide.

A few months ago, Lord Sainsbury was saying there was more than enough legislation Clearly that was not the case. The minister said it would be too slow to implement.Aisling Burnand, of the Bioindustry Association, said: “This is a breakthrough. Since then there has been an escalation in the number of incidents; the collapse of the plan to build a research centre in Cambridge, and now targeting in Oxford.”. Sources said any new proposals could be included in criminal justice legislation already going through Parliament.There was disappointment for the biotech industry, though, which was again rebuffed in its campaign for a single piece of legislation to tackle animal rights extremism, a law it says should be akin to the one that helped tackle football hooliganism.