A spokesman for the German-owned bank refused to say how much the former MP for Bristol West would be paid. He will be on a one-year rolling contract.
Observers reckon Mr Waldegrave will be valuable to the bank through his contacts in Whitehall, Westminster, the City and boardrooms across corporate Britain. Kleinwort has always prided itself on its political contacts. It won many of the first big privatisation mandates in the 1980s, including that of British Telecom. David Clementi, for instance, the former head of corporate finance at Kleinwort, was last year made deputy Governor of the Bank of EnglandThe Right Honourable William Waldegrave comes from a Tory political family and was educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard. Elected a member of All Souls, his first political job was as political secretary to Edward Heath as Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in 1973-5.He also acted as assistant to Lord Weinstock, managing director of GEC, from 1975 to 1981.

He first entered the Cabinet in 1990 as Secretary of State for Health, and rose to Chief Secretary to the Treasury five years later He was on holiday yesterday and unavailable for comment. A Dresdner Kleinwort Benson spokesman moved to quash any suspicions that Mr Waldegrave may have ever been in a position to direct privatisation work towards Kleinwort when he was in government. “The Financial Secretary to the Treasury would have dealt with Privatisations; he (Waldegrave) never had anything to do with that,” said the spokesman.Kleinwort says it is growing its corporate finance business. It is just started advising Gallaghers, the US giant, and already deals with Endesa in Spain and Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas company, in Russia.. UNITED Utilities yesterday ended its disastrous foray into the sewers of Bangkok by pulling out of a contract to modernise the city’s sewerage system and launching a compensation claim to recover the pounds 90m it has lost on the deal. North West Water International (NWWI), UU’s overseas arm, was awarded the pounds 150m project in 1993 but quickly ran into trouble after the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority began to change the specifications and introduce new by-laws which slowed down work on the contract.
The company made a pounds 7m provision against the contract in 1995 and then took a further pounds 83m charge in 1997. Late last year, work was halted on the scheme after the Bangkok authorities suspended further payments to NWWI.UU said it was confident that it would not have to make any further provisions against the contract and disclosed that it intended to go to arbitration to recover its losses.

It added that it had taken advice from senior construction lawyers in the UK and Thailand and was confident that it had a strong case.The project involved building a waste treatment works and a 31-mile network of sewers under the Thai capital. But the Bangkok authorities increased the specifications, asking for a 24 per cent increase in the length of tunnelling and a tripling in the number of manholes. New city regulations were also passed which restricted construction work to a four- hour period each night and prevented any work which caused “noise, vibration or excessive light”.. DIRECTORS at Reuters missed out on bonus payments last year because it failed to meet internal targets for installing its new dealing terminals. Total directors’ remuneration for 1997 fell by 10 per cent as installations of the Series 3000 dealing systems only reached 28,000 after the first full year of sales against a target figure of 30,000. Bonuses were also affected after the group failed to achieve a 10 per cent growth in earnings per share last year.
The details were included in Reuters’ annual report which was published yesterday.