Farming News - MPs' expenses: Elliot Morley faces longest jail term pleads guilty to dishonestly claiming £32,000
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MPs' expenses: Elliot Morley faces longest jail term pleads guilty to dishonestly claiming £32,000
Elliot Morley, the former environment minister who has admitted fiddling his expenses by £32,000, is facing the longest prison sentence of all the MPs caught up in the scandal.
A senior Crown Prosecution Service lawyer branded him “blatantly dishonest” and said his behaviour could not be excused.
For nearly two years, Morley claimed significantly more than the value of his mortgage on his second home, a wing of a large Georgian house in his Scunthorpe constituency.
Despite paying off the mortgage on the property in 2006, the former minister continued to claim £800 a month in mortgage payments for the next 21 months.
The 58-year-old former government whip, who stood down at the last election, was due to face trial on Monday but changed his plea at the last minute. Yesterday at Southwark Crown Court, London, he pleaded guilty to two charges of false accounting.
Jim Sturman QC, representing Morley, said his client knew he was going to jail and “that unless something extraordinary happens, it is only a question of how long, not if”.
Morley is the last of the four MPs originally charged to be convicted and sentenced. David Chaytor was jailed for 18 months, Eric Illsley for a year and Jim Devine for 16 months. Yesterday’s hearing marks the end of criminal proceedings against MPs, although files on other parliamentarians are being considered by the Crown Prosecution Service. Simon Clements, from the CPS, said: “The Parliamentary expenses system exists to assist the public’s representatives in carrying out their duties, but Mr Morley used it to line his own pockets with just over £30,000.
“Such behaviour is blatantly dishonest and cannot be excused.”
Morley’s fraudulent claims started in April 2004 – when he was still a minister – and ran until November 2007. When challenged about the phantom mortgage by The Daily Telegraph, he said his claims were for an endowment policy, which was a “mistake”.
In 2009, The Daily Telegraph disclosed that Morley rented out his main home in London to another Labour MP, Ian Cawsey, for £1,000 a month. As this was Morley’s designated main residence he was not entitled to rent it out. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on Mr Cawsey’s part.
In November 2007, Morley designated the London property as his second home and started claiming mortgage interest payments – at the same time as Mr Cawsey was claiming for the same address. This double claiming continued for four months until it was spotted by the fees office in March 2008.
Between April 2004 and February 2006, Morley submitted 19 claims for “excessive mortgage payments” to which he was not entitled, worth £15,200.
Between March 2006 and November 2007, he submitted 21 second home allowance forms, totalling £16,800, for reimbursement on a mortgage that did not exist.
To both charges of false accounting, he replied “guilty”.
Morley made no comment as he left court on unconditional bail, to await sentence next month.
Lord Hanningfield, a Tory peer, is due to face trial next month on six charges of false accounting under the Theft Act.