ICAEW former president Mark Spofforth is one of several members of the accountancy profession to be recognised in this year's New Year's Honours list.
Spofforth, a partner in the Chichester office of family firm Spofforths, received an OBE in the 2014 Honours list. He was ICAEW president in 2012-13 and has held a number of influential posts within and outside the institute, including service on the Takeover Panel, and the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills deregulatory strategy group. Spofforth is actively involved in the charity sector and worked on the 2012 government review of the Charities Act.
Chartered accountant Peter Hargreaves, who held positions at KPMG, Unisys Group and Whitbread before co-founding investment company Hargreaves Lansdown, has been given a CBE for services to business innovation, financial services and to the city of Bristol, where the company is based.
This year's honours list contains more women than men for the first time, accounting for 610 of the 1,195 people named in the list. They include senior City figure Alison Carnwath, the chairman of Land Securities, who becomes a Dame. Carnwath, who qualified as an accountant with Peat Marwick (later KPMG) then moved to Lloyds Bank and on to Schroders, is the only woman to chair a FTSE 100 company. Her name was in the news when she resigned from the board of Barclays in the wake of the 2012 Libor scandal, having previously voted against then chief executive Bob Diamond's £2.7m bonus.
Virgin Money chief executive office Jayne Gadhia, who originally trained as an accountant with EY, has been given a CBE for services to banking and the voluntary sector. A CBE also goes to David Bernstein, former chairman of the Football Association. Bernstein qualified as a chartered accountant in 1966, working with Bright Grahame Murray before joining Pentland Group (the outdoor and sports clothing and shoe group) as joint chief executive. He has a number of non-executive positions at major retailers and was chairman of football club Manchester City from 1998 to 2003.
Also recognised in the 2014 New Year's Honours list is former Bank of England deputy governor Paul Tucker, who was given a knighthood for services to central banking. Professor John Kay, a visiting professor of economics at the London School of Economics and the author of the 2012 Kay Report into reform of the equity market, has been handed a CBE for services to economics.
