This Easter you can see them lounging on their yachts in Monaco, surrounded by bleached blondes, or jetting off for the Caribbean. They are London’s zillionaire hedge fund managers, who fly to their private islands in their Learjets, sip vintages from their own vineyards and relax with their personal yoga instructors.

Except Philip Richards. Probably the best-performing hedge fund boss in Britain, Richards earns £8m a year and makes a fortune for his investors — but he doesn’t have a yacht or a holiday home.

Instead the 45-year-old will leave his home early this morning, go for a six-mile run, accompanied by his black labrador Jet, before getting into his five-year-old Audi and driving to church with his wife Mary.

After lunch with his wife’s 90-year-old grandmother, he will sit down at his computer to work out exactly how much of his fortune to give away to charity this year. Last week it emerged that he has just donated £3.3m to charities, notably a new church and a Christian youth centre near his home in Tonbridge, Kent.

“I will be very disappointed if, by the end of the year, that figure has not risen to £4m,” he says. Easter, of course, is the time when a certain prophet gave his all, as Richards well recognises.

Entrepreneurs have always made money and then given some of it away to charity — usually to assuage feelings of guilt. What makes Richards different is that by making devilishly large sums of money, he believes that he is serving God and his fellow man.

The more money he makes, the more holy he feels. He is one of a new breed of the super-rich who have gone public with their philanthropy and their faith, insisting that God and Mammon go together like communion bread and wine.

“People say money and religion do not mix. Why?” Richards says. “God is creative and, if you are a Christian, you should want to be creative, too. Creativity isn’t just about being an artist or a musician. Business is creative. It creates wealth, all the things that society needs to live on.”

He is one of a growing number of high-flying investors attempting to shake off the Loadsamoney “greed is good” reputation of Square Mile traders and reclaim the link between money and morality.

Between brokering mega-deals, John Studzinski, co-head of investment banking at HSBC, is to be found in London soup kitchens, ministering to the poor. Studzinski’s boss, Stephen Green, who next month becomes chairman of HSBC, is another fervent Christian. An ordained minister, he occasionally delivers sermons at his London church and is the author of a book called Serving God? Serving Mammon?

Ken Costa, vice-chairman of the investment bank UBS, is a warden at Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge in London. He is among those who agree with Peter Mullen, chaplain to the London stock exchange, who says “just because you are a banker, it doesn’t mean you’re a devil”.

But it’s an uphill task for, as the less fortunate point out, surely it is the meek — not the £8m-a-year wheeler-dealers — who are meant to inherit the earth? Or is there a new philanthropy taking hold?

RICHARDS’S credo is one that he would like to see transform the way wealth is perceived and charity is directed. In spite of all the inequalities capitalism generates, it is, he argues, spiritually uplifting. Making pots of cash not only satisfies the Christian duty to be creative, it benefits society.

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