What Does 'the Warren Buffett of Europe' Have in Store?

He's an inveterate deal-maker who has made a fetish of discretion, is Belgium's richest man with a fortune estimated at $3.1bn (£1.6bn) and was made a baron five years ago.

Albert Frère is also a close friend of Bernard Arnault (worth $26bn), owner of French luxury goods empire LVMH who has built a stake of just under 10% in stores group Carrefour - that has just ousted Luc Vandevelde, another Belgian, as chairman.

The pair, who already co-own the wine-maker Chateau Cheval Blanc near Bordeaux, have set up a joint €1bn (£683m) investment fund and, at one point, were said to be considering a rival bid for Aston Martin, the iconic British sports car maker offloaded by Ford on Monday.

The octogenarian Frère is awash with cash: his GBL investment holding company made €4.5bn from selling its 25% stake in media group Bertelsmann last year, helping to boost its 2006 net income from €523m to €2.88bn.

So what are he and Arnault up to?

Gilles Samyn, chief executive of another Frère holding, CNP, says they are considering six investment projects, including a full takeover of Go Voyages, a French travel group.

But the baron, a native of the steel rustbelt around Charleroi, has even bigger fish to fry.

Operating these days from a luxury apartment on Paris's prestigious Avenue Foch or out of Saint Tropez, he is the largest individual shareholder in Suez, the French energy and environment group pursuing a stalled €80bn merger with Gaz de France that he supports.

He has also built a 16% stake in cement-maker Lafarge, saying he plans to take this to 20 and eventually 30%.

Previously, the baron, who built his fortune in the steel sector, helping to create the forerunner of pan-European group Arcelor that Mittal took over last year, has: sold banking group BBL to Holland's ING, insurer Royale Belge to Axa, power-producer Tractebel to Suez, oils group Petrofina to Total and, of course, TV broadcaster RTL to Bertelsmann.

He was in at the kill when Vincent Bolloré, another friend, won control of advertising group Havas and chairs youthful French TV chain M6.

Arnault's aides say the French tycoon and his Belgian friend have no interest in taking over Carrefour but Frère's wealth and business passion suggest that he is lining up one or more big investments.

At 81, his energy appears inexhaustible and this workaholic told the International Herald Tribune last year: "I have simply erased the word 'retirement' from my vocabulary."

Did Angela Merkel take her eye off the ball?

The EU president, now known as the summit queen after her success in persuading 27 governments to sign up to ambitious and binding targets for reducing global warming, had fought hard as German chancellor to kill off European commission proposals to break up huge, dominant energy groups - such as Germany's E.On and RWE.

We all thought energy ministers had effectively done her bidding a few days before. But not on your Neelie (Kroes).

The EU competition commissioner is quietly crowing.

She believes the summit's conclusions leave scope for her and her commission colleagues to pursue the radical option - ownership unbundling - of forcing the big, "vertically integrated" groups to sell off their electricity and gas transmission networks (grids) and thus remove their ability to manipulate the trading market, forcing up prices to industrial and, ultimately, domestic consumers.

The softer alternative of handing over control of the grids to an independent systems operator, who would ensure open access and promote investment, notably on a cross-border basis, also remains in place.

It was heavily canvassed by the German groups with Merkel's backing and E.On went so far as to propose the creation of an embryonic European market built around the Benelux countries, France, Switzerland and Germany.

Nickel Neelie, as she likes to be known because of her readiness to stand up to Microsoft and to bust cartels, is determined to present full ownership unbundling plans later this year - a move backed by UK group Centrica whose managing director for Europe, Jake Ulrich, says it will encourage new companies (such as itself) to enter the mainland market, delivering investment, greater security and diversity of supply and more consumer choice.

A report in this week's Spiegel magazine is a powerful weapon in Neelie's campaign.

Drawing on leaked secret data from the Leipzig-based EEX power exchange, it effectively shows that Germany's big four energy groups - EnBW and Vattenfall as well as E.On and RWE - have boosted their already swollen profits by controlling the exchange's daily contracts.

By withholding cheaper power from one plant they have, it is said, forced more expensive electricity from another to be offered - setting the gold standard price for all other offers and keeping new entrants at bay.

One academic analyst has calculated that unjustified price increases of 30% have ensued.

It must make for grim reading in E.On's Düsseldorf headquarters where chief executive Wulf Bernotat, protagonist of the German industry's fightback against Neelie, is pondering how to rescue his €41bn takeover bid for Spain's Endesa from government resistance - and the latest move by Italy's Enel to increase its Endesa holding to 24.98% and indicate it could go to 29.99% if proposed legislation to raise the takeover threshold to 30% is approved. Is his towel ready to be thrown in?

Whatever happened to corporate social responsibility?

It was a buzzword of the 1990s and the early part of the new millennium.

The EU, now preoccupied with preening itself as the world's first putative low-carbon economy, saw itself then as a "pole of excellence" for CSR but its fanfares have gone strangely muted in the last couple of years.

Richard Howitt, Labour MEP, is finally trying to breathe new life into that campaign, with the European Parliament approving this week a resolution he drafted for its employment and social affair committee demanding mandatory reporting on the social and environmental impacts of business.

Howitt is dismayed that a so-called multi-stakeholder forum, convened by the European commission on CSR, has fallen apart - boycotted by NGOs such as Amnesty and Oxfam which favour regulation, disapprove of the voluntary approach adopted by business and the lack of transparency shown by the pro-corporate commission.

He says the commission has handed the hot potato to business and points out that many companies simply use their social and environment reports as PR tools, disguising the use of sweat shops and even slave labour further down their supply chain.

"We are talking about reports which have no common methodology, no international benchmarks and no independent monitoring and verification," he says.

Trying to "de-polarise" the row over the issue, he wants the EU to adopt a single piece of new legislation for integrated social, environmental and financial reporting - and to "act as a global leader on exporting CSR standards as it has done on climate change" by forging a partnership with the Dutch-based Global Reporting Initiative, a body used by several large companies for compiling their own reports, and promoting a dialogue with Japan.

But, even with the wind of the MEPs' votes behind it, is this another EU initiative that has run into the sand?