Call it the curse of the Financial News CFO profile. In the same way that chief executives garlanded with Manager of the Year awards somehow soon find themselves rescuing the company from bankruptcy, so groups profiled in our corporates page should prepare themselves for bad luck.

Take Martin May, profiled last January. Freshly lauded as Turnround Manager of the Year for his rescue of Cape, an engineering company laid low by asbestos-related litigation, May had taken over as the chief executive of PlaneStation, a troubled airports operator. It went bankrupt seven months later.