CURRENT ACCOUNT: Speculation about Greencore's plans for its sugar and malt businesses has again surfaced of late.

While the company has declined to comment on recent reports that it is considering a strategic alliance, sources close to Greencore say the speculation that it is in talks on a deal with the French-based Sucre Union are wide of the mark.

However, since Greencore's acquisition of the Hazlewood business in Britain, there has been widespread expectation that, at some point, it would seek to reshape its business portfolio to allow it to concentrate on the high-growth convenience food sector.

But what it will do with the sugar and malt businesses, which, despite being low-growth, remain highly cash-generative, remains to be seen. A straight sale of either business is considered unlikely because of its dilutive impact on earnings. According to one estimate, a sale of the two businesses could reduce earnings by as much as a third.

Greencore is believed to have considered securitisation last year, an option that would have allowed it to raise cash on the back of the future cashflow from these operations. But it is understood that, when the numbers were crunched, such an option did not seem so attractive and the company did not pursue it.

Other options open to the company and the financial engineers considering the possibilities include joint ventures. Or it could merge either of the two businesses into a bigger entity in which it would retain a stake.

However, given its high gearing, observers believe Greencore will be keen to realise cash from any deal, which it could use to pay down some of its hefty borrowings, which stood at €563 million last September.

Current Account is feeling a little bit neglected by its pals in the technology sector, some of whom have decided a close relationship with the press no longer holds the appeal or benefits it once did.

A particular blow came earlier this week when home-grown hero Baltimore Technologies found itself too busy to discuss its 2002 results or its plans for the future. The hurt was intensified by memories of occasions in recent years where it was almost impossible to fend off the company's enthusiastic efforts to gain press coverage.

Baltimore is not alone. Horizon, another troubled Irish technology firm that once courted Current Account's affections, saw fit to spurn requests of a similar nature upon the release of results last week.

Spokesmen for the firms, both of which are emerging from a period of restructuring, said analysts had taken up all available interview time slots. While decisions on how best to allocate the time of busy executives obviously remains the prerogative of management, it is unusual for listed firms not to discuss results with the press when they are published.

And it is important that it should be so, particularly for shareholders holding small blocks of stock. While larger holders may have easy access to expensive analyst coverage, this will often be beyond the reach of those of more modest means.

For this category of shareholder, media coverage is often a critical source of independent information on the health of the company in which they have invested their money. In the absence of discussions with listed firms, however, it becomes more difficult for such coverage to fulfil that need.

It seems that transparency, a key lesson firms surviving the technology downturn were meant to have learned, remains a vague concept for some.

There have been grumblings at Spar, the ubiquitous convenience store franchise, over claims that its market share fell by half a point last year. The group rejected data by researchers Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) that suggested it lost ground to rivals Centra in 2002 and held a meagre 1.4 per cent of the grocery market.

Spar was quick to fetch its calculator and estimate its slice of the market at 7 per cent. Why the anomaly?

Apparently TNS only measures turnover of "traditional" grocery items, i.e. the sort of thing a typical family is likely to buy on its weekly outing to the supermarket.

Spar does a brisk trade in convenience goods, which don't seem to show up on TNS's radar. Add to this the fact that TNS doesn't actually publish its figure (citing competitive reasons), leaving commentators to seize on titbits leaked to the press, and it is little wonder that confusion reigns.