Tough talkers come to the fore after a year of thrills and spills

This was a year when Kraft, the US food firm, bought our beloved Cadbury and promptly closed a manufacturing plant it had promised to keep open. Tony Clement, Canada's industry minister, blocked mining group BHP Billiton's $40bn (£26bn) offer for Potash Corporation, on what looked worryingly like nationalistic grounds. In the US, BP was carpeted following the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Still, it wasn't all doom and gloom: companies such as SuperGroup, the clothing retailer, made a fabulous stock market debut; Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg gave away billions of dollars of his wealth; and Warren Buffett, the veteran US investor, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates discovered a new way to persuade US billionaires to give to charity. In short, it was a year of heroes and zeros. Zeros Kraft boss Irene Rosenfeld pledged to retain a key Cadbury factory, Somerdale, near Bristol, in order to win support for the US food group's £11bn bid for the chocolate maker this year, only to announce its closure, with the loss of 400 jobs, days after gaining control. Rosenfeld was virtually invisible throughout, even declining to appear in front of a committee of MPs investigating the takeover. To add insult to injury, it emerged last month that Kraft plans to move parts of Cadbury to Switzerland in order to cut its tax bill and thus deprive the UK government of much needed revenues. Reckitt Benckiser's Bart Becht deserves a quick heckle after shattering British records for executive pay – taking home more than £90m in cash and shares in one year – bringing the total he has made from running the maker of everything from Cillit Bang kitchen cleaner to Durex condoms to more than £200m since 2005. German chancellor Angela Merkel was quite happy for Germany's juggernaut economy to benefit from an artificially low currency – the old Deutsche Mark would have appreciated considerably if still in existence, making the country's exports significantly less attractive – but seems less keen to give too much back. She opposed measures to stabilise the eurozone, through the creation of a common EU bond and the expansion of the €750bn (£636bn) emergency fund to bail out cash-strapped governments in the region. Merkel also exacerbated the problems of Ireland and other struggling European governments in November, when she lobbied for sovereign debt-holders to share some of the pain in the event of future bailouts, in a move that spooked the markets – and continues to do so. In the interest of fairness, we should perhaps point out that Merkel is under pressure from the citizens of Germany – by far the biggest contributor of bailout funds – who are getting a bit fed up with propping up their failing neighbours. Mark Tincknell , former chief executive of Connaught, and Jarvis Snook , former chief executive at Rok, both fell from grace. There was clearly something in the air in Exeter's Guardian Road business park this year, as the two listed property maintenance companies, based next to each other, plunged into administration. Connaught's decline proved to be the more dramatic of the two and is the subject of an investigation by the Financial Services Authority, the City watchdog, into whether the council-house maintenance firm fully disclosed its dire financial condition to investors before a surprise profits warning in June. Guy Hands , founder of Terra Firma, lost plenty of face this year when a New York court quickly rejected a fraud claim he had launched against Citigroup over his ill-fated £4.2bn purchase of EMI music group in 2007. Hands had accused heavyweight Citigroup banker David Wormsley of lying about a nonexistent rival bid for EMI in May 2007 to encourage a rival offer, which he said caused him to overpay for the now-troubled business. A New York jury threw the case out after four hours of deliberation. Sean FitzPatrick became a hate figure in Ireland. Recently, 30 protesters gathered outside the seaside home of the former Anglo Irish Bank chairman in County Wicklow, demanding that he be thrown into jail. Known to the media as "Seanie" and once the life and soul of the Dublin business and cocktail party scene, FitzPatrick quit as chairman of Anglo Irish in December 2008, before being arrested in a dawn raid in March 2010 as part of an investigation into financial irregularities at the nationalised bank. In July he was declared bankrupt and the smooth-talking businessman, who enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, now insists he lives on just €188 a month while being chased for €70m of loans he owes Anglo Irish. He has already repaid €20m to the bank, where he worked for 33 years. Stephen Phipps , chairman of Desire Petroleum, and Madagascar Oil's chief executive, Laurie Hunter , reminded us what a hit-and-miss affair oil exploration can be. Last month, Desire's share price crashed by almost half – and has pretty much stayed there – following an embarrassing reversal of fortunes in which the company declared, just four days after trumpeting a significant discovery in the north Falklands basin, that it had made a further discovery – that the find was essentially water. And in what must go down as one of the most unfortunate flotations in global corporate history, Madagascar Oil suspended its shares last month, barely two weeks after listing on London's Aim stock market. The reason? The small matter of the announcement by the African island's government that it was planning to seize Madagascar Oil's assets. "There can be no guarantee that any price agreed for such an acquisition will be representative of the fair value of such assets," the company said, in an apparently straight-faced statement. But naturally the zero of the year award can only go to BP's former chief executive, the gaffe-prone Tony Hayward . In November, Hayward finally admitted that BP had been forced to make up its response to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster as it went along, something he said had made the group look "fumbling" and "incompetent" in the eyes of the public. Hayward also admitted the contingency plans drawn up by the company had been completely inadequate. "We did not have the equipment to contain and disperse [oil] on the seabed. In fact, the equipment had never been designed or built. It simply did not exist," Hayward said. Heroes Britain's new Nobel laureate in economics, Christopher Pissarides , took a brave step by almost immediately delivering a stern warning to the chancellor that cuts to social security benefits in October's comprehensive spending review risked consigning an entire category of jobless workers to a spiral of poverty, disillusionment and long-term unemployment. On a similar note, the CBI's president-in-waiting, Roger Carr , quickly broke ranks by declaring his support for the Labour-initiated 50p rate of income tax on Britain's richest earners – in sharp contrast to the business organisation's vigorous campaign against the policy. Much respect must go to Cheryl Eckard , the former quality control manager at pharmaceuticals firm GlaxoSmithKline, for winning a battle against her employer after blowing the whistle on a series of contamination problems, and their subsequent cover-up, at a now-closed GSK factory in Puerto Rico. Her complaints, first made in 2002, related to important drugs such as the Paxil antidepressant and the diabetes medications Avandia and Avandamet. They fell on deaf ears and the following year she was fired on the spot and marched out of the building. Seven years later, in October, she received $96m, believed to be the largest ever reward for a whistleblower, as part of a civil settlement between GSK and US regulators. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet , who have each been the world's richest man at one time or another, founded the Giving Pledge in June to encourage other mega-wealthy people to give away large chunks of their fortunes. So far, at least 57 American billionaires have joined and pledged to give away at least half of their fortunes, a total of $125bn. They include New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, the currency speculator, and CNN founder Ted Turner. In a rare case of British job creation, inventor and entrepreneur James Dyson this year doubled the number of engineers employed at his company's Tetbury Hill headquarters in Malmesbury. Investors who bought into the SuperGroup 's flotation at 500p a share in March would no doubt like to thank the fashion retail chain for a fine performance. Those same shares were changing hands for £12 by close of play last week. Congratulations to the British creators of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire , who in July won $269m in damages from the Disney entertainment empire in a US court after a six-year battle over unpaid royalties. "It's been debilitating and it's been very, very difficult at times. But I'm delighted that in a David against Goliath story, David has won," said Paul Smith, the multimillionaire founder of Celador International , the format's creator, after the verdict. In what many may view as an unorthodox choice, we've decided to award hero status to Lucas van Praag , Goldman Sachs's chief spokesman, for handling a difficult brief with style. Dubbed "Goldman's rococo PR prince" by one New York newspaper, Van Praag dismissed inaccurate predictions of a $100m bonus for Goldman's boss by saying: "There's speculation and there is stupidity. This speculation transcends the simply stupid and takes it to an entirely new level." Earlier this year Van Praag said: "The approach we've adopted to media coverage is that we aggressively rebut and refute reports or commentary that we believe to be wrong. And if you want it to be noticed, you've got to make it notable." And finally, retired art teacher Robert Bramwell deserves our parting accolade after forcing energy provider npower to repay £70m to customers it overcharged for gas following a dogged two-year battle in which Bramwell refused to accept that his bill was correct – and was eventually proved right. As a result, npower had to pay £60m plus VAT and interest to the 1.8m customers in the same boat as Bramwell who had been overcharged during 2007.