It also kept its doors shut on Boxing Day

It also kept its doors shut on Boxing Day.The lowest amount staff could save in the three schemes was £5 per month but on average employees put £50 aside. This was a return of 260 per cent on her original £15,000 investment. She was thrilled and planned to spend the cash on a world cruise.Even Ms Dmello’s windfall is dwarfed by the potential £1.5m paper profit that Mr Rose is sitting on from his options over 980,000 shares that he was granted when he joined the company. They do not vest until July 2007, however, so he will need to ensure the group’s recovery does not lapse until then.After surging past the 400p hurdle that represented Philip Green’s potential cash offer for the group in the summer of 2004, the next milestone for the stock is the 650p peak of 1997 it reached after profits exceeded £1.1bn.Mr Rose said he was “delighted” that those employees who have showed “faith” in the retailer have prospered from their hard work.

About one-third of the group’s workforce, 22,000 employees, are members of the scheme.Marks & Spencer is widely tipped to be one of the festive winners when it reports its Christmas trading update tomorrow.Analysts expect a small rise in like-for-like sales. Anything less will be a disappointment given the heady expectation surrounding the announcement. “Reducing the accrual rate would reduce the cost of the pension over the life of the pensioner,” he said, adding that a solution to the problem would be announced “within the next four to six weeks”.Another option is to use the proceeds of the proposed sale of its travel concessions business, which includes its agreement with Marks & Spencer’s Simply Foods stores, to plug the gap. Analysts believe the business could fetch up to £1.3bn.The spokesman said the increases to Sir Francis and Mr Bailey’s pension entitlements reflected their length of service with the group. Sir Francis, who is 60, started with the group as finance director in 1986, while Mr Bailey, 57, has been a director since 1993.The annual report, to be published on the company’s website today, shows that Mr Bailey was one of a number of executives to waive his rights to performance bonuses. Mr Bailey turned down about £300,000 due for meeting sales targets.. The surge in Marks & Spencer’s share price, which recently broke 500p for the first time in seven years, has handed a £40m windfall to thousands of its staff after three save-as-you-earn share schemes matured.

The payout is the biggest since the retailer’s heyday in the late 1990s and was boosted by the 47 per cent rise in its stock last year. More than 11,500 staff – about one-fifth of its workforce – who participated in all three schemes will pocket an average of £3,500 each.
Although similar schemes mature every 12 months, this is the first time for many years that the retailer has opted to shout about its employees’ jackpot. The group’s fortunes turned faster than even Stuart Rose, its chief executive, had anticipated thanks to strict stock control, better fashions and a focus on full-price sales.Of the three schemes, which stretched over three, five and seven years, the five-year scheme was the most lucrative because the strike price was the lowest at £1.56.Louisa Dmello, who works at Marks & Spencer’s Croydon store, was among those who scooped the maximum £40,000 from the five-year scheme because she invested the full £250 per month. Staff at the troubled catering giant Compass could face soaring pension contributions just weeks after seeing their two top bosses enjoy a boost to their pensions of more than £1m each.

The group is grappling with ways to fill a £532m pensions black hole but this will not affect its two outgoing executives, Sir Francis Mackay and Mike Bailey, who have both had the value of their pension pots topped up in the past 12 months.
The Compass annual report, which some institutional shareholders received on Friday, showed that Sir Francis, the chairman, saw the value of his pension rights increase by £1.23m last year to £16m. Sir Francis is to be replaced by Centrica’s Sir Roy Gardner as soon as the gas group can find a replacement.Mr Bailey, the chief executive who resigned in the autumn after a series of profits warnings and alleged fraud at one of Compass’s subsidiaries, benefited from a bigger increase of £1.4m, taking his total to just over £15m. He will leave once headhuntersrecruit his successor.The fate of the departing executives differs markedly from the company’s 500,000-odd staff, who saw the deficit in their retirement scheme swell last year by one-quarter. Dr Sheth says: “Female infanticide of the past is refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise. It is ushered in earlier, more in urban areas and by the more educated … A careful demographic analysis of actual and expected sex ratios shows that about 100 million girls are missing from the world – they are dead.”.

At the third birth, the sex ratio declined further to 719 girls to every 1,000 boys when the first two births were girls. By contrast, when the first or second child was a boy, the number of girls born at second or subsequent births exceeded the number of boys.The practice of female foeticide has taken the place of infanticide and is extensive in China as well as India, aided by the development of ultrasound. Women who have already had one or two female children are clearly at highest risk.”The research team found that when the first birth was a girl, at the second birth there were 759 girls born to every 1,000 boys. If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10 million missing female births would not be unreasonable. They found the sex of the previous child born affected the sex ratio of the current birth, with fewer girls born to families who had yet to have a boy.The effect was more than twice as great among educated mothers compared with those who were illiterate, but did not vary by religion.Based on the natural sex ratio from other countries, the researchers estimated that 13.6 to 13.8 million girls should have been born in India in 1997 but the actual number was 13.1 million. Because she will eventually belong to the family of her future husband, expenditure on her will benefit others.