David Mills (lawyer)

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David Mackenzie Mills is a British corporate lawyer who specialises in international work for Italian companies, and who has been accused in Italy of corruption. He is the husband of the United Kingdom Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Tessa Jowell.

1 Early and personal life
2 Professional career
3 Berlusconi and "Jowellgate"
4 Ecclestone
5 Arms to Iran
6 External links

[edit] Early and personal life

The son of an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders, privately educated Mills went to University College, Oxford, and then in 1968, qualified as a barrister. [1]

Mills has three children from his first marriage; one of these is the Sunday Times journalist Eleanor Mills. [2]. Mills remarried Tessa Jowell in 1979, and they had two children together, living in Kentish Town, North London. Jowell had previously been married to social scientist Roger Jowell. The couple have recently separated [3], after it was revealed that he had not told her that he was given £340,000 for his work for Silvio Berlusconi.

Mills is the brother-in-law of Dame Barbara Mills QC, Adjudicator for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, former Director of Public Prosecutions (1992-1998) and Director of the Serious Fraud Office (1990-1992). [4] [5]

[edit] Professional career

David Mills was a barrister who became a commercial solicitor in the 1980s. [6] He is a former Labour councillor in the London borough of Camden, and like others involved in the London Labour party of the 1980s is close to the Blairite group of politicians and left-leaning celebrities, to which his second wife belongs. [7] [8]

[edit] Berlusconi and "Jowellgate"

Main article: Tessa Jowell financial allegations

Mills acted for Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian Prime Minister, in the early 1990s. This has been the cause of controversy and of allegations. David Mills was involved in setting up a large number of offshore trusts for the "B Operation" as he termed Fininvest, Silvio Berlusconi's operations. Mills is being investigated in Italy for money-laundering and alleged tax fraud [9] [10] and on 10 March 2006 prosecutors in Milan asked a judge to order Mills and Berlusconi to stand trial on corruption charges. [[11]]. Prosecutors submitted 15,000 pages of documents to the preliminary hearing judge who will determine whether the case should go to full trial.

In February 2004, he had written to his accountants [12] laying out a scenario where he would receive a large amount of money from the "B Operation" (Berlusconi's Fininvest) for having "turned some very tricky corners, to put it mildly" which "had kept Mr B out of a great deal of trouble that I would have landed him in if I had said all I knew".

He admitted this story to Italian prosecutors, later retracting it and claiming that the money came from someone else. One source cited was Diego Attanasio, a shipping magnate and another Italian client of Mills. Attanassio denies this story.

[edit] Ecclestone

He was also involved with Bernie Ecclestone when Formula One Racing secured a derogation from European limits on tobacco advertising after Ecclestone contributed more than one million pounds to the Labour Party during the 1997 General Election.

[edit] Arms to Iran

In 2003, it was revealed he was involved an unsuccessful deal for Iranian airline Mahan Air to buy a fleet of BAe 146 aircraft from British Aerospace. He said the sale did not go through and that he was not granted any preferential treatment. However Foreign Office Minister Baroness Symons gave advice to Mills on the political climate surrounding the project. [13]

It was subsequently disclosed that as a consequence of these dealings, Ms Jowell has been excluded from Cabinet papers and talks on Iran since 2003. [14] [15]