Avis Incorporated the US car rental business is preparing to join sister company Avis Europe and arch rival Hertz

Avis Incorporated, the US car rental business, is preparing to join sister company Avis Europe and arch rival Hertz with a stock market listing which will value it at around $1bn. Neither Mr Bamford nor Nigel Tofe, Alpha's contact at Henderson, could be reached yesterday.. It has been criticised privately by the exchange over Alpha and last November Guinness Mahon, its merchant bank owner, merged its operations into its own That led to the departure of chairman Peter Ross. They are, however, intrigued by Mr Young's apparent links with Henderson, which also included another Russian oil prospecting client, JKX, in which DMG took an 18 per cent stake.Henderson introduced Mr Bamford to Alpha, Mr Mastorakis said.The broker has had an unsettled time of late. I am not in a position to say anything more right now because of the sensitivity of the issue," he said on Friday.Until they resigned without explanation in December, Alpha shared two directors, Brian Copsey and Anthony Alderton, in common with Greenhills, an AIM-quoted restaurant group which is in receivership.Dealings in Greenhills are also being reviewed by the Department of Trade and Industry in a major inquiry into an alleged insider dealing ring operating in the City and offshore.There is no suggestion that Mr Bamford, any of Alpha or Greenhills' senior management or advisers are implicated in the affair.Mr Bamford's investments have been scrutinised by investigators probing disgraced fund manager Peter Young's investments, which left a pounds 180m "black hole" in DMG's funds last September.MetLife's UK-based GFM International Investments, with $1.3bn of funds under management, pumped money into many of the speculative firms that attracted Mr Young.These included Xavier, an oil firm prospecting in Russia; Princess Resources, a Canadian mining company; Optical Care, a Bermuda-based spectacles seller; Ashurst Technology, another AIM-quoted company advised by Henderson Cros- thwaite; and Isleinvest, an Alberta listed shell.Mr Bamford, 46, left GFM last April to set up a 50/50 joint venture, Isleinvest Development Capital Corp, with Isleinvest.Mr Young's losses, which are being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office, have prompted MetLife to call in accountants Price Waterhouse to review all of his investments.Isleinvest is headed by Canadian financier Jacob Joseph Elkin, who until last November also headed Ashurst.So far, DMG's investigators have focused on the role of two brokers, Fiba Nordic and Carnegie, in introducing deals to Mr Young. Stephen Bamford, the former head of US insurer Metropolitan Life's international investment arm, invested in Alpha Omikron, an Alternative Investment Market company under review by the Stock Exchange in the insider inquiry. He also brokered a deal which left Alpha with one of MetLife's loss-making investments, Medical Underwriting Services Ltd (MUSL), a medical information company, in January last year.MUSL was closed on Valentine's Day after abortive sale attempts and the sacking of its chief executive and staff without statutory severance pay.Just four days earlier, Alpha's nominated advisers, Henderson Crosthwaite, also resigned and last week chairman Emmanuel Mastorakis was still trying to sign up new brokers to avoid losing its AIM quotation."We are in negotiations at the moment. A top fund manager under scrutiny following the Deutsche Morgan Grenfell/Peter Young affair has emerged as a key backer of a public company that features in one of Britain's biggest ever insider-dealing inquiries.

Many of the Danes who have summer houses in Fano, they point out, live abroad to escape Danish taxes.. Denmark's southern border, which has moved back and forth over the centuries, is becoming increasingly blurred as frontier checks are reduced, and keeping out German buyers is becoming pointless, say some.The protectionist Danes, meanwhile, are often accused of hypocrisy by Germans. Speculators count up how many summer houses could be built and sold off to Germans at a vast profit if the ban was lifted. Other Danish residents simply complained that the German presence was pushing up prices and forcing out locals.There are, nevertheless, some Danes who think the property laws are outdated and should be changed. Even before the war Germans owned houses in Jutland, and they were back in the early Fifties, undeterred by possible Danish resentment."For the older generation who had lost people in the war, the German tourism was upsetting," says the agent Claus Thyssen. The unspoilt beaches of Jutland have always been eyed with envy by the Germans, whose only coast is along the Baltic to the north. But nowhere is the German holiday migration so striking as in Denmark.

In the town of Westkappelle, where more than 10,000 Germans have bought holiday homes, outnumbering by five-to- one the 2,000 residents, local by-laws have been passed, making it harder for foreigners to buy property.Even Germany's eastern neighbours are worried about incursions - the Poles are nervous about heavy German settlement around the picturesque Mazuria lakes. The European Commission has launched a legal action against Austria after Vienna passed a law requiring anyone buying property in the Tyrol to seek a permit from the Tyrolean land authority.Along the coast of Zeeland in the Netherlands, the Dutch are also seeking ways to halt the German advance. There is already one German resident for every six locals on the island, and a window poster campaign is demanding a halt to further settlement."Germans are buying up the island," said Mr Matas, "and they just won't integrate with local people and adopt our customs."Austria is up in arms about the number of Germans buying property in the Tyrol, where in some resorts more than half the holiday homes are owned by Germans. On joining the EU, Sweden, Finland and Austria all attempted to win Danish-style protocols to deter German land ownership, but were refused.In Spain, the chief minister of the Balearic islands, Jaime Matas, recently called in the German consul to complain about the amount of property in Majorca being bought up by his countrymen and women, including the supermodel Claudia Schiffer. However, Denmark is not the only country which is increasingly worried by creeping German settlement. An eye is kept on estate agents across the border offering Danish property for sale.The Danes fear that negotiations to rewrite the Maastricht Treaty could bring new demands from Brussels for their protocol to be abolished.

In a highly controversial legal action, 20 Germans have recently been accused by Danish courts of illegally buying property along the Danish coast, and have been given six months to sell up and leave.The Danish interior ministry has instructed local residents to observe the movements of Germans and to report if they suspect any illegal property sales. But now the Danes see new evidence that Germans are trying to outflank them, by getting Danish relatives or friends to buy properties in their name. Unless someone has lived in Denmark and paid taxes for five years, summer houses are only for rent.Since Denmark joined the European Union in 1973 it has been under constant pressure to abolish this blatantly "unEuropean" law, especially with the advent of the single market, upholding the right to free movement of capital and of people.None the less, in 1992 the Danes won a special "opt out" protocol in the Maastricht Treaty allowing them to maintain their legal defence against German property ownership. As long ago as 1959 Denmark passed a law preventing foreigners from buying summer houses.

After all, we have this wonderful coast - and there are only 5 million of us and 80 million of them."But no matter how early the Germans hit the beach, they are banned from owning any land or property on Fano. Above the dunes children play hide and seek in wartime bunkers. "You'd find it hard to find a Dane on the beach in July," says Claus Thyssen, the letting agent "In fact you'd never guess you were in Denmark at all They love to come here. Every day German families stake their claim to a patch of Fano's magnificent eight-mile beach, transforming the sands into a giant patchwork of brightly coloured windbreaks and towels. At the height of the summer season the German population reaches 100,000, compared with 35,000 Danish residents.