Surely the Lotus F1 Team Isn’t Just Slinking Quietly Away From Its Embarrassing Team Partner, AGT?

By Richard Smith

Here’s an interesting timeline.
October 22, 2013: The web archive of Lotus’s Official Team Partner list includes a firm called AGT. (Update 11/11: the snazzy website formatting didn’t make it into the Wayback Archive that I usually consult, but a kind reader provided links to another archive with snazz)

November 6, 2013: Relying heavily on posts at the blog www.redd-monitor.org (posts that google.co.uk, under spurious legal threat from AGT, has redacted), Naked Capitalism suggests that AGT is an investment scam which is getting the wholly undeserved appearance of legitimacy from its association with Lotus F1:

November 10, 2013. See if you can find AGT in Lotus’s Official Team Partners list today! Maybe it’s just a redesign, though; go on, have a good look round at the Lotus site. As of Sunday, 10th November, 2013, AGT has gone, very quietly, from the Lotus web site Official Team Partners. Or perhaps it will just turn out to be a web site mistake and AGT are back by the time you read this. I’d be very surprised, but it is theoretically possible

Perhaps Lotus will get around to issuing a press release, in the next 36 hours or so, explaining their decision. It would be a shame if Lotus turned down the opportunity to make amends for giving a high profile to what the UK Consumer Minister, just in the past few days, called a “particularly contemptible” scam.

For instance, Lotus might want to clarify whether their deal with AGT included payments from AGT. Payments from AGT would have been, in effect, scam takings from hoodwinked investors. I certainly wouldn’t want to imply that Lotus were aware of this; though I do think they were pretty slipshod in their due diligence about their partner.

Alternatively, it might be that Lotus have overpaid for carbon credits, if they bought any from AGT, which would mean that Lotus were carbon scam victims, too, alongside another 1,000 victims of AGT in Dubai, and another 1,500 investors (and rising) who bought in to other carbon credits scams in the UK.

Either way, disclosure about their relationship with AGT, from a high profile outfit like Lotus F1, would be welcome: it would help educate a public both oblivious to the danger of carbon credits scams, and unprotected by the regulators. I hope Lotus F1 accept the opportunity to educate.

Meanwhile McLaren F1 continue to display the Carbon Neutral Investments logo. Wakey, wakey, McLaren!

…as do Sauber F1. Wakey, wakey, Sauber!

Update 11/11. A kind reader also provides a link to the original Lotus press release re AGT, which is still online at the Lotus site (and elsewhere on the Web too: it’ll take one mighty airbrush to obliterate all that).