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TWST: Can we begin with an introduction to Benchmark Group (London:BMK.L)? Perhaps you could touch on some of the history behind the company and then just bring us up to date?

Mr. Nigel Kempner: Benchmark Group is a U.K. property company quoted on the London Stock Exchange. I arrived as Chief Executive in April 1996 when it was a company with a small capitalization and previously had been a financial services group controlled by a large Far Eastern investor -- the Hong Leong Group from Malaysia. We bought one or two properties in central London during 1996 and then undertook a major transaction at the end of 1996 to acquire a large portfolio of central London properties from Friends Provident Life Office, which is a UK insurance company. As part of that transaction, Friends Provident took part of the consideration by way of shares in Benchmark Group PLC. [Today Friends Provident owns 35% of Benchmark Group PLC and the Hong Leong Group through its quoted subsidiary in Singapore, First Capital Corporation, also holds 35%, leaving 30% of our shares in the public’s hand as a free float. ] We have grown as a quoted company from a market capital in 1996 of around 3 million pounds sterling to a market capital today of just under 300 million pounds sterling including our quoted convertible loan. We are highly geographically focused as a specialist central London property developer, investor and owner principally in commercial property with an emphasis on the West End, and we have today under our management some two million square feet or 1.2 billion pounds sterling of assets, all located within the Circle Line of what’s known as the London Underground System, 90% of which by value are located in what we know in London as “the West End”, by which we mean areas such as Mayfair, St. James’, Covent Garden, Knightsbridge and Kensington. Institutions over recent years have tended in real estate, as well as other sectors, to prefer specialization rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades, which has acted to our benefit as one of the largest specialist West End quoted property companies. We have adopted a policy of buying non-institutional properties in prime institutional locations and then applying our management skills to redevelop, refurbish and improve or actively manage the assets to increase the income, turn them into institutional assets and then hopefully sell them back to institutions to create good profits. In this way we were able last year to undertake a sale of some 300 million pounds sterling of our portfolio, 250 million pounds sterling of which were sold into a newly formed specialist unit trust called the West End of London Property Unit Trust (WELPUT), which we undertook with Schroder Investment Management -- it is quite similar to an American style of REIT –set up as a Jersey property unit trust. As a result of the proceeds of that, recognizing some 80 million pounds sterling of historic profits, we paid a special dividend to our shareholders of some 73 million pounds sterling last November. So, we are big believers in recycling capital and actually delivering real return to shareholders rather than just relying on independent paper valuations. What sets us slightly apart from our competitors is that in each year since 1996, we have always made plenty of acquisitions, but we have also sold quite a lot of properties to create profits against historic cost. Today, we are continuing to specialize in the West End market, which we believe has attractive long-term potential. It’s a very tight planning-controlled environment. There is very little new development and little new space coming on stream, so that when there are tenants, they tend to pay relatively high rents for space in prime West End, particularly as the size of units leased tends to be relatively small in the West End, averaging about 3,500 sq ft. And even in a slightly softer market than we’ve enjoyed over recent years, in 2002 recent moves have been Lazards, moving from the City to the West End to occupy 140,000 square feet; Capital International moving from the City to occupy 110,000 square feet in the West End; and HSBC Asset Management moving their asset management and private banking operations to St. James’s. All those then have spin-offs with some smaller new specialist boutiques and fund management, specialist hedge fund operators who see the West End as giving them greater identity and more proximity to their clients than say the major bulge banks that have moved to the east of the City down to Canary Wharf which is much more difficult for their clients to get to. The West End has been quite a beneficiary of that move. So we are a very specialist team, we are very compact, we manage everything totally in-house, have a total team of 22 people at the head office and we undertake one or two different and new initiatives such as our direct office leasing concept, Benchmark Direct and Benchmark Customer Care which provides extra services to our occupiers. Those are managed very actively and offer additional services to tenants other than just building services and it is something we are continuing to develop in what is obviously a softer market. On the investment side, central London is extremely popular at the moment. The UK historically has a very landlord-friendly lease, of maybe up to 15 years duration with the tenant being responsible for the cost of all repairs and insurance, maintenance and management and with five yearly upward-only rent reviews. In today’s uncertain times, the income can be produced net with certainty and then contractual income going forwards is obviously extremely attractive relative to other forms of investment. We have therefore had an enormous amount of purchases undertaken in the last eight weeks by German investors, U.S. investors, Gulf State investors, high net worth private investors from all parts of the world and investors relying on fixed interest debt as well as U.K. institutions. So it has been an extremely active market on the investment side with yields of between 6% and 7.5% and five year fixed interest money of under 6% and loan to value ratios of 85%. There has been virtually no speculative development finance available.