ACCORDING to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest registered company name is The Liverpool and Glasgow Association for the Protection of Commercial Interests as Respects Wrecked and Damaged Property Ltd, company number 15147. A mouthful, yet comprehensible. But a strong contender for the longest single word company name must be the Russian joint venture partner of Irish mineral exploration company Bula Resources in the Salymskoye oilfield prospect in western Siberia.
The Russian company labours under an excessively lengthy, near unpronounceable and certainly incomprehensible name, a nightmare for the foolhardy headline writer and a severe test for the "widows and orphans" facility of this newspaper's word processing programme. Whatever the configuration of typography, the system is invariably obliged to surround the sprawling monster with untidy white spacing.
Bula owns 50 per cent of the Salymskoye oilfield, the remaining 50 per cent is held by its Russian partner (here we go) Khantymansiyskneftegasgeolocica (31 letters), hereafter known as "the Russian company". This corporate mouthful is just five units short of what is reportedly the longest word in the Russian language, Ryentgyenoelyekrokardiografichyekogo (36), pertaining to the X ray electrocardiograph. Impressive but still dwarfed by the 85 letter Maori name for a hill in New Zealand's North Island which is spelt (perhaps not, the word machine is emitting a distressing electronic whimper).
Earlier in the week, Bula sadly announced the departure of its executive chairman Jim Stanley, stepping down to "pursue other mining interests". Could a contributory factor possibly be one too many broken night's sleep after nightmarish hallucinations of the leviathan brass name plate resulting from any reverse takeover? Mr Stanley is chairman of the more linguistically benign Ovoca Resources.
