He writes: 'In the letter page of 17 Jan, Professor Gerald Vinten asks how many millions I have made from my connection with the Irish International University.

'Five years’ ago I was offered payment by the university. I turned this down and asked for the money to be used for a student scholarship.

'The exposé of the Irish International University (IIU) by BBC TV London has received widespread publicity. The BBC TV report does not, in my view, accurately represent the views that I expressed at the interview with an under-cover reporter Plus, the BBC has used a photograph completely out of context.

'There is a picture of me with Professor Sandhu (Chief Executive of IIU) It was taken at a function in London over five years ago. The caption is "The university staged an award ceremony in Oxford". I have never been to Oxford!

'The BBC also implies that I am a major player in the university. I must emphasise that my role with the university has been that of a figure-head .This is also how IIU described my role to the BBC. I have attended several IIU convocations in UK and in Malaysia at which I have met hundreds of students. I have never received any complaint about the university.

'I have never been happy with the IIU website and have made my views clear to IIU. It said that the accreditation body in the UK was independent when I knew that it was not. On several occasions, I have told IIU that the website was misleading. It also appears that IIU has said that it had a campus in Ireland. The BBC found that it was not a campus but a telephone line! I was not aware of the lack of campus in Ireland.

'The BBC reporter suggested that my position with IIU is untenable and that I should resign. As a result, I told the IIU that I would resign if my required changes to the website were not met. The BBC has now confirmed that the misleading aspects of the website have gone.

'The BBC has highlighted the fact that I am resident in Monaco and has tried to insinuate that this is in some way related to income from IIU students. I have lived in Monaco since 2000 ie before my involvement with IIU. I must emphasise that I do not get paid to be on the IIU website or for any other services rendered to IIU.

'Professor Sandhu is one of my old students and when he set up the university, he invited me to become Vice Chancellor. I held that position until it was taken over by Professor Ralph Thomas at one time a close friend of Professor Vinten Since then I have become Honorary Chancellor which is a more accurate description of my position.

'The "Honorary" title was used to indicate that it is position in which one does not expect payment. It is highly likely that the IIU will be taking legal action because it has been represented as "Not a University" and "Not Irish". However, the registration of IIU as a university in Ireland is there for all to see. It has Irish Government approval also to use the word "International" in its title.

'The Irish Constitution allows any organisation that is set up as a university in Ireland to operate as a university, albeit not accredited. The IIU operation was described as a scam. Yet visas are given only to students attending colleges approved by Government agencies. I have no doubt that the quality of the education provided was better than that in some fully accredited universities and certainly better value than most accredited courses.

'Professor Vinten is, of course, well known as a leading player in the accreditation field as is Professor Thomas. At the BBC interview, I had suggested that rather than looking at the Irish International University they should be looking at the whole sordid business of accreditation.

'The BBC chose not to publish my comments in this connection. But for an independent assessment on the whole saga go here.

'Bear in mind also that the BBC reporter is an Oxford graduate and therefore perhaps not completely unbiased in the battle between the accredited and the unaccredited.'

I've published Wooller's comments in full in the interests of balance. He is right to question the whole 'sordid business of accreditation'. But if he considers it 'sordid' - a strong word - why allow himself to become so aligned with an organisation that used the term accreditation dubiously?

And while the rest of hat he says may well all be the case, it implies judgment on his part that is very much at the margins of what is and isn't acceptable.

And, as I wrote before, none of this reflects well on Wooller.

Or perhaps he chatted to his fellow passenger Richard Branson about how shrewd self-promotion (never the prime minister’s strongpoint, to be somewhat understated about it) can make a reputation. (UPDATE: it sounds like Northern Rock cropped up too)

That said, his time might have been better spent with three other passengers - Deloitte chief executive John Connolly, Ernst & Young chairman Mark Otty and KPMG senior partner John Griffith-Jones. (PwC’s Kieran Poynter was invited, I gather, but had to decline due to a prior commitment).

As my colleague Gavin Hinks has written this morning, it’s unusual for accountants to be invited to fly the corporate flag on an overseas prime ministerial visit. I hope they use it wisely.

While their priority (and Brown’s for that matter) will be to extend their already highly successful operations throughout China, I hope all parties found some time to discuss domestic matters.

Hopefully they touched on tax – not least the harm uncertainty over capital gains tax reform risks doing to British business.

It would have been a missed opportunity if reform of HMRC didn’t crop up.

And if the fragility of the global and domestic economies was not discussed at some length there would have been little point boarding the plane.

As the chancellor himself said: ‘You may have noticed this is an exciting time to be chancellor of the exchequer. And frankly I could have done without some of the excitements. I’ve had to deal with the unexpected like missing computer discs and difficulties caused by events far, far away.’

The latter, of course, an allusion to the US sub-prime lending that has caused (or at least highlighted) Northern Rock’s fragile financial position. He did stray off topic but rarely anywhere specific.

An announcement on capital gains tax reform would be ‘soon’ and made to the House of Commons once responses to his initial proposals had been reflected upon.

The Treasury was considering all options on Northern Rock, would prefer a private sector solution was found but ‘would see it through’ and take ‘whatever action, however difficult’. (Nationalisation is the only the interpretation of that remark).

Meanwhile the Treasury – which he acknowledged had been driven by too many targets in the past - would continue to be involved in the detail of government policy where it needs to take a view - economic or moral.

But it was a throwaway remark about what the role of the Treasury should not be that struck me as most remarkable.

‘It’s possible to look at the Treasury as a finance officer function – almost acting as a club treasurer,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you can possibly act in that way.’

What he seemed to be saying was that he needed to be involved in financial managing and in strategy. And how, by implication, that wasn’t really the role of the government’s senior finance officer. I couldn’t disagree more.

‘I guess that within a couple of years time at the present rate of progress everyone will know the financial position of the company at every level in real time,’ he said. He didn’t quite get the timing right but that remains the direction of travel. And I do wonder whether he would have blamed FDs for not making it happen sooner. After all he had warned: ‘FDs could be the key gatekeepers making that happen or they could be the abominable snowman preventing that from happening. They need an IT strategy as well as a financial strategy as well as a business strategy.’

A good FD, said Sir John, must be able to measure innovation, reinforce everything that is working well within a company and be willing and able to cut out everything that is not. And to do it quickly. But, again he warned, FDs who were going to have a lasting impact on their business must do more. They must, he said, be visionaries and persuasive ones at that. ‘In the finance function it’s all about risk and if you don’t take risks that’s the most dangerous position of all. It almost doesn’t matter what you do as long as you are constantly trying something new.’

He also talked of the need for younger accountants to change. ‘They have got to have a dream of where they might be in future,’ he said. ‘It’s not that they might have a 20% chance of becoming chief executive, it’s that they have a 60/70% chance of being the main agent for change in the business in which they working. That ought to be the ambition of the young accountant.’

To achieve that he urged the accountancy institutes to make their training more relevant to modern business needs. ‘The pressure on the training of young accountants is to buy into that change. My message to them is that it is bloody good that you have started but please hurry. You haven’t got much time.’ Ensuring that that happens wouldn’t be a bad legacy.

NASDAQ-listed Catapult announced last week that it had replaced Deloitte with Stonefield Josephson, a firm ranked 67th in the US. Not many companies trip down the league table when choosing a new auditor. But that wasn’t the most remarkable thing about this decision. It was the detail that California-based Catapult was willing to go into in an SEC filing.

‘Its Audit Committee believe that, by engaging Stonefield Josephson, Inc. as the Company’s independent registered public accounting firm for the current fiscal year, the Company will realize significant savings on these expenses without negatively affecting the quality of the audit and related services.

‘Based on estimates from the two firms, the Company currently believes that the potential savings for fiscal 2008 from the change in firms will be in the range of 43% to 49%. The Company cautions that this is an estimate only and is based on the Company’s current understanding of the information it has received from the two firms and the scope of the work that will be required.’

So Catapult’s decision was (a) based on a desire to save money (it expected to shell out out just shy of a million dollars to Deloitte for its audit in 2008) and, crucially, (b) based on the belief that a modestly-sized firm can offer the same service quality as a Big Four firm at a significantly reduced cost.

The fact that it was willing to say so is to its credit and hopefully will pave the way for other companies to be more transparent about their thinking on auditor engagement.

Before I get attacked for massively over-simplifying the issue (to which I plead guilty) and being partial (my plea there is not guilty), that’s not a call for more companies to drop the Big Four. It is a call for more businesses on both sides of the Atlantic to be more open about why they choose and review auditors.

I have said several times that I can’t see a regulatory solution to the audit choice debate. This is the best market one I’ve seen yet.

Wooller himself told BBC reporter Angela Saini the university was ‘dodgy’. Which wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t its honorary chancellor.

Holding that position makes Wooller’s further statements simply astounding. He admitted to an actor employed by the BBC that the university’s website was an illusion: ‘When you look at the website, it's a figment of someone's imagination. Someone's dreamt up what a university should look like, and that's what's on the website.’

And despite the exposure he refused to quit as honorary chancellor stating that most IIU students were happy and that the university was good value for money.

Presumably he will retain the title Baron Knowth, which he uses for university business and, he told the BBC, he bought.

I should point out that Wooller defends his position. ‘By being with them, I thought I could improve things,’ he told Accountancy Age. ‘I said I would resign unless [they] made the changes, which they did.’ The university has made changes to its website and no longer refers to a Dublin campus for instance. Are these changes the ones he was referring to? Are they enough?

Wooller also added that thousands of people were happy with their degrees and that he was not involved in the UK operation, ‘where there are half a dozen people not happy’. Nevertheless he also told the BBC that the university was ‘not accredited, so it's not recognised’ before adding of the students:’ There's a lot of convocations and they pay a lot of money to go to the convocations ... if you can mention Oxford or Cambridge then the whole world thinks that it must be a good university ... it's very misleading.’

I’m glad he mentioned the students. The BBC’s Angela Saini writes in The Guardian of one of their cases: ‘In 2006, Sounak Halder, a student from Kolkata, applied to do a course through the IIU. A one-year master's cost him £4,500; at a recognised UK university he would have had to shell out upwards of £7,000. It was only after arriving in England that Sounak discovered his college was a tiny office block in east London with no library and a handful of students. "I tried to contact the university [IIU] but they didn't pick up the phone," he explains. "They are cheating innocent guys." He ended up going back home in serious debt.’

The Irish Independent, which first raised concerns about the university in 2006, reports that The Department of Education and Science has written to it several times instructing the owners to stop using the word university as their use of it was against the law. The department's legal section was still examining the options with regard to IIU, it says.

So what does this say about Wooller? Well it doesn’t reflect well on him. To me, the look on his face during the covert filming suggests he knows that.

What’s certain, however, is that given their battles over the years (not least during recent merger attempts) there will have been little attempt to conceal the smiles on the faces of Moorgate Place’s upper ranks.

To recap briefly: when Espinasse joined Vivendi in 2002, the French media giant was in a dreadful state. In transforming the business from a utility into a media-led conglomerate, it had run up £24bn in borrowings. Worse, it had been accused by the SEC of committing ‘multiple violations of the anti-fraud, books and records, internal controls and reporting provisions of the federal securities law’.

Given that damning account, it’s little surprise to read this morning that French prosecutors have received a report from financial investigators on its accounting practices.

But addressing a room full of CFOs in 2005, Espinasse was willing to air his dirty linen in public admitting the lengths to which he would go to placate Vivendi’s creditors. ‘When one banker gets scared, he scares other bankers,’ he said. ‘And when a big company is in trouble, the rules of the game change and they send you the special affairs guys. In addition, you don’t only talk to bankers, you talk to lawyers.’

To begin what has been a remarkably successful turnaround he needed to persuade them to be patient – a costly exercise in terms of bank charges.

‘I wanted to buy time,’ he said. ‘You don’t restore confidence with just a click of your fingers.’

But – and here’s a lesson as relevant in 2008 as it was for Vivendi five years ago – that gave him a chance to sell some of the company’s larger assets without resorting to a fire sale.

If you are unlucky enough to have to deal the special affairs guys in the 12 months ahead be prepared to pay for their patience.