David Mackenzie Donald Mills (born 31 May 1944)[1][2] is a British corporate lawyer who specialises in international work for Italian companies.
In February 2004, Mills had met his accountant Bob Drennan, a partner in the firm Rawlinson & Hunter, setting out the circumstances under which he had received a large amount of money from the "B people" as a gift, and admitting that he had "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 had set the pertinent facts out in a letter, which he handed to Drennan, apparently unaware that accountants are not protected by legal professional privilege and hence are obliged to report suspected illegal activity by their clients.
[14] In March 2006, after his wife Jowell claimed that Mills had not told her until four years after the event that he had been given £340,000 for his work for Silvio Berlusconi, the couple "agreed to a period of separation".
[4] On 17 February 2009, an Italian court sentenced David Mills to four years and six months in jail for accepting a bribe from Silvio Berlusconi to give false evidence on his behalf in corruption trials in 1997 and 1998.
[20][21] In evidence given by videolink from London to a Milanese court in December 2011, Mills stated that his previous claim that Berlusconi had bribed him to the extent of $600,000 had been a lie prompted by the need to "provide to the Inland Revenue a story which explained why I had treated the money as a gift and not as income" and that the money had in reality been a stipend paid to him by Italian shipbuilder Diego Attanasio.
"[22] Mills was also involved when Formula One Racing secured a derogation from European limits on tobacco advertising after Bernie Ecclestone contributed more than one million pounds to the Labour Party during the 1997 UK general election.
[citation needed] In 2003, it was revealed that Mills was involved in an unsuccessful deal for Iranian airline Mahan Air to buy a fleet of BAe 146 aircraft from British Aerospace.