Amlin’s Formula-E race car partnership puts pedal to the metal

 

Lloyd’s-based reinsurance company Amlin gave lunching City-ites something to gawk at yesterday with the unveiling of its new sponsorship target, a Formula-E race car and British race-driver Katherine Legge. What the bejeezus is Formula-E? It’s like your bog standard Formula One except the cars are electric rather than gas guzzling. They also race internationally, on city-centre streets rather than out-of-town circuits – and yes, we’ll have hosting a city-centre road race in London next year (actual route TBC).

 

“It’s an innovative new sport and it fits in nicely with our sustainability drive,” Amlin’s comms director Adrian Britten told The Capitalist. “It’s also very inclusive, it’s not very often you get to see a cars doing 150mph on the same streets you take your kids to school on.” Indeed.

 

■ Banking's finest pub-owning double act Adam Wilson and Peter Shea, both of stock broker Daniel Steward, are looking to invest further into the pint-pulling industry. The old friends are hoping to set up a pub chain called The Confederacy, in addition to their award-winning boozer, The Phoenix Inn in Hampshire (Best British Roast 2012, don’t you know). The name points to the ownership style, which will see managers take up to 25 per cent of equity in return for meeting targets. “The Confederation sounded too Star Wars,” Shea told The Capitalist. The pair have set up a Crowdcube funding page to pull the £150,000 they need together with £32,650 raised so far. The plan is to buy around a dozen pubs and the pair already have a few in their sights, although they assure us the research was done mostly online rather than pub-crawls around the home counties. Shame…

 

■ Dramatic scenes at the Reckitt Benckiser charity golf day at Wentworth yesterday, where Brunswick partner Robin Wrench managed to get a hole in one. His ace came at the fifth (a par 3) with a perfectly struck 7 iron. But rather than having to buy the 160 guests at dinner the traditional celebratory drink, Wrench, who heads Brunswick’s Capital Markets practice, pledged a sum to Reckitt’s charity of choice, Save the Children. The move will no doubt score a few brownie points his boss Sir Alan Parker, the veteran City spinner is chairman of the children’s charity.