People and Business: The Bar loses at Cluedo

DAVID KNIGHT, a 38-year-old City of London barrister who happens also to be the Northern Ireland Cluedo Champion, put up a very creditable challenge in last weekend's UK round of the World Cluedo Championships.

Mr Knight played as The Reverend Green at the tournament, held appropriately enough in the Sherlock Holmes Hotel, Baker Street, London. He described the competition as "intense", and narrowly lost out to Josef Kollar, 53, the defending world champion, who always dresses up as Colonel Mustard.

In real life Mr Kollar is an accountant who lives in a mud-walled house on the borders of the New Forest in Hampshire.

Mr Knight, meanwhile, left Lovell White Durrant, a City law firm, three months ago to set up his own Internet company. He is aiming to put law relating to housing finance on the Internet so that local authorities and housing associations can get basic, up-to-date legal advice and information without having to pay a solicitor.

He has also recently been appointed to the legal board which advises the Association of British Insurers (ABI) on law relating to property.

QUESTION: WHY did the accountant cross the road?

Answer: Because he looked up the file and saw that's what they did last year.

AS JOHN SWIFT comes to the end of his five-year contract as the first- ever rail regulator, his boss John Prescott has been advertising for a replacement.

Coincidentally, the Government is also advertising for someone to head up the new Competition Commission, the planned replacement for the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC), which is due to be launched later this month.

Mr Swift may not quite be flavour of the month with New Labour, but he seems to have amassed something of a fan club among City competition lawyers, who reckon that he would make an excellent chairman of the fledgling Commission.

Sadly, Mr Swift has ruled himself out of the running. He says: "I would advise the Department of Trade and Industry to think very carefully before appointing a utilities regulator to the post."

Instead he has decided to return to work at the competition Bar, as head of Monckton Chambers.

EDDIE JORDAN may be worth pounds 54m following his deal to sell half of his Jordan Formula One motor racing team to Warburg, Pincus. But his friends back in Dublin remember him as a young bank clerk with AIB, a carpet seller in an open-air market and a second-hand car salesman.

Not all at the same time, of course. The enterprising Mr Jordan tried many careers before getting his big break as a Formula 3000 driver. When he found it difficult to raise sponsorship he formed his own team. His party piece was to take one of his racing cars along to discos and pubs to raise money.

"FUZZY LOGIC" may sound like something out of a science fiction movie, but the principle underpins the main technique by which the taxman nabs tax dodgers.

Mark Watson-Gandy, a City barrister, warns: "No business is safe. New fuzzy logic techniques used by the Inland Revenue mean that they now target firms that fail to conform to business trends in their industry. Be innovative, stray from the norm or buck the trend, and you are liable to be targeted for an investigation."

Mr Watson-Gandy has just co-edited a chapter on "Avoidance, Evasion and Tax Investigations" for the Thomson Tax Guide, an electronic guide on tax law.

He found that the Inland Revenue is now compiling profiles of exactly what each size of business in each sector should look like, in terms of profits, tax paid and so on.

Depart from the average by winning a big order, say, or expanding abroad, and you could attract the taxman's knock.

LEAFING THROUGH European Chemical News this week, as one does, my eye was caught by an article on the way regulation in the natural gas sector is hitting the chemical industry. The headline ran: "Feeling the pressure from natural gas". Perhaps the solution is "Rennies" or "Alka Seltzer".