This time next week we should have a far better idea about the fate of Safeway. The competition commission’s conclusions about who should be allowed to bid for Britain’s fourth biggest grocer areexpected on Thursday or Friday – and it will not be a day too soon for the chain’s 92,000 employees.

Whatever the regulator’s ruling, it is now clear there will be no return to the status quo. There are those who have believed that all the would-be bidders might be blocked, that Wm Morrison might be cleared but fail to win shareholder support and that Philip Green might well turn out to be all blab and no bid. They have suggested that Safeway could, as a result, remain independent and simply wither on the vine.

Safeway’s management, however, now believe it is impossible to go back and are making tentative plans for a management buyout as a final option to deliver shareholder value. The chain’s charismatic chief executive is key to this process; his presence is required by backers if they were to risk their cash.

A property valuation by DTZ suggested a pounds 1.9bn premium over book value on 201 Safeway properties. Tough planning regulations mean that superstore values are still on the increase, although they might take some sort of hit if a glut of Safeway sheds suddenly hits the market.

Come the final reckoning, it is a small band of shareholders who will decide Safeway’s future. Ten institutions hold some 50% of the chain’s shares, but it is just one of them – Fidelity, especially fund manager Anthony Bolton – that is the likely king maker.

Mr Bolton’ s Special Situations fund has quietly been buying Safeway shares throughout the summer. From a 10% stake at the time of the initial Wm Morrison bid, he now speaks for some 14%. He has also bought 3% of Wm Morrison.

And Fidelity has shown in recent months that it will consider nothing but top dollar for its holdings. It rejected offers for JJB, Holmes Place and Pizza Express, and – most interestingly – turned down a big premium for its stake in rival supermarket Somerfield.

CAP claptrap

British ministers were so busy defending the indefensible – Europe’s botched reform of its common agricultural policy – that they failed to notice the outrage boiling up among developing countries at last weekend’s World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun.

It is a sign of how serious the breakdown is, not just for the world economy but for the global drive to cut poverty, that Gordon Brown has personally intervened in the debate. His call today for root and branch CAP reform is a refreshing contrast to the platitudes British ministers mouthed in Cancun.

June’s reforms will not cut prices for consumers, the bills for taxpayers or the amount of surplus food Europe dumps on world markets, but that did not stop Margaret Beckett from describing it as a “historic deal”. Ms Beckett’s officials know the real story: decoupling subsidies from farm output, the centrepiece of the reforms, will not significantly cut back Europe’s food mountains.

The EU’s own research shows that in some sectors production will rise. When the US decoupled its subsidies from output in 1996 so that it could disguise them as “non trade distorting” subsidies allowed by the WTO, farmers barely changed their production patterns.

For a government that has supposedly given up spin, a bit of honesty would be welcome. The best way of helping developing countries is to open Europe’s borders to their farm products, which would reduce prices, and unfortunately drive less efficient European farmers out of business.

Maybe it is time to take agricultural reform out of the hands of the Department for Food and Rural Affairs and give it to people who really believe in it.

Davies departs

So, farewell Sir Howard Davies. After six years at the helm of what became the FSA, Sir Howard left yesterday for the London School of Economics.

On his watch, Equitable Life collapsed and investors in split capital trusts have taken a bath. Endowment policies were increasingly shown to be incapable of living up to their billing and with-profits funds to be flawed in their design.

Davies will be remembered with a special fondness – at least by financial journalists – for testing out his new market abuse powers on a number of newspaper groups, including this one, over leaked documents purporting to outline a bid by Interbrew. The investigation appears to have been dropped.

As a Manchester City supporter Davies knows a bit about thankless tasks, but forming the FSA – at the behest of Gordon Brown in 1997 – was always going to be the mother of them all.

He mashed together the messy raft of regulators which previously policed the City, steered the City through the collapse of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund and oversaw the response to September 11.

Davies inherited a lot of badly written regulation and has set the wheels in motion to try to get it right. Tantalisingly, he said last week that a dozen crooked traders are close to being punished.

Only time will tell whether new FSA bosses, Callum McCarthy and John Tiner, will bask in Davies’ legacy.