As one insolvency expert confided last week, Facia not stumping up for the stock at the outset hardly suggested the soundest of financing.The involvement of United Mizrahi Bank also arouses curiosity. Last November, it sacked John Doherty, its London-based credit manager. Branch chief executive Rafi Kellner was dismissed, too, after allegations of improper lending practices.Now just one of seven managers remains. Mr Doherty is suing for wrongful dismissal, with an industrial tribunal set for December.

He accuses UMB of foot-dragging over providing documents and last year filed complaints with police over alleged harassment by private detectives.Murray Johnstone, the Scottish fund manager, is also nursing its wounds. It owned 50 per cent of Facia – not the 12.5 per cent so far reported – after selling Mr Hinchliffe Sock Shop. It stood to make half of the first pounds 9.8m if Facia was floated or sold, a quarter of any excess up to pounds 21.8m and 12.5 per cent of anything after that. Just after New Year my colleague Patrick Tooher wrote a penetrating cover story “Mr Hinchliffe and his Amazing Shopping List”.

“I was running it very skinny,” he said, crying foul over claims Facia’s costs had gone through the roofs of its 850 stores.
Pretty rich really, as Mr Hinchliffe, with his helicopter and chauffeur- driven Mercedes – number plate SH1 – has most likely never run a business skinny since he moved on from his earliest days in marketing at Mars. Ask investors in engineer James Wilkes, who counted a Sheffield mansion, deer park, peacocks and underground disco among their assets after dumping the consummate dealmaker four years ago.I have to say “by all accounts”, as Mr Hinchliffe was lying low at the end of last week, refusing to answer calls No wonder. The Hinch, as friends know the Sheffield phoenix, put his latest crash down to an “evil witch hunt”, whipped up by a hostile press. Another familiar canary song, backed up over the years by a chorus of writs over unfavourable articles.

Last week, by all accounts, Stephen Leonard Hinchliffe was at it again. The high-living boss of Facia was vowing a comeback, seeking fresh finance from unspecified US and UK backers, a familiar refrain as Sears and other poor creditors will testify. But if they are resolved, there is no reason why Britain’s most unlikely success story cannot run and run.. What the Post Office needs is the freedom to compete fairly with its rivals. Whether it does this in or out of state ownership matters little – though it is essential that the Treasury be stopped from demanding apparently random dividends at will.Like most things relating to the Post Office, the arguments are complex. “The British post office, more than any other, is very conscious of being a public service,” Mr Johnson says.

Britain is the only country with two deliveries every weekday; in Australia, Sweden and Ireland there is no Saturday delivery while in North America you will not get post delivered to your door. In the UK, as fans of Postman Pat know, the mail will always get through.And what of the argument over privatisation? It is irrelevant. Bagged up again, the letter heads off to the sorting office at Inverpartick, where it is sorted finally by the local postman – he knows better than any machine how it should be delivered. At 7am he jumps in his van; an hour later, the letter is delivered.In most respects the job of the delivery man is the same as ever. Beyond that, it could be a train or a plane: Skynet, which consists of 32 specially chartered flights, is the busiest night flying operation in Britain.Arriving at the Aberdeen sorting office in the early hours of the morning, Mr Pumpkin’s envelope is fed into a machine that reads the pink lines and classifies the letters by “walks”. Between 100 and 200 miles, train is still preferred (a giant mail-only station is being built in north-west London). His studies showed that traditional mail trains were too inflexible for short journeys and too slow for very long ones Now, mail travelling up to 100 miles goes by road.