Senior KPMG man named as Midlands Tory party donor

Steve Hollis, head of UK and EMEA markets at KPMG, was named as one of 22 members of the secretive council, which has donated almost £1m to the Tory party over the last three years, according to the Electoral Commission.

Hollis is one of 22 senior figures who advise chief executive John Griffith-Jones on the firm’s strategy.

Deloitte’s George Campion was also listed as being part of the group. Campion is a senior tax adviser in Deloitte’s Birmingham office who specialises in property transactions.

The council said it was listing its members, many of whom are senior figures in Midlands business circles, ‘in the interests of transparency’.

Both Hollis and Campion were out of the country this week and unavailable for comment. It is not known what their individual contributions to the council were.

The revelations come as part of wider scrutiny of political party funding. Senior Labour figures involved in the party’s loans are believed to be facing charges of false accounting.

Loans provided to the Labour party were not disclosed to the party’s treasurer, Jack Dromey, it emerged earlier this year.

But a senior lawyer said this week that prosecutors would have to do more than prove the omission for the charge to stand up in court.

‘The difficulty is to show that when an omission was made, that it was made dishonestly,’ said Jonathan Fisher QC, a specialist in white-collar crime.

False accounting can be punished with up to seven years in jail.