Polite indifference is the City's best riposte to Mili's non-dom bomb

It's funny what you can inherit down the male line - anything from a squint to a chunk of Berkshire. A Briton can even inherit foreignness, in the form of non-domiciled status, though Labour plans to abolish the tax break. This would be a nuisance for wealthy entrepreneurs and City executives who benefit. But they would have trouble arguing convincingly in favour of this legacy loophole.

Like a chocolate truffle wrapped in gold leaf, non-dom status is nice to have, but hard to justify.

For a fee, the wheeze exempts a UK resident from tax on overseas earnings so long as the money stays there. Stuart Gulliver, chief executive of HSBC is famously a non-dom, despite being born in Derby and living in the UK since 2003. The justification is that he lived in Hong Kong previously and plans to return there.

More commonly, non-doms are at least a bit foreign. Ross McEwan, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, is a proud Kiwi and Antonio Horta-Osorio, his opposite number at Lloyds, is Portuguese. Weirdly, you can claim non-dom status if your father or grandfather was born overseas.

The only factor that may have prevented Ed Miliband from proposing abolition sooner is historic support for the leftward-drifting Labour party from prominent business people with past or present non-dom status. This group includes Sir Ronald Cohen and Lakshmi Mittal.

Wealth managers will argue that some non-doms would decamp to cheaper hang-outs. So they might. Others would shrug and acknowledge that a break only the rich can afford provokes more hostility than it is worth and that the West End offers a better choice of restaurants than Monaco.

In the UK's febrile political climate, organised capital needs to pick its battles. The non-dom wheeze should not even make the long list.

Lights. Cameras. Inaction. Instead of leaping into the spotlight like bygone Hollywood heartthrob Douglas Fairbanks, ITV's Adam Crozier is staying mutely in his trailer. ITV responded to press reports it was about to buy the TV unit of The Weinstein Company for up to $950m with a dignified "no comment".

The takeover nevertheless looks like the kind of deal ITV might want to do. Particularly, one surmises, from the viewpoint of Wall Streeters working for The Weinstein Company. This is best-known for producing films such as The Artist, which concerned a Fairbanksesque screen idol.

Mr Crozier is responsible for a stylish refurb of ITV that has left the broadcaster with a strong balance sheet. This is financing his expansion of ITV Studios, a production business that was already growing strongly. The idea is to reduce ITV's reliance on the mature market for TV advertising.

Liberum calculates a downpayment of $300m for Weinstein TV would leave ITV with 0.5 times net debt to underlying earnings by the end of this year. That would be well below a self-imposed ceiling of 1.5 times, though the number would rise as deferred payments came due.

Entertainment executives have traditionally been able to resist anything except temptation. But Numis's Lorna Tilbian credits the former Royal Mail boss with the self-discipline needed to avoid overpayment. Market rules put little pressure on him to disclose any plans regarding Weinstein TV, a private US company which is being auctioned. For the moment, Mr Crozier can afford to do nothing, an enviable position for any chief executive to be in.

Fog is confusing for pilots and investors alike. Flybe, a small airline flying regional routes mostly within the UK, should acknowledge the shared peril by dispelling some of the statistical mist swirling around its performance.

Flybe concluded the first year of a three-year turnround plan with an upbeat fourth-quarter trading update. This included reassurance that the business would break even in pre-tax profit terms in the year to March after writing down £10m on a Finnish joint venture and making a £6m provision for passenger compensation claims.

Fine. Both are, for the moment, non-cash costs. So the treatment appears conservative. Less laudably, Flybe excludes the £26m cost of leasing Embraer jets it no longer uses, but still pays for. Break-even also depends on ignoring a revaluation of dollar loans.

In summary, Flybe will lose money in 2014-2015. New broom Saad Hammad, can justifiably claim operational performance is improving. But the chief executive is groping for a financial achievement that is out of reach. Investors who paid 295p per share in the 2010 flotation and have seen the price drop 80 per cent may feel like passengers stuck on a grounded aircraft while the pilot tells them they would be halfway to their destination were it not for bad weather.

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