ROME/MILAN: Two offers for ailing Italian airline Alitalia are far below market price, with one bid of just one euro cent a share, a source close to sale talks said, sending shares into a tailspin that prompted their suspension.

Domestic minnow Air One has offered just one euro cent per share, the source told Reuters on Friday.

Air France-KLM has offered 35 euro cents per share — but even that only values the Italian flag carrier at about 485 million euros, or 346.7 million pounds, less than half what the market thought it was worth on Thursday.

Shares in the loss-making airline, which has been hawked by the government for nearly a year, tumbled and trading was halted several times. Shares fell as much as 30 percent before recouping some losses to close 13 percent down at 0.76 euros.

“The offer by Air One is at one cent per share,” the source told Reuters, adding that Air Frances offer is at 35 euro cents per share.

Both Air France and Air One declined to comment. The offers are non-binding and both can be reviewed.

Alitalia said in a statement the bid prices were “not full and complete,” adding that as they pertained to non-binding offers, they were “a mere first reference to value.”

In a separate statement requested by the stock market regulator, Alitalia said it will consider the financial resources of the bidders and also their ability to create a single hub to rival other large European airports.

Both these criteria suggest it favours Air France-KLM, which wants to ditch the companys twin hub strategy and focus on Rome at the expense of Milan.

Alitalias Chairman Maurizio Prato has already spoken favourably of the French bid, but that view faces domestic pressure to keep the flagship carrier in Italian hands.

Italys main employers body, its largest unions and several politicians have come out in favour of Air One, whose bid is backed by Italys biggest retail bank Intesa Sanpaolo.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he could talk about Air Frances offer with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi when he visits Rome on Thursday.

JOBS, STRIKES, POLITICS

Unions, worried over potential heavy job cuts in both offers, threatened on Friday to strike unless the government consulted them before choosing a buyer and told them what the bidders plans were.

Roberto Formigoni, a key politician in the region where Alitalias Milan hub is based, also called on the government to give details of the plans.

“The industrial plan is the most important part of the valuation: it does not matter who offers a cent more or a cent less. It is all about the commitment of the company presenting strategy,” he said.

Alitalia, whose main attraction for buyers is its dominance of the route from financial capital Milan to Rome, has put off a final decision on the offers to December 18 after the government failed to pick one at a long meeting on Wednesday.

Prodi said on Thursday there were “clearly …different instinctive opinions” among his cabinet over the best partner.

His fragile centre-left coalition government put Alitalia up for sale at the end of last year but a first auction flopped in July when all the bidders pulled out.

Time is now running out for the government to find a survival solution for the airline, which loses a million euros a day and has said it has funds for a year if it sells assets.

Rome cannot give any more money to Alitalia, which already is burdened by 1.2 billion euros of debt, after a ban from the European Union on further state aid.

Uncertainty around the sale heightened this week when a group claiming to include Singapore Airlines sent a letter expressing interest to Alitalias board which met on Thursday.

Singapore Airlines said later it had no intention of bidding for Alitalia and it had never heard of “Singapore Airlines Holdings,” which was mentioned in the letter. Deutsche Bank denied newspaper reports it would advise the mystery group. — For a factbox on the Alitalia bids click on

(Additional reporting by Alberto Sisto; Writing by Jo Winterbottom and Gavin Jones; Editing by David Cowell)

THE BILLIONAIRE WHO WASN’T
How Chuck Feeney Secretly
Made and Gave Away a Fortune
By Conor O’Clery
PublicAffairs; 337pp; $26.95

- ( below) Editor’s Review The Good A superbly written, detailed look at Chuck Feeney, who gave away billions. Reads like fiction. The Bad Talk about making you feel guilty–Feeney is as selfless as they come. The Bottom Line An engrossing look at an unusual, influential philanthropist.
They call them the woodwork donors—the philanthropists who traipse around behind the scenes giving stealthily and mysteriously, insisting on ironclad anonymity every step of the way. Until he was outed 10 years ago, New Jersey-born Chuck Feeney was the world’s most profligate secret Samaritan. He remains, at 76, the most unusual. Eschewing all traces of luxe, the man who compiled what would today be worth $4 billion buys his suits off the rack, uses a plastic bag for a briefcase, sports drugstore spectacles, wears a $15 plastic watch, and flies coach. He owns no house and no car. He wonders aloud about the need for more than one pair of shoes. When he’s in New York, he likes to dine on chicken pot pies at grubby midtown dives. “It has always been hard for me to rationalize a 32,000-square-foot house or someone driving me around in a six-door Cadillac,” the publicity-phobic Feeney told BusinessWeek in a rare interview in 2003. “The seats are the same in a cab. And you may live longer if you walk.” As New York Times columnist Jim Dwyer once said, this is a man whose life is like Donald Trump’s, only backwards.

In his superbly written page-turner, The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, Irish journalist Conor O’Clery chronicles Feeney’s fascinating life. He also probes the psychology behind Feeney’s stark rejection of life as an exercise in conspicuous consumption. Feeney’s Depression-era childhood, Catholic upbringing, charitable parents, and poor-kid status at ritzy schools all conspired to influence his largesse. In crisp, Dickensian detail, O’Clery gives us the smells, sights, and sounds of Feeney’s hardscrabble upbringing; his explusion from Manhattan’s selective Regis High School; and his financing his way through Cornell University’s hotel management school as the “sandwich man,” selling 700 baloney-and-cheeses a week out of a wicker basket.

Feeney’s early days in business were an exercise in frugality. He held meetings in coffee shops and had an entertainment budget of zero. With his business partner, Robert Miller, he built Duty Free Shoppers into an international behemoth. That part was known throughout the 1970s and ’80s. What wasn’t known until 1997 was that 15 years before, Feeney had decided to systematically give it all away. He had grown tortured about the state of the world and his having so much. In 1982 he secretly transferred his share of Duty Free to an offshore Bermuda foundation he’d set up named Atlantic Philanthropies. It was one of the biggest and most unusual philanthropic feats in history.

Feeney was obsessed with concealing his identity and even keeping the endowment a secret from Miller, who revels in a life of ostentation and whose socialite daughters went on to marry a prince, a Getty, and a von Furstenberg. Any grant from Atlantic came with hyper-lawyered nondisclosure agreements and vows of secrecy. He agreed to this book only because the story was already leaking out, and he wanted to make sure the details were correct.

O’Clery also shows how Feeney used his philanthropy to further political ends—notably Feeney’s role in trying to advance the Irish peace process through backdoor diplomacy. Irish leaders credit Feeney with helping to build reconciliation in that country.

As the father of the “giving while living” school of philanthropy, Feeney has had a great deal of impact in philanthropic circles. This carpe diem approach has influenced other super-philanthropists, including Bill Gates and Michael Dell, to donate their fortunes during their lifetimes as opposed to bequeathing riches posthumously. The philosophy goes against the grain of most American philanthropy, where charities limit annual giving to 5% of their endowments. In 2003, Feeney’s Atlantic made a stunning announcement: It planned to spend itself out of business over the next 12 to 15 years, giving away $350 million annually to four causes: disadvantaged children, the care and treatment of the elderly, global health problems, and human rights.

Feeney’s spend-it-now philanthropy has also influenced others to better prepare their children for lives of privilege minus the psychological hex wealth can sometimes be. In keeping with his ideas that life should not be an acquisition spree and that work and a sense of purpose ultimately bring a richer existence, Feeney long ago bestowed modest sums on each of his five children. He did the same for himself. The worth of his stake today? $1.5 million. Feeney isn’t just influencing current philanthropic practice. He’s also picking up where Andrew Carnegie left off: As the legendary steelman said: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced.”
READER REVIEWS

(12-14) 10:50 PST New York (AP) —

Online advertising jumped 25 percent this year, raking in a cool $20 billion, but Internet executives say that figure could have been even higher if advertisers had reliable and consistent ways to measure online audiences.

Unlike traditional media, where each format has one main ratings provider Д The Nielsen Co. for television, Arbitron Inc. for radio and so on Д there are many sources of data on online audiences. And they frequently conflict.

Disagreement also continues over which criteria best gauge users’ potential interest in a product or service. And the resulting data aren’t easily comparable to ratings in other media anyway.

It’s a “problem of plenty,” as Manish Bhatia, president of global services for Nielsen Online, a unit of The Nielsen Co., told a recent conference on online audience measurement.

Web publishers are frustrated that the lack of cohesion is holding them back from capturing more of the $250-billion-a-year U.S. advertising pie, especially given the huge amount of time people spend online.

“This industry looks like it can’t get out of its own way,” said Steve Wadsworth, president of The Walt Disney Co.’s Internet group. “We need measurement of the audience and their use of the system that’s clear, simple and actionable for a marketer. You need comparability with other media.”

As Internet executives hash over clickstreams, page views and user panels, 2008 is sure to see even more evolution of the way online audiences are measured. Other media Д including TV, radio and billboards Д also are revamping the way they calculate ratings in response to pressure from advertisers trying to measure how effective their ad dollars are.

David Hallerman, senior analyst at research company eMarketer Inc., said many large advertisers remain shy of the Internet because of confusion over audience measures. Some also want to stick with video ads, which are still in their early stages on the Internet.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, which represents more than 300 Web publishers, has called for Nielsen Online and comScore Media Metrix to undergo audits by the Media Rating Council, a process that is still under way. ComScore and Nielsen both still use panels, while Quantcast Corp., a relatively new agency, combines panel and Web-based data to produce ratings.

Resolving what to measure is as complex as deciding how to measure it. Some sites produce their own ratings based on internal server logs, on the theory that panel-based data understate traffic. But comScore says internal logs can overstate traffic when users delete identifying files called cookies from their browsers because servers think they’re seeing a “unique visitor” each time that user arrives.

Counting unique visitors can also be challenging Д and lose meaning Д when an individual logs in to several different computers, or a family of six all use the same computer. “Page views,” once a key indicator, haven’t been since Ajax software let people view different elements on one page instead of going to a new page for each one.

From any vantage point, there’s still no clear equivalent for reaching a potential audience of 18 million people around the country at the same time with a single ad on “Desperate Housewives.”

“There aren’t well-established, tried-and-true standards in the industry, which need to be worked through,” said Jeff Marshall, senior vice president of digital marketing at Starcom USA, a major ad-buying agency. “The concerns are escalating as more and more of our clients are shifting significant amounts of money into the space.”

Traditional measures may not even apply to the Web, some executives say, because the benefits the Web offers Д most notably, the opportunity for users to click right through and buy the advertiser’s product Д aren’t comparable to other media.

But Web publishers want to give advertisers some basis for comparison.

“Advertisers want to be able to understand that their online spend got this reach, and their offline spend got that reach,” says Jim Spanfeller, president and CEO of Forbes.com.

Or, as Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, put it: “Marketers want to know, If I take $10 out of TV and put it into online, am I getting $10-plus back?”

Peter Daboll, a research guru at Yahoo Inc. who holds the title Chief of Insights, acknowledges that it’s still a “challenge” to work through the various kinds of online data.

“We’re not dealing with a perfect science here,” said Daboll, formerly chief executive of comScore. “What we’re trying to do with our advertisers is take some of the mystery out of this.”

Indeed, advertisers are demanding just that.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, said corporate leaders have been ratcheting up the pressure on marketing departments to justify their ad budgets with hard proof they are generating business.

In response, TV broadcasters this fall started counting how many people watch commercials during a show. Radio ratings company Arbitron Inc. is rolling out a new electronic measurement system that uses a portable device to capture what stations people actually hear, instead of what they recall hearing. The system is running in Philadelphia and Houston, with nine more markets to be added in September.

And the outdoor advertising business will replace estimates of vehicle and pedestrian traffic in front of billboards with a measure that takes into account how visible a certain billboard is. The new measure will also include estimates of demographic data, something other media already provide.

Advertisers seem fed up with the adage that half their ad spending seems to work, they just can’t tell which half.

“CEOs finally said, enough is enough,” Liodice said. “We have to know with greater specificity what comes out when something goes in.”