Michael Hintze, a member of the international advisory panel for the Financial System Inquiry, looks an interesting choice.Hintze, who holds dual British and Australian citizenship, is one of a number of wealthy donors to the Conservative Party in the UK and has been accused of effectively "buying" the knighthood he received last year. He provided £3.7 million in funding to the Tories, including donations and soft loans between 2005 and 2011. He earned the sobriquet "Godfather of Tory donations" from one Labour MP.The MP, John Mann, was quoted in the Daily Mail in 2011 asserting that Hintze was "putting his money behind the key people in the party very deliberately. People never give money for nothing. They want something in return, they want influence.""Michael Hintze is a hedge fund boss and where he wants influence is over financial regulation," Mann alleged.Hintze's connections to the affair that bought down defence secretary Liam Fox in 2011 are detailed in the book A Quiet Word: Lobbying, Crony Capitalism and Broken Politics in Britain by Tamasin Cave and Andy Rowell.The hedge fund CQS, founded by Hintze, had provided free office space to Adam Werritty, a lobbyist and close friend of Fox alleged to have misused his relationship with the defence secretary.The Bureau of Investigative Journalism chronicled Hintze's political donations in the UK.Australian Electoral Commission records do not show any political donations from Hintze.Hintze, a trained physicist, may hold idiosyncratic views on key policy issues. He must be presumed to be a climate change denier, being on record as a funder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, of which former UK Chancellor Nigel Lawson is a principal.