Royal Mail fails to deliver annual results

The owner of Royal Mail group switched from takeover controversy to farce today when it took nearly seven hours to tell the stock market that it would not be able to publish its annual results as scheduled.

When International Distributions Services, Royal Mail’s holding company, finally got round to making an announcement, it appeared to blame its auditors at KPMG.

With no announcement of its preliminary results at 7am and repeated indications that publication would be “in an hour or so”, speculation grew during the morning that some form of intervention had taken place after the prime minister called a general election on Wednesday evening.

The proposed £3.5 billion takeover of International Distributions Services by Daniel Kretinsky, a Czech energy tycoon best known in