THE chunky chairman of KPMG International, is everything you expect from the boss of one of the big four global accountancy groups: sober-suited, politely persuasive, meticulously thorough. Then you ask Mike Rake how he spends his (very large) salary.

“Sixteen polo ponies.”

I’m in the wrong profession. Rake, sitting in an anonymous room on the seventh floor of KPMG’s London base off Fleet Street, grins a little sheepishly and then pre-empts my reaction. “Everyone has a total misconception about polo, it’s just a scruffy bunch of people enjoying the fastest team game in the world. It’s absolutely not a snobbish pastime.”

But it’s not what you expect your average accountant to do, either. Let’s just say Rake ceased being average some time ago. For a start he’s the only Brit to head one of the Big Four accountants (KPMG, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Ernst & Young, Deloitte & Touche). And he’s probably the only accountant to be paid £1.45m basic — more than most of KPMG’s clients, and they include 25% of the FTSE 100. His was one of the biggest salaries in the City of London last year.

Anyone would think he was running Barclays. Actually, he says, sidestepping the taunt, it’s not comparable. “I don’t get share options and I have no pension fund. I do get a company car, I suppose, and nice fruit in my office.”

Rake, 55, whose lived-in face often looks as if it has just popped out of a rugby scrum, has a disarmingly sharp sense of humour that occasionally catches you by surprise. He needed it last year — the worst year of his professional life, he says. KPMG’s turnover in the UK slumped from £1.37 billion to £1.28 billion as the global economy slowed and doubts about the credibility of the global accountancy groups post-Enron rocked markets everywhere. A thousand staff at the firm, including partners, were “let go”.

This summer, a tentative smile is back on Rake’s craggy features. KPMG has revealed a bounce-back in its half-year figures to end-March: revenues up 13.2% globally to $6.1 billion. All this is happening outside Britain, which is still pretty flat, he admits, but the tickling-up in income might mean business is on the move again. KPMG, unlike its rivals, declined to swallow any of the parts discarded by the now-defunct Andersen — once one of the Big Five until Enron — so Rake is pretty confident the growth has not been bought in.

Perhaps we should just be surprised that an accountancy group releases any figures at all. It didn’t used to, but now both KPMG and E&Y do, and from next year all of them will. Why? “Well, it’s painful to disclose your figures but you have to practise what you preach,” says Rake, who was an early advocate of the change. “So in transparency, accountability and openness, that’s what we’ve done. We have a major position of trust in the community and we ought to be accountable for our results.”

It’s also part of Rake’s response to the deluge of criticism hurled at the big accountants post-Enron. KPMG has sold its consulting arm — avoiding conflict of interest with its auditing business — and adopted a more plc-like approach to its internal affairs. The old fear about transparency, that clients would be horrified to see how much profit the firms were making, has been vanquished. “We’ve never had any negative reaction from clients,” says Rake. “Indeed, last year, when we had to disclose a decline in profitability of 20% and all the partners got less money, clients could see we weren’t immune from the pressures they face.”

And has it given the firm, which is much more eurocentric than the other three majors, any advantage over rivals? “Definitely. We were the first to do it, and first to decide to sell our consulting arm. I think that’s not a bad thing. From a reputation point of view, people respect that. It gives us something to say that’s sensible in the debate over the regulation of the profession — and you see that the government has now required all the firms to publish their figures.

“The other value has been in improved governance of our firm. Partnership is a funny animal. It works by election and selection, with a very flat structure. I think the discipline of introducing a board, an audit committee and a remuneration committee has been of real benefit to the firm.”

Indeed, as another at KPMG points out, for all the fuss about Rake’s mega-salary, he is the first senior partner at the organisation not to set his own remuneration, and only the second to publish it. That openness, particularly popular with younger partners moving up, has had a profound effect on internal management.

“You cannot see what’s going on at Deloitte or Price Waterhouse, or many of the big law firms in London,” says Robert Berg, a partner who worked with Rake on the KPMG board. “Mike has pulled it all together.”