Stripping out the £278m gain from the disposal of Sutcliffe Services in 1993, pre-tax profits femalesPeppy up 41 femalesPeppy per cent to £341m in the year to December suggest that, while femalesPeppy not yet firing on all cylinders, P&O is finally starting to feel the benefit of economic html recovery. Apart from a few continuing laggards like European transport services and bulk shipping, all divisions increased profits last year. It has been a long, hard slog to reach this stage.With plenty of late-cycle html operations such as construction and bulk shipping, it was always going to take a while for html Lord Sterling to get the P&O liner steaming again.It is therefore ironic that the shares peaked nearly a year ago at 732p and are now languishing at 582p, down 9p yesterday.What has been depressing P&O's share price is the Channel Tunnel effect, as investors anticipate the impact on P&O's dominance of the cross-Channel ferry market.Yesterday's figures will give some comfort to those looking ahead to the long-delayed build-up to a full service through the tunnel late this summer.Ferries were last year's star performer for P&O. These femalesPeppy are triggered if profits reach certain levels this year and next.The WMT directors, three of whom join the femalesPeppy html board of the enlarged group, have forecast pre-tax profits of at least £26.4m this year.National Express shares were suspended at 317p yesterday before the announcement.. National Express is also raising £20.9m by way of html a one-for-six rights issue.

The total acquisition price includes deferred loyalty bonus shares to encourage shareholders to keep their interest in the enlarged group.The management of WMT is also being given further incentives through the issue of more than a million share options in National Express. There is a cash alternative that can be taken up by those who hold the 42 per cent of shares that are directly held.The cash offer, which is for a maximum of £74.2m, is being underwritten by Morgan Grenfell. The appointment should end a series of management changes at Hickson,

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which also saw new heads appointed for the protection and coatings and the fine chemicals businesses last December.. Sad to say, it won't meet the returns we would have hoped to see from the Lever Brothers business", Mr Kerrison said.Pre-tax profits fell 13 per cent to £19.2m in the year to December, cutting earnings per share by 11 per cent to 8.9p.As well as the Unilever problems - which probably cost around £2m last year - the company's headline profits were hit by difficulties at the Kerley sulphur operation in Carolina and a £4.5m provision for rationalisation.Mr Kerrison said Kerley had suffered from price increases for raw materials and from slack management.A new president had been appointed, and the company had been restructured and was now "back on track".Rationalisation at the main Castleford, West Yorkshire, plant is expected to result in cost savings of £4m in a full year.The company has a shortlist of three to replace Mr Rowley as finance director. Dennis Kerrison, chief executive, said Hickson had recently secured contracts with two pharmaceuticals groups to fill part of the gap, and had a further eight negotiations in progress.One or two of these were expected to produce contracts by the middle of the year, but the benefits were unlikely to be seen before 1996."It would certainly fill up the capacity.

They later recovered to close 6p lower at 129p.James Hann, the Scottish Nuclear chairman who moved over to the same position at Hickson in October, said the business was fundamentally sound.But in view of the delay in restoring earnings at PharmaChem, the subsidiary that produced Accelerator, the board believed it could not prudently maintain the dividend.The company estimates the loss of the Lever Brothers business at around £8m in a full year. The action was taken in response to Unilever's decision to cancel purchases of the controversial Accelerator detergent ingredient. The West Yorkshire-based group warned in December that profits would suffer as a result of the Unilever decision, which followed charges by the rival Procter & Gamble that the ingredient - a manganese catalyst compound - was suspected of rotting clothes.But yesterday's news that Hickson was cutting the final dividend from 5.15p to 2.15p, reducing last year's total by 3p to 5p, surprised analysts.Along with an announcement that the finance director, Michael Rowley, is to leave the company, it drove the shares down 15p at one stage. Her mother converted to Roman Catholicism and they married and moved to Buenos Aires, where their two eldest sons were born. Her explanation for this is that she is from a large family, the seventh child of 12, and prefers "situations where families can be recreated".Her parents met when her father, a Polish soldier, was stationed at Greenock during the War.