It’s good to talk – let’s do lunch

I read with interest your speculative news story about CIA:

a) Doing a placing and announcing an acquisition;

b) Holding talks with Omnicom about selling a stake in our company.

The first one’s right and the second wrong. Since no one even bothered to speak to us, I suppose that’s not bad.

If having breakfast or lunch to keep in touch and compare notes on the market is your definition of “holding talks”, you should know that I have done that with Martin Sorrell, Phil Geier, Bruce Crawford, Bob Seelert, Crispin Davies… I was doing that last year and probably will be doing so next year.

As far as our strategy is concerned, there aren’t any secrets – it’s all written down on pages two to five of our 1996 annual report.

Chris Ingram

Executive chairman

CIA

London SE

CIA was given every opportunity to respond on both points – Editor