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Courtesy Private Eye.........
Gong Fishing
Honours List,
SIGNIFICANT CULTURAL PHILANTHROPIST: Michael Hintze has also given £1.4m to the Tory party
NUMBER 10 said the Queen's birthday honours saluted those "playing their part to create a Big Society". Judging by the list, it's a big society of Tory-donating financiers, arms bosses and dubious civil servants.
The government claimed Michael Hintze was knighted for being "one of the UK's most significant cultural philanthropists". Hintze uses the millions from his hedge funds - which are ultimately owned offshore in the Cayman Islands - to plaster his name over exhibitions and galleries. But his philanthropy also embraces the Tory party, which has given £1.4m. Bicester banker Robert Fleming, from the financial dynasty who manage their own and other "high-net-worth" folk's billions through the Fleming Family Private Bank, got a CBE, also for "philanthropy" - including £500,000 given to the Tories by Robert Fleming since 2001.
Bill Winters, the former JP Morgan banker who got a CBE, is the "respectable" face of the City. US-born, London-based Winter is credited with keeping JP Morgan away from some of the wilder "structured products" behind the crash, and served on the Vickers Banking Commission ("Banker-bashing is a bad thing"). Winters has given £50,000 to the Tories since 2010, earning him membership of George Osborne's "donors club". Number 10 said BAE Systems chairman Dick Olver was knighted for contributions to "the development of corporate governance in the UK" and "ethical business conduct". On his watch BAE has paid out over £70m in fines over charges of bribery in Tanzania, Saudi Arabia and Eastern Europe, without a single executive going to prison.
Among the public servants recognized was University College London provost Malcolm Grant, who was knighted in part for being chair of the NHS Commissioning Board, a key government body for NHS privatisation. His own students passed a "no confidence" motion against Grant in 2011. They were angry that the £330k-a-year Grant, one of the highest-paid university chancellors, was resisting the "living wage" for low-paid cleaners that was agreed by most other London University colleges.
Cabinet Office mandarin Melanie Dawes became a Companion of the Order of Bath. She was the HM Revenue & Customs tax commissioner who in 2010 sat down with boss Dave Hartnett, Vodafone finance director Andy Halford and Hartnett's new boss at Deloitte, David Cruickshank, to agree the dodgy Vodafone tax deal. Later the same year, after Hartnett fouled up a deal with Goldman Sachs and was told to undo it by a "governance committee", it was Dawes with whom Hartnett once again conferred and agreed that he would ignore the committee and stick with his own deal. In a recent judicial review, the high court described all this as "not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue". Not glorious, but apparently honourable.
Greg Martin, principal of Durand Academy in Lambeth, was one of five headteachers knighted for services to education. He could, of course, also have been recognised for services to the legal and PR professions, having shelled out more than £380,000 of school funds on lawyers Carter-Ruck in libel fights with a teacher's father and with Lambeth council's chief auditor, plus £310,000 on PR firm PMLR to buff the school's (and its head's) image (Eyes passim).
