City People

TED TURNER, founder of CNN and chairman of Time Warner, will arrive in Cowes tomorrow to join Larry Ellison, head of the Oracle data software giant, to sail one of the most dangerous yacht races in the world.

At the climax of "Cowes Week" on the following Saturday Mr Turner will climb aboard Mr Ellison's 84 foot "maxi" yacht Sayonara for the Fastnet race. It will be the 20th anniversary of the last time Mr Turner took part in the race, which starts in Cowes, rounds the Fastnet rock off the south-west coast of Ireland and ends in Plymouth.

Last time, in 1979, a huge gale blew up and 15 people were drowned. Mr Turner emerged unscathed.

Talking of dangerous races, Mr Ellison won the Hobart race off Australia last Christmas, again when a number of people were killed.

Mr Ellison is no stranger to danger: he also has a Mig fighter in which to relax. On a lighter note, both moguls are expected at the Royal Yacht Squadron Ball at Cowes tomorrow night. Sadly, no word reaches me of whether Mr Turner's delightful wife Jane Fonda will be attending.

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SALOMON SMITH Barney has snatched two top analyst teams from HSBC. Salomon has hired Max Dolding and Guy Froud to cover leisure, entertainment and hotels, and Charles Winston and Matthew West to research the beverages, restaurants, pubs and breweries sector. All four will become directors and will report to Albert Richards, head of European Equity Research. Both teams were ranked third in the latest Reuters UK Larger Company Survey.

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SIR PETER Davis, the "man from the Pru", has just moved his money from an ordinary Egg savings account to the Egg Internet-only account, which pays an extra quarter of a per cent interest. As one might say of the Pru's chief executive, its good to know that "le patron mange ici".

Sir Peter says that when the insurance giant first planned Egg, they thought it would attract net heads in their twenties and thirties. In fact, they've had a huge surge of accounts from people in their forties and fifties, he says. (Sir Peter Davis is 57.)

Sir Peter adds that soon after the launch of Egg one of the clearing banks rang up and asked if they could put pounds 600m on deposit for one of their private clients. The Pru wouldn't take the money because the bank couldn't divulge the name of the individual.

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GEOFFREY MADDRELL, the chairman of Westbury, Glenmorangie, LDV and ProShare, has added yet another chairmanship to his name: Unite Group, a pioneer in building residential accommodation on "brownfield sites" for universities and hospitals.

Unite was the brainchild of Nicholas Porter, who transformed his family housebuilding business in the early 1990s.Unite's first non-executive chairman David Naish oversaw the company's admission to AIM last month, and will step aside, but remain as a non-exec. Mr Maddrell, 63, says he is "excited to join such a young and focused team. I hope they will benefit from some older, wiser counsel."

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BLICK, A Swindon based company that makes clocking-in machines and the like, has clocked in a new finance director, Garry Peagam, who is currently head of finance at the electricity supply business of South Western Electricity (Sweb). Mr Peagam fills the seat vacated by Michael Lee when Mr Lee was appointed chief executive in May. This followed the sacking of the previous boss, Mark Aldridge, who survived just a year before announcing a profits warning.