A spokesman for Manchester United said the club had yet to meet the secretive Mr Glazer, who has made no public comments on his intentions, but added that “they have touched base with him” in the past couple of weeks and were trying to meet him, “hopefully by the end of the year”.About 17 per cent of the club’s shares are held by small individual shareholders. The Irish horse racing tycoons JP McManus and John Magnier hold the largest single stake, 23 per cent, through their investment vehicle, Cubic Expression, and although they have made private assurances they do not intend to launch a bid for the club, Mr Houston said that they have yet to say so publicly.More worrying for the club is the 9.7 per cent stake amassed by Malcolm Glazer, the owner of reigning Super Bowl champions, the Tampa Bay Bucaneers. David Gill, the chief executive of Manchester United, told shareholders yesterday that “we don’t have and don’t want a sugar daddy” at the annual general meeting of the company that owns the football club.
Oliver Houston of the supporters’ action group Shareholders United, whose main aim is to maintain the independence of Manchester United through ownership of shares in the club by fans, said that he was “delighted” at the club’s forthright attitude.Manchester United has been the subject of persistent takeover speculation in recent months as a number of businessmen have built up significant stakes in the company. They were floated as a diversified business, but they spent as much on Varisolve last year as on all their other products together, and they have allowed this one product to dominate.”. It finds, develops and commercialises technologies in medicine and electronics and has a portfolio of more than 300 new technologies.Ed Steele, an analyst at HSBC, said: “They have made a rod for their own back. BTG is just as in the dark as everyone else is.”BTG was formed out of the National Research Development Corporation and sold by the British Government in 1992.

Varisolve is expected on the European market by 2005.The active ingredient, polidocanol, is already approved for use in Europe in a way that it is not in the US. Erling Refsum, a biotechnology analyst at Nomura, said: “It’s not good news, but the product is just delayed … BTG has repeatedly hailed Varisolve as a breakthrough treatment for the painful condition and one that can be carried out over a lunchtime.Safety concerns surround the size and effects of bubbles of gas that get into the bloodstream and the small incidence of deep vein thrombosis shown in the European trials.The company was optimistic that the FDA could be swayed and that the separate approval process in Europe would not be affected, although this won’t be clear until the regulator’s explanatory letter later this month. It was developed by Juan Cabrera, a surgeon in southern Spain who has successfully treated thousands of women. Last month, BTG’s house broker, Credit Suisse First Boston, argued this single product represented three-quarters of the company’s value.Varisolve is a foam injected into varicose veins that dissolves them without surgery. It looked impossible yesterday that the product, called Varisolve, could be launched in the United States by 2006 as planned.BTG’s shares, which had more than tripled this year, mainly on hopes for Varisolve, slumped back 226p to 154p, wiping £240m from the company’s market value.

American regulators halted trials of BTG’s revolutionary varicose veins treatment yesterday, sending the technology group’s shares plunging nearly 60 per cent.
The Food & Drug Administration, which has taken a sceptical view of BTG’s claims to safely destroy varicose veins with an injectable foam, said that pilot studies must stop after it reviewed data from the first 40 patients.The company said it was still waiting to hear the reasons for the suspension, but was ready to conduct additional tests or submit other data to try to reverse the decision. Powergen is also increasing electricity prices by 7 per cent – a move which will increase the average £250 bill by £17.25 a year.. “We will be examining why, when demand for gas is not particularly high and the supply of gas is not low, we have seen gas prices go up by 80 per cent in October.”The Energy Intensive Users Group, which had written to Ofgem urging it to launch an investigation, welcomed the move. Energywatch, the consumer body, also backed the inquiry, saying it had been asking questions about the fairness of wholesale gas prices for some time and was delighted the regulator was now examining allegations of manipulation.Energywatch also said that Powergen’s price rises would amount to a “nasty” Christmas box for consumers, adding about £17.50 to the average gas bill of £350. Wholesale prices make up about 45 per cent of household gas bills.Consumer groups and heavy industrial users of energy welcomed the Ofgem investigation, which could result in fines of up to 10 per cent of turnover if shippers are found guilty of abusing the market.Wholesale gas prices have risen from 15p a therm in September to a peak of 34p a therm in October and Ofgem said it was concerned that the sharp increase did not seem to be justified by market conditions.”We have a duty to consumers to examine the reasons behind these gas prices very carefully,” said Ofgem’s chief executive, Alistair Buchanan. The energy regulator Ofgem launched an investigation yesterday into the doubling in wholesale gas prices in the last two months amid allegations that shippers may have been manipulating the market.