Tory Peer Claimed Thousands of Pounds on Mystery House

Britain's inexhaustible expenses scandal has caught up with a Conservative peer, who had used someone else's home address to claim thousands of pounds in expenses.

The Sunday Times has revealed that Lord Taylor of Warwick, a 57-year-old former barrister, repeatedly “lied” to the House of Lords about his main residence.

Taylor, who has lived in his family home in west London for over a decade, had claimed his home was a terrace house in Oxford which he neither owns nor has ever lived in.'

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Baroness Uddin Provides No Evidence for £83,000 Claim

BARONESS UDDIN, the Labour peer at the centre of a police inquiry, has failed to provide evidence to back her expenses claims of £83,000 for a main home outside London that does not appear to exist.

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George Osborne ‘Flipped’ Second Home to Claim for £450,000 Loan

George Osborne “flipped” the designation of his official second home from his London residence to his constituency home after taking out a £450,000 mortgage on the property.

The Shadow Chancellor bought the Cheshire farmhouse close to his constituency ten months before winning the Tatton seat in June 2001.

Instead of taking out a mortgage on the property he funded the purchase by increasing his borrowing on the London home where he and his wife had lived since 1998.

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Gordon Brown Billed Taxpayer for Two Second Homes

Mr Brown, who "flipped" the designation of his second home before moving into Downing Street, submitted an estimated electricity bill for his home in Fife which partly covered a period when his London flat was his designated second home.

He also claimed for council tax and service charge bills for his London flat which included periods when his second home was in Scotland.

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Peers Claim Thousands for Mortgage-free Homes

PEERS are claiming hundreds of thousands of pounds in expenses for staying overnight in London when they already own homes with no mortgages near the House of Lords.

The Sunday Times has found that many London-based peers routinely claim accommodation allowances intended to finance peers based outside the capital.

Among them are two House of Lords couples who are each claiming large sums for running shared properties in expensive parts of London.

The Conservative peers Viscount and Baroness Eccles made separate expense claims on the same Westminster flat totalling more than £44,000 last year. Since 2001 they have received about £220,000 to maintain the property, which has no mortgage.

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Second Labour MP Claims For Non-existent Mortgage as Justice Minister Quits

David Chaytor has become the second Labour MP to admit claiming thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money for interest on a non-existent mortgage, it emerged last night.

The MP for Bury North will pay back £13,000 claimed on expenses after telling The Daily Telegraph that he had made an “unforgivable error” by continuing to submit monthly claims for £1,175 for months after the loan was paid off.

He is likely to receive the same treatment as Elliot Morley, a former minister, who has been suspended from the Parliamentary Labour Party after admitting claiming £16,000 for a non-existent mortgage. Lawyers have said that there is a good case for a criminal investigation.

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Blair's £43,000 Expenses Were Shredded 'by Incompetence' ( Yeah Right!)

Tony Blair dodged possible fire over his housing deals after hundreds of expenses claims were 'accidentally' shredded.

Documents itemising some of the then Prime Minister's receipts for 2001-02 were destroyed by Commons officials 'by mistake'.

It covered a period when he claimed for Myrobella, his Sedgefield constituency home.
It was already known that Mr Blair claimed £43,029 over a three-year period up to 2003-04.But it was not known what the money was spent on.

The former Premier's financial affairs have long been under the spotlight.

A receipt-by-receipt breakdown of his expenses claims published last year showed he had remortgaged Myrobella for £296,000, almost ten times what he paid for it, months before he bought a London town house for £3.65million.

The details were only published following a four-year freedom of information battle.
But the 'black hole' in Mr Blair expenses claims raise questions over what details the destroyed documents might have contained.

To increase suspicions, Westminster officials shredded the files even though they were the subject to an ongoing legal challenge.

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The shredder has since been promoted I bet!

Ex Minister Claimed £16,000 For Non-existent Mortgage

A former minister who claimed Parliamentary expenses on a mortgage which did not exist will today have to justify his claims to the Chief Whip.

Elliot Morley will have to explain to Nick Brown, Labour’s enforcer in chief, why he claimed more than £16,000 of taxpayers’ money for a mortgage he had already paid off.

The former agriculture minister under Tony Blair claimed mortgage interest on his constituency home for more than 18 months after the loan had been repaid. Lawyers said last night that the claim could amount to fraud. But Labour sources said that Mr Morley had paid the money back as soon as he was alerted by the Parliamentary authorities. They did not give any indication that he faced disciplinary action.

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Theft, Pure and simple Theft. If he isn't prosecuted and kicked iut of parliament then they are complicit in conspiracy to defraud and should also be charged!

What Links Expenses and Torture: New Labour's Total Immorality.

It is good that details of MPs expenses have got out. I am sad if they were sold rather than leaked in the public interest, but they should have been available, unredacted, anyway.

Having said that, the Telegraph has made a massive pig's ear of its big scoop. It majors on Gordon Brown paying his cleaner through his brother. That sounds to me unwise of Brown, but really not a huge front page story. I am not convinced Gordon Brown fiddled anything.

On the other hand, Hazel Blears changing her official second home designation three times in a year, in order to get the taxpayer to pay for furnishing all her homes, is simply crooked. As are Hoon's multiple home arrangements. Jack Straw only paid back his "accidental" excessive claims for mortgage and council tax after the Freedom of Information Act ruling that expenses would be published. The Telegraph throws away the really crooked transactions in the odd phrase.

Straw's expenses are particularly interesting. He has lived in a series of London government mansions ever since 1997. The taxpayer pays for his Blackburn flat, but his real home is his £1million plus Cotswolds property. Just where Straw gets all his money is an interesting question. Some real investigative journalism into Straw's relationship with his bagman, Lord Taylor of Blackburn, and the peddling of influence for the defence industry, would be more interesting than anything the Telegraph reports today.
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/more_lord_scumb.html
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2007/08/theres_good_mon.html
http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/01/jack_straws_cor.html

But I am struck by the continued government mantra of "It was all within the rules", which Harriet Harman is being trotted round the television studios to spout this morning. Harriet has the job because she hasn't made dodgy claims. She is old money. Her family don't even notice the odd £100,000.

But this idea that it is OK to stretch the rules to the limit - with no worry whether it is right or wrong - is not a minor point. It is done for advantage, so it is immoral, not amoral.

It is an issue which has been heavily on my mind since I gave evidence on ministerial complicity in torture to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights last week. Nobody except me and possibly Cranley Onslow showed any horror at torture. There was instead a discussion on the finest details of whether there was any possible way this may be declared legal, "within the rules".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF9spgagSHI

Even on an issue like torture, right and wrong seems to have disappeared completely from our national political discourse. Is it any wonder they are fiddling their expenses?

Craig Murray

MPs to Get Up to £5,000 Summer Recess Payment

MPS would be given a one-off payment of up to £5,000 to maintain their second homes this summer as part of Gordon Brown's controversial overhaul of their expenses system.
The Prime Minister is desperately looking for ways of averting a Commons defeat this week over his plans to introduce a flat-rate daily payment of about £150 to MPs for attending the Commons. David Cameron, the Conservative leader, yesterday claimed the "clocking-in" proposal – designed to replace the discredited second homes allowance – was "dead", while a Cabinet Minister privately conceded that Mr Brown's proposals in their present form would be rejected in Thursday's vote.

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Now Chancellor Alistair Darling Under Fire for Expenses

Alistair Darling has claimed thousands of pounds in expenses on his family home while renting out his privately owned London flat and living in a grace-and-favour apartment in Downing Street, it was reported last night.

The Chancellor has on a number of occasions swapped the title of main home between his house in Edinburgh and his flat in London, reportedly enabling him to claim expenses for both dwellings while also earning rent from his South London flat.

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MPs To Censor Their Own Expenses

Members will this week be shown copies of thousands of receipts and other documents due to be published under the Freedom of Information Act.

They will be invited to redact the documents, blacking out information they do not want to disclose.

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A Classic cover up and whitewash from the 'pigs in the trough'

Anyone in the private sector found fiddling expenses is subject to summary dismissal and it should be the same for them

MPs Vote for Expenses Cover Up

The move came after a court ordered Parliament to disclose details of properties on which MPs claim expenses.

The House of Commons on Monday backed an amendment to the Political Parties and Elections Bill, which effectively excludes MPs' addresses from the Freedom of Information Act.

Some MPs have claimed that disclosure of the information would threaten their security.
However, freedom of information campaigners believe the information is important to ascertain the validity of expense claims.

Some fear that the ban will make it harder to establish whether MPs are complying with the rules on housing expenses, making it easier for them to abuse their allowances.

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Jacqui the Nazi to Face Inquiry Over Expenses

The Home Secretary was put under increasing pressure yesterday when an investigation began into claims that she is misusing her parliamentary housing allowance.

Jacqui Smith has been criticised for designating her sister's house in London as her “main home”, allowing her to claim more than £20,000 a year for her “second home”. She has claimed at least £116,000 in second-home allowances for her constituency home in Redditch, Worcestershire, where her family live.

John Lyon, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards, said yesterday that he had accepted a complaint involving information from Ms Smith's London neighbours, who contacted David Cameron's office. Last week Mr Lyon turned down two earlier requests.

The decision to look into Ms Smith's housing arrangements follow allegations by a couple who live in the same street, Dominic Taplin, a businessman who used to be co-owner of the London nightclubs Abigail's Party and Legends, and his wife Jessica, a manager for a charity. They live four doors from Ms Smith and say that she is often there for as few as two nights a week and spends little time there during the long parliamentary recesses.

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MPs Defy Judges To Keep Their Expenses Secret

Details of MPs’ claims for plasma televisions, furniture and cleaning bills will be kept secret after Harriet Harman bowed to backbenchers’ pressure to stop expenses claims being published.

MPs are preparing to pass a new law next week that will exempt them from parts of the Freedom of Information Act, meaning that they will never again be forced to publish receipts for their claims, in defiance of an order by the High Court.

This would make MPs the only public sector employees with special privileges to protect them from disclosing their expenses.

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Anger As Snouts-in-Trough MPs Still Refuse to Publish Expenses

MPs are refusing to publish details of their lavish taxpayer-funded expenses until next summer, prompting accusations of a 'cover-up'.
Commons authorities had promised to release up to two million claims covering money spent on home improvements and furnishings this autumn.
But the Daily Mail has learned that Speaker Michael Martin is expecting to delay opening up the files for scrutiny for almost 12 months.
The figures may be slipped out during September's party conference season when all eyes are away from Westminster.

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