There are reports from highly reliable sources that Gérard Lopez and his partner in GenII Capital Eric Lux, have sold their shares in the Renault F1 Team Ltd company, which was renamed Lotus Renault GP Ltd on December 16. The suggestion is that the Genii Capital shares have been sold to Group Lotus. If this is true then the team should now be 100%-owned by Lotus, as Renault announced on December 8 that it had sold its shares to Genii Capital. We have heard, however, that Renault may still be involved and could have re-acquired a share of the team, on rather different terms to the previous arrangement.

It is worth noting, however, that on December 8, according to records in Companies House, Renault’s Jean-Francois Caubet and Genii’s Eric Boullier both had their Renault F1 directorships terminated, although Boullier is still running the team.

There have been rumours for some time that Genii Capital would sell the team to Group Lotus, but the adoption of the Lotus Renault GP name, and the subsequent company filings, suggest that Renault may still be involved, if only to have a say in what happens to the cars that bear its name in Formula 1. The name of the chassis cannot be changed unless all the teams in F1 agree to allow that to happen.

It is probably worth noting that there is a proposal in Companies House to strike the Lotus Renault GP company off, which appears to be due to the fact that it has yet to file its accounts. No doubt this will be sorted out rapidly as the team will lose all of its Concorde Agreement benefits if the legal entity it represents ceases to exist.

The company in question began life as Inremco 60 Ltd, which became Benetton Formula Ltd in 1985, was transformed into Renault F1 Ltd in 2001 and then revamped into Renault F1 Team Ltd a few months later.

ADDED LATER: The team has denied that Genii is selling out to Lotus and says that right now the team is 100% owned by Genii. There are talks about Lotus acquiring a shareholding, but this will not be more than 50%, despite the rather misleading reference to a “major” shareholding in the team that was included in the December 8 press statement.