Skibound, a new winter sports arm, chipped in pounds 3.1m.The worst performance was Canada, where First Choice's Signature subsidiary slumped from a profit of pounds 7.9m to pounds 4.7m. Despite the fall, Mr Clubb said there was no intention of selling the business to Airtours, which has expressed an interest.Investment column, page 20. The oil exploration sector was set alight yesterday by a sighting shot for Clyde Petroleum from Gulf Canada Resources, a former subsidiary of the Reichmann property empire, writes Tom Stevenson. Clyde's shares closed 34p higher at 118.5p as dealers banked on Gulf's initial 105p-a- share approach being nothing more than an opening gambit in a hotly contested bid.

Gulf's Texan president and chief executive, James Bryan, known in the oil business as JP, called Clyde's chairman, Malcolm Gourlay, just before 7am yesterday to warn him of the imminent hostile approach. By 11am, Clyde had issued a statement rejecting Gulf's offer as "unsolicited and wholly unacceptable".Mr Gourlay described the timing of the approach as unfortunate, coming, he said, as the City was beginning to rerate Clyde's shares. As a second- liner with a bias towards oil production rather than exploration, Clyde has traded at a discount to its peer group.He rejected Gulf's claim that the exercise and sale of options by Clyde directors this week at 81p undermined their argument that the bid undervalued the company. The numbers of shares involved, he said, were insignificant compared with the holdings directors had retained.Mr Bryan described Clyde's record in exploration as "miserable", but said he had great respect for what Roy Franklin, Clyde's managing director, had done in creating a four-pronged business with operations in Australia and Indonesia as well as the Dutch and British sectors of the North Sea. The deal, Mr Bryan said, fitted in with Gulf's ambition of expanding its geographical spread beyond itsNorth American and Indonesian interests.He said the pounds 432m offer was a full price, which represented a 35 per cent premium to Clyde's value on 27 November and a 24 per cent premium to the price at which the shares closed on Tuesday night. He compared the price with the 62p value Clyde's broker Hoare Govett had put on the company's net assets and the 84p "going concern" value, which includes probable and possible oil and gas reserves as well as the stricter proven variety.The deal sparked a flurry of speculative interest in other smaller oil companies. Cairn Energy, Hardy Oil and Gas and Monument all saw their shares rise sharply yesterday, as did the larger players, Enterprise and Lasmo.Clyde said it planned to set out the reasons for its rejection of Gulf's offer in a letter to shareholders In the meantime, it said, shareholders should do nothing.

Clyde said the terms "fail to take account of the record and prospects of Clyde and the quality of its business and portfolio".Gulf's shares were off C$0.25 to C$9.30 in early trading in Toronto.. Woolwich Building Society pledged yesterday to fight for amendments to a controversial new Building Societies Bill, which Angela Knight, the Treasury Minister, said she hoped to introduce to the Commons between late January and early March. Cross-party support seemed likely after Mike O'Brien, Mrs Knight's counterpart in the Labour Party, welcomed the publication of the Bill, though he said Labour would still like an additional rule to exclude members of less than two years' standing from benefiting from conversion to banks. Woolwich and Alliance & Leicester, which plan to convert to banks, have failed to persuade Mrs Knight to reinstate their full five-year protection against takeovers, which they will lose under the Bill if they make a bid for another financial institution.The publication of the Bill left lingering doubts about the timing of the flotations of the two societies, although a third, Northern Rock, said it would proceed as planned. Woolwich said: "We will lobby to ensure that it is suitably amended on its way through Parliament. Had our board known when it took the decision to convert that this was even a possibility, then we might have chosen to convert in a different way."Alliance & Leicester said: "The new draft Bill addresses some of the anomalies but does not, in our opinion, complete the process, and leaves converting societies with a number of issues of concern in the middle of long and costly conversion processes."Mrs Knight made one concession to the converting societies by requiring a 75 per cent turnout in any vote on removing the five-year ban on takeovers This increases the obstacles to a hostile bid. The Bill eliminates the need to set aside special reserves on flotation. Without the Bill, some of the converting societies would need to raise extra capital.Brian Davis, chairman of the Building Societies Association and chief executive of Nationwide Building Society, urged the politicians to get on with the task of getting the Bill passed..