Arise Lord Fink Of Bogroll

Last week, when Mil The Younger asked Young Dave “Let us take Stanley Fink, who gave £3 million to the Conservative party. The Prime Minister actually appointed him as treasurer of the party and gave him a peerage for good measure. Will he now explain what steps he is going to take about the tax avoidance activities of Lord Fink?”, he may not have realised the full extent of Fink’s activities.

Because those activities do not just extend to defending himself against details such as those unearthed by the deeply subversive Guardian, for example ““He opened Swiss accounts with HSBC in 1996 and 1997, which banked Man Group shares held in UK-registered bare trusts designed to minimise capital gains tax. Most of the trusts were wound up when he returned to London”.

No sirree, Stanley Fink is not just about ““Lord Fink, the Tory donor and hedge fund chief, disclosed in an interview that he had lobbied George Osborne for a cut in taxes on invisible earnings so that he and other hedge funders no longer feel obliged to set up companies in places such as the Cayman Islands”, he is also a director of several companies. This portfolio is varied, almost eclectic.

And the directorship that seems not to have interested Miliband - although the product of the company concerned is, by definition, very close to him, and indeed every other MP - is Zenith Hygiene Group plc, of which Fink is currently the Chairman. Who they? Well, Zenith tells that “At Zenith Hygiene we pride ourselves on the quality of our cleaning, sanitisation and hygiene  products”. Er, such as?

Well, such as the kinds of products that can be found on pages 96 and 97 of the Zenith “core products catalogue”: toilet rolls, which, one may be reassured to find, can be supplied in the softer and more luxurious varieties. Why should this matter to MPs? Ah well. As the Register Of Interests for the House of Lords shows, Zenith “has contracts for the supply of goods and services to the two Houses of Parliament”.

So when the cleaners are out and about, removing dust and dirt from all those nooks and crannies around Parliament, Stanley Fink is benefiting - although, as the same Register Of Interests stresses, “the Member has taken and will take no part in any business relating to these contracts”. Well, apart from when he has to use the, er, facilities during his visits to the Upper House in service of the party to which he has so generously donated, of course.

Yes, Lord Fink has already secured the business of MPs, whether they like it or not. That’s an activity none of them can avoid. Not a lot of people know that.