BUSINESS DIARY: HOW HILTON BOSS GAINED SOME STREET CREDIBILITY AND

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Dec 4, 2005

CLOSE CHAVEZ

Howard Friedman, a South African who transferred from Miami to Watford in July to become president of Hilton International UK & Ireland was surprised to hear that the Glasgow Hilton is located in the city's red light district.

But co-existing with ladies of the night . . . as the Glasgow hotel does . . .

might be less of a headache for Friedman than some of the challenges he faced in South America as president of Hilton Americas in recent years. These included dissuading transvestite hookers from hanging out around one of the group's Brazilian hotels and dealing with currency devaluations in Argentina, Ecuador and Venezuela. At a dinner in the Caledonian Hilton last week, he told journalists how the firm had coped with hyper-inflation . . . "you charge in dollars as much as you can but scramble to raise prices in local currencies on a daily basis" . . . and the vicissitudes of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. "I also went up the Amazon to look into the opening of an Eco-lodge, where there were 37 varieties of barracudas and little else." Glasgow will surely seem tame after that.

BLACK DAYS

Conrad Black was in contrite form in a US court last week in his first brief appearance in the case in which he stands accused of defrauding investors in his former media empire.

If he expects any charity from his former flagship title, The Daily Telegraph, though, his hopes will have been dashed last week by Jeff Randall, the paper's editor-at-large.

Randall gutted the Tory peer with gusto, declaring that Black and his wife Barbara Amiel ("the wellpreserved clothes horse who put the chic into the chicanery") infuriated too many people on the way up who are now waiting to get their revenge on the way down. "Including me".

When BBC business editor, he searched the US and Canada for someone with a good word to say about the man. "We'd have had more success searching for the Northwest Passage, " he wrote. "Lord and Lady Black had many cute acquaintances but few firm friends."

STUNNING OMISSION

Not turning up is the suavest game in town these days, it appears. Not only did Brian Maule, left, of Chardon d'Or not make it to the Glasgow Restaurateurs' Association awards to collect his Restaurant Of The Year gong because he had just extended the restaurant and was needed at the coal-face, but hotels impresario Peter Taylor did not quite appear at his own company's Christmas event for hacks. "Peter is unfortunately not able to make it, " explained a rep from Town House Company at the imaginative "moveable feast" courseper-hotel dinner. "I know, I just saw him in the bar down the road, " said our own ever-observant reporter Julia Fields. Taylor was attending the Spirit Of Scotland Awards instead.

Absence must be the new black.

Mind you, perhaps Maule would have turned up at the restaurant bash at the Radisson if he had known the excitement he missed.

Diners were treated to the sight of the police using a high- voltage Taser gun to stun someone outside the venue.