People and Business: PR on the piste

IT'S A small PR world. Claire Gilbert, who has just left Ernst & Young to join rival accountants Pannel Kerr Forster as their public relations director, bumped into a bronzed Phil Smith, who is leaving KPMG to travel the world, in a supermarket in the French Alps a couple of weeks ago.

Ms Gilbert and Mr Smith, who were both skiing in Meribel, worked closely together last year in the aborted merger talks between Ernst & Young and KPMG.

Ms Gilbert recently married Peter Lynn, whom she met while working at the Serious Fraud Office in the early 1990s.