"Also, you have to understand that there are 26 different tenses in French, and the French can eat, walk and make love in these different dimensions of time. Whereas in Russian we only have the basic three - past, present and future, and this changes the way that we look at life."Makine will not talk about his Soviet childhood or his reasons for leaving the country. Though the tax hauls are large, the sums are unlikely to be enough to - by themselves - to stem the tide of cross border mergers.Hence, the Chancellor can look forward to a steady and easily collected revenue flow - which is presumably why the Conservatives never got around to acting on the plan announced in 1990 to abolish stamp duty on shares and securities all together. However, though the ruling applies from midnight last Friday, it is apparent that it has failed to stop similar tax savings by two other high-profile cross-border deals involving UK companies - the $35bn merger of pharmaceutical company Zeneca and its Swedish rival, Astra, and Vodafone's $62bn purchase of AirTouch.In taking this swift action, Patricia Hewitt, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, is probably on to a winner. What was a dark corner of the tax world was suddenly bathed in light, when BP and Amoco escaped paying $800m in duty during their merger last year by issuing new shares as foreign currency bearer shares instead of American Depositary Receipts, through which US investors usually deal in UK equities.

The saving arose because the bearer shares were made exempt from the 1.5 per cent stamp duty reserve tax in 1989 in order to assist companies wanting to borrow overseas. The Revenue says that, while this purpose will continue to be allowed, it has cracked down on transactions which the legislation was not designed to cover. Projected revenues of pounds 2.4bn for the 1998-99 financial year were enough to prompt an Inland Revenue swoop at the weekend to plug a loophole that was in danger of looking like a yawning chasm. Yet, arcane as it may be, it is a nice little earner for the Exchequer. Sitting on their fat market capitalisations and hemmed in by domestic monopoly constraints, it may be time for the UK clearers to strike pre-emptively across borders.. IT SAYS a lot about the complexity of stamp duty reserve tax that mere whisper of it sends even hardened specialists scurrying for cover. There is also talk that Banque Nationale de Paris will be obliged to look overseas for a partner.

Given the pace of merger activity among Continental banks, there is a danger that Don Cruickshank's review of the UK banking scene could look even more parochial by the time he publishes his conclusions.But the UK banking industry is structured in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to adopt the same national solutions as the Swiss, the French and the Spanish, as the failure of Barclays and NatWest to merge shows.The word from Paris yesterday was that SG Paribas has ambitions to spread its wings further. Paribas' opulent new headquarters in Marylebone may be one early casualty while the wine bars of the City should be filling soon with fixed income dealers and equity analysts drowning their sorrows and looking for new employment.Inevitably questions will now be asked of that dwindling band of European banks which still remain outside larger national or transatlantic groupings Consolidate or die certainly makes for an easy catchphrase. The overlaps are mainly in London where both companies run large investment banking operations from sumptuous offices Paribas may be longer established in the City But SG has been making up ground fast. It has added the banking division of Hambros to its equities business, Strauss Turnbull, and is bankrolling Nicola Horlick's dream of creating a fund management business with pounds 5bn under management.The target of pounds 560m in cost savings within three years gives the management plenty to aim at. No wonder the finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn was jumping for joy at the merger yesterday.As with the SBC-UBS merger, it is not hard to see where most of the pain will be felt among the 78,000-strong workforce. It also neatly dispenses with one of the main obstacles to the French government's sale of Credit Lyonnais.