The 19 lowest house price increases over the past 10 years were all in Scotland, though even in the joint worst areas for property market inflation, Aberdeenshire and Dundee, the value of the typical property still more than doubled.Elsewhere in the country, Surrey, Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are the most expensive counties in which to buy property, as they were in 2006. Nevertheless, Martin Ellis, Halifax's chief economist, said the top-performing areas of the UK for house price gains had begun to close the gap on the South-east."Wales and the South-west are popular areas for people seeking to relocate and for those looking for a holiday home," he said. However, with an average increase of 224 per cent in London house prices since 1996, property inflation in the capital has lagged the UK's top performers.Halifax said prices in one in three counties had trebled over the past 10 years. But despite the gains in the West, which was previously more affordable than the South-east, property market inflation has widened the gap between the most and least expensive areas of the UK.The difference between the price of the average home in the most expensive county, Surrey, and the cheapest area, Blaenau Gwent in south Wales, has risen 138 per cent in real terms. That figure included 13 property hotspots in Wales, though Cornwall topped the overall rankings with a 268 per cent increase in the price of the average home in the county over the 10 years to the end of last month. Just two counties in the South-east made it into the top 20: the Isle of Wight, where property prices were up 220 per cent, and East Sussex, where substantial gains in Brighton boosted the average price of a house in the county by 214 per cent.The leading gainers in Wales included Anglesey, Ceredigion, Carmarthenshire, Caerphilly and Powys, where average prices were up more than 200 per cent.Halifax's survey excluded the London property market, which would have given the South-east an additional entry in the bank's top 20 rankings. The UK's largest mortgage lender said 18 of the 20 counties with the highest average house price increases since 1996 were in the west of the country. Homeowners in the west of the UK have been the biggest beneficiaries of the country's rampant house price inflation over the past 10 years, figures from Halifax Bank reveal.

Two activist hedge funds, Atticus Capital and TCI, which own almost 20 per cent of Euronext, favour a merger between the two continental exchanges rather than a deal with London.Two hedge funds, Halcyon Asset Management and Chesapeake Partners, each bought 3 million shares in the LSE yesterday.Euronext is due to confirm its consolidation plans at its annual meetingon 23 May. It said last weekit was in talks with other exchanges, thought to include the London and Frankfurt exchanges, the NYSE, the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.. A group of French banks have pooled their stakes in Euronext to strengthen their position in the event of a merger or bid for the pan-European exchange. BNP Paribas, Calyon, Dexia, Soci? G?rale and Caisse des D?ts et Consignations hold a combined 9.7 per cent stake in Euronext, and will use this to promote lower costs, better liquidity and systems reliability in the event of any mergers or acquisitions. The London Stock Exchange said it is seeking links with other exchanges. It declined to confirm which exchanges it has been in talks with, but sources close to the talks said Euronext, the pan-European market formed in 2000 by the merger of the Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam bourses, is the most likely partner.

The LSE is also believed to be in talks with the New York Stock Exchange.London is likely to face competition if it does seek a merger with Euronext.Deutsche B? has confirmed it is pursue a deal with Euronext. In Russia it generates 20 per cent of the country's tax revenues, supplies 90 per cent of its gas, exports gas to 27 countries including the UK, and employs 330,000 The Russian government owns 50 per cent plus one share.. It is said to be frustrated with the lack of capacity in the interconnector, a common complaint about the pipeline.The "Dutch option" would see it supply an extra 3 billion cubic metres of gas a year to the UK through the soon-to-be built rival to the interconnector, a pipeline that will run from Balgzand in the Netherlands to Bacton.Gazprom believes that Britain's gas market offers higher profits than the Netherlands and Germany, its other big target market. The gas is mostly supplied through the so-called interconnector pipeline from Belgium to Bacton in Norfolk and amounts to about 2 per cent of the UK's gas needs.However Gazprom wants to increase that figure to 10 billion cubic metres by 2010, and to 20 per cent of the market by 2015. Sources at the company in Moscow told The Independent yesterday that the company was as determined as ever to occupy a fifth of the UK market.The company currently supplies Britain with 4 billion cubic metres of gas a year, mainly to big industrial customers and power stations. In the UK's case, it makes no secret of the fact that it wants to cut out intermediaries and sell Siberian gas directly to UK consumers as North Sea oil and gas stocks dwindle.With 60 per cent of Russian gas reserves at its disposal, it believes it is well-placed to fill the vacuum. However Gazprom argues that Britain has nothing to fear, that it has been supplying gas to Europe without interruption for the past 30 years, and that the decision to turn off the tap was purely commercial, and that any Western energy supplier would have acted in the same way.