The unions believe Mr Blair is preparing to come down on the side of the CBI in a long-running argument over recognition in the workplace.Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, proposed an emergency Trades Union Congress to lay down the labour movement’s line on the White Paper. The Prime Minister has agreed to meet TUC leaders again, in advance of publication of a White Paper, “Fairness at Work”, which is due out soon following protracted negotiations between both sides of industry.
In the meantime, the unions will also hold talks with Margaret Beckett, President of the Board of Trade, whose department is responsible for drawing up the legislation.Relations between the unions and Downing Street cooled sharply last week after a meeting between the Prime Minister and TUC leaders. TONY BLAIR is making a further bid to head off a revolt by the trade unions over government plans to legislate on rights at work. It makes refined “chiral” base chemicals that other drug-makers may use for clinical trial programmes to test new drugs.. Operating profit surged to pounds 2.3m in the first half of 1997 from pounds 200,000 a year earlier, reducing Chiroscience’s growing operating loss, which was pounds 15.8m at the half year. It focuses on compiling “libraries” of molecules used to discover new drugs.

She said options may include selling it or floating it.ChiroTech has grown rapidly, generating pounds 5.9m in sales in the six months to August 1997 from pounds 3.9m a year earlier. ChiroTech could be sold to a financial buyer, who may then spin it off, or to another drug company that wanted to expand into “chiral” chemistry, a growing field in drug research.A Chiroscience spokeswoman would only confirm that the company is “looking at ways of realising shareholder value” from ChiroTech. “ChiroTech operates independently and is profitable, and is a very different business from what they are trying to achieve [in drug development].”Chiroscience, a Cambridge-based company which was founded by biotech entrepreneur Chris Evans, will use the proceeds to offset its spending rate of about pounds 2m a month, lessening the need for fund-raising efforts such as the pounds 40m rights offering it held in 1996. The profitable subsidiary made up 64 per cent of Chiroscience’s revenue in the first half of 1997.
The sale of ChiroTech would be the second big sell-off in the growing UK biotechnology industry after Celltech’s sale of its “biologics” contract drug-making unit to Alusuisse-Lonza Holdings for pounds 42m in 1996.”I think it would be a good move,” said Nick Woolf, analyst with BA Robertson Stephens & Company.

Chiroscience has already received strong interest from potential buyers after putting ChiroTech on the market a few weeks ago. CHIROSCIENCE Group, one of Britain’s top biotechnology companies, is looking to sell its ChiroTech chemistry division in a move that could generate pounds 80m. Some accountants and lawyers are alarmed that the increase extends to the sale of all goods by the transfer of documents. If that is so, small businesses buying plant and machinery from other businesses by transfer of deeds also face paying higher stamp duty.And there are concerns that for very large property transactions – say over pounds 10m – attempts will be made to do the deal off-shore, through trust companies.. “There are plenty of deals we are working on, where we hope to beat the deadline,” he said.One other problem highlighted by accountants and advisers over the increase is that it may range far more widely than the Budget lets on.

“Renegotiations are going on for many deals, because the new owners are loath to pay the extra money. So there is a lot of horse trading going on, and in most cases, parties are splitting the difference,” Mr Griffiths said.Informal guestimates suggest there might be as much as pounds 500m worth of transactions across the country that buyers and sellers will be trying to close before Tuesday evening.Robert Kidby, a property lawyer at City solicitors Lovell White Durrant, is expecting very little sleep this weekend. And the move to raise stamp tax again – Gordon Brown had already raised it in his July Budget – caught many in the commercial sector napping.”We had already had the previous increase, so there was a belief that the Budget would not tamper again with stamp duty,” said Paul Griffiths, director of investment at commercial agency Chesterton.Now Chesterton clients are rushing to complete deals. And for properties worth pounds 500,000 or more, the rate went up to 3 per cent from 2 per cent.
It is not only residential property, of course, that is affected by this move Commercial property is in the same boat.

For properties of pounds 250,000 and above , the Chancellor raised stamp duty to 2 per cent from 1.5 per cent. Mayfair estate agents, lawyers and the like, are rushing around in a frantic scramble to beat the deadline this Tuesday for paying the Chancellor’s higher rate of stamp duty on properties worth over quarter of a million pounds. THE usual post-Budget frenzy to stock up on goodies that have had higher taxes imposed on them has taken a distinctly up-market turn this year. “The review could recommend a penny levy on cinema tickets, rental videos, blank video tapes, things like that,” said the senior executive “But I doubt it will happen.”. “A mechanism is being put in place so that if a producer gets lottery money, his distributor can too,” said Mr Preston. “The problem so far is that lottery money can only go for capital projects,” said Hannah Leader, a partner in another London distributor, Capital Films.But sceptics say government support for Britain’s film sector will not alter its status as a Hollywood colony.