LloydsTSB’s finance director Helen Weir features among this year’s judges for the Accountancy Age Awards, along with Margaret Ewing, the former FD at BAA and former Accountancy Age award winner.

Weir is one of the most senior FDs in the FTSE 100 and joined the bank after a successful period with retail group Kingfisher. Margaret Ewing last year won the Blue Chip FD of the Year award for her work at BAA, and is now an FD mentor at Deloitte.

The panel will convene on the 5 September to deliberate on awards ranging from Global Firm and Blue Chip FD to Small Firm and Accountant of the Year. The awards cover practice, the corporate world, software and the best individuals operating in finance.

Among the other judges on the panel are Kieran Poynter, managing partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the UK’s largest accountancy practice with a £2bn turnover; and Jann Brown, FD at Cairn Energy, one of the most exciting energy companies flirting with membership of the FTSE 100.

They will be joined by Paolo Pieri, FD at Lastminute.com, the online travel operator, and Baroness Noakes, (Dame Sheila Masters) a former partner at KPMG and now a Treasury spokeswoman with the Tory party, whose lobbying was responsible for partially opening up the Financial Reporting Council to the Freedom of Information Act.

Fellow award winner Dynshaw Italia, FD at Cobra Beer, is also on the panel. Last year he was named the top FD in a growing business.

The public sector is represented on the panel by Helen Kilpatrick, FD at the Home Office, where she has been charged with putting huge accounting difficulties in order. Colin Gentile, FD St George’s NHS Trust, will be representing the health sector.

Tanya Beckett joins the panel from the BBC where she is a presenter on World Business Report, while financial institutions are represented by Tim Bush, a corporate governance expert with fund managers Hermes, which currently has around £70bn under management.

They will be joined by Mark Freebairn head of the FD practice at Odgers ray & Berndtson, one of the biggest executive headhunters on both sides of the Atlantic.