Senior KPMG man named as Midlands Tory party donor
A member of KPMG’s governing board has made donations to the Conservative party through the Midlands Industrial Council, it emerged this week
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.