Banks pledge to support Jarvis until March 2005

The collapse of Jarvis has been averted, thanks to its banks agreeing to prop the group up until next spring - 25 March 2005 to be precise, writes John Leitch.
The last-minute reprieve gives chief executive Kevin Hyde eight months to sort out his well-documented mountain of problems.
The group's financial results were finally revealed last Friday, after being postponed for two months.
The group came within 24 hours of breaking Stock Exchange rules.
Jarvis ran up a pre-tax loss of £247m as a whole raft of extra-ordinary, one-off costs came to the surface. Turnover was little changed at £1.4bn. Last year this produced a pre-tax profit of £63m.
"This has been a difficult year," Hyde said, "and the results are disappointing." He thanked his lenders for their constructive attitude "which allows us to complete the recovery strategy we embarked on some months ago".
In Accommodation Services, Jarvis will no longer undertake any new construction activities. It is taking a £74m hit to cover potential future problems to resolve final account disputes and ongoing relationships with subcontractors and "the extent that damages may become payable to the customer for late delivery as a result".
Hyde said the Wirral schools PFI scheme was a significant contributor to the write-off.
The TubeLines stake will be sold, as will the European roads business and the group's plant and property portfolio.
Jarvis reckons it can raise £150m from the sales, although City analysts are surprised that the figure wasn't higher.
One analyst said: "The future is too difficult to call. There are an awful lot of caveats in these results. They've scared the daylights out of investors."
Earlier last week, Enterprise bought education services company JMPC for £4.2m. Jarvis held a 51% stake in JMPC.