John Gardiner, the chairman of Tesco, the UK's leading supermarket chain, has launched a stinging attack on investment bankers.

He said banks were "completely useless" when it came to extracting companies from crises. He said that he received no help from merchant banks when rescuing Cammell Laird, the former shipbuilding company, from bankruptcy in the 1970s. Instead, they had all tried to interest him in buying the sort of engineering companies he wanted to get away from.