Portillo failed to register his speech-making fees

Michael Portillo faces a formal complaint to the Parliamentary standards watchdog for failing to register his earnings from speaking engagements, The Independent can disclose.

Michael Portillo faces a formal complaint to the Parliamentary standards watchdog for failing to register his earnings from speaking engagements, The Independent can disclose.

The revelation that the shadow Chancellor, who makes £5,000 a time as an after-dinner speaker, omitted to list these fees is particularly embarrassing for the Tories because they made political capital this week from a similar complaint about the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy.

It will also further damage Mr Portillo, who had to apologise to the Commons in April after he failed to declare a link with an oil company when he spoke in a debate on petrol prices. The new complaint is being made by Chris Leslie, the Labour MP for Shipley, who also made the previous complaint about Mr Portillo to the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, Elizabeth Filkin.

One speakers' bureau, JLA, told a reporter posing as a representative from a business association that it had employed Mr Portillo on several recent occasions. The agency offered to book Mr Portillo for a speech next January for £5,000 plus VAT and expenses. Asked whether other commitments might force Mr Portillo to cancel, JLA's booker said: "He's done four or five events for us ... and there has never been a problem."

Among Mr Portillo's recent engagements was an afterdinner speech to defence officials in Greenwich, south London, organised by the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. The firm paid £5,000 for the speech. One PricewaterhouseCoopers employee who was at the event said Mr Portillo "went down very well", not least because he knew some of the diners from his days as Defence Secretary.

She said Mr Portillo had threatened to pull out following the furore over Ken Livingstone's income from speaking engagements, but went ahead after the firm suggested donating his fee to charity. The firm paid the fee to the agency and did not know whether Mr Portillo kept it or not.

Another agent, Diana Boulter, said she had booked Mr Portillo for a private client who was willing to pay "a very, very reasonable fee" for an event in Leeds in April this year. However, he was forced to pull out at short notice because of a Shadow Cabinet meeting.

Parliamentary rules require MPs to register all payments of more than £500 and lodge employment agreements for regular engagements. MPs must register gifts even if they then give them away to charity. Mr Portillo registers "occasional fees for journalism, broadcasting and speaking", but does not list the agencies for which he has worked or the amounts he has been paid.

Mr Leslie wrote to Ms Filkin last night to ask her to investigate. "I shall be asking her to consider in more detail the finding that senior policymakers may be available at a certain price to particular business interests," he said.

A spokeswoman for Mr Kennedy, who faces a complaint from the Tory frontbencher Angela Browning over his own fees, said the Tories should "clean up their own act" before criticising others.

Mr Portillo was abroad on holiday last night and could not be contacted for comment.