NEXT LORD MAYOR SETS OUT A CITY MANIFESTO
ALL CHANGE in the Lord Mayor’s office, as alderman David Wootton was yesterday elected the 684th Lord Mayor of the City of London at the Guildhall.
The Lord Mayor Elect, as Wootton will be known until he takes office on 11 November, used his election day to declare that the theme of his year in office will be ensuring the City and its financial institutions are “fit for the future”.
“It is easy to regard the City as solely about financial services and only looking outside the UK, but this is far from the case,” said the Bradford-born alderman. “Having been raised in Yorkshire, I know that the City does care about manufacturing and other industries across the rest of the country. We need to communicate this better and join the dots… between the City of London and the wider UK economy.”
Wootton, who was elected as a partner at Allen & Overy in 1979, was later the guest of honour at a ceremonial lunch hosted by incumbent Lord Mayor Michael Bear for aldermen and the principal officers of the City of London, including the commissioner of the City of London Police Adrian Leppard and City chamberlain Chris Bilsland.
But for all the gold tableware adorning the old ballroom at Mansion House, the role of Lord Mayor remains perhaps the only unpaid position in the City. “The Lord Mayor makes the money and the Mayor of London spends it,” joked one alderman.
SMALL SUPERPOWER
ONWARDS and upwards for the financial PR firm Corfin, which has been swallowed up in a merger with the independent consultancy Luther Pendragon (LP).
The financial details of the deal are undisclosed, but yesterday marked the first day of trading for the new company of 45 employees, based in LP’s offices on Ludgate Hill. The union is a “meeting of minds”, says Corfin co-founder Neil Thapar, as his firm adds its financial clients – Ocean Power Technologies, Hydrodec, Cryptologic and Wolfson Microelectronics – to LP’s roster of corporates, NGOs and government bodies.
Simon Whale, LP’s managing director, said the merged company is a “small but heavyweight one-stop shop” that offers “more care and attention” than the international groups. “Any client always wants to make sure they have the highest-quality advice, and you can’t always provide that in a huge PR firm,” he said, pointing to “the range of people leaving the bigger groups to set up smaller concerns”.
He couldn’t mean the two ex-Citigate founders Jonathan Clare and David Wright, who are setting up the wryly named PR outfit Newgate… could he?
RICH REWARDS
HATS OFF to Nathalie Dauriac, the chief executive of Signia Wealth (left), who has made the shortlist for the Women of the Future awards after founding the firm in 2010 and building its assets from scratch to just under £2bn.
Dauriac is joined on the shortlist of the UK’s most impressive women under 35 by JP Morgan director Emily Yoder and Lloyds Banking Group director Lisa Bryant, who go head to head in the Business and Finance Category, and by Linklaters partner Aisling Zarraga and Ernst & Young’s Caroline Dhir, who have been nominated for Professional Woman of the Future.
“It is incredibly important that we take these opportunities to recognise the female leaders of tomorrow,” said Shell’s UK chairman Graham van’t Hoff, sponsor of the awards.