Tory MP paid £100k expenses to own company


by Newswire    
October 15, 2009 at 12:38 am

David Wilshire, a senior Conservative MP, used his House of Commons expenses to pay more than £100,000 of taxpayers’ money to his own company, The Daily Telegraph has disclosed tonight.

Mr Wilshire claimed for more than three years for office assistance provided by “Moorlands Research Services”. Parliamentary expenses rules forbid MPs from entering into arrangements which “may give rise to an accusation” of profiting from public funds.

But on Wednesday night, Mr Wilshire – the MP for Spelthorne in Surrey – admitted that he and his partner, Ann Palmer, were sole owners of the business.

The Telegraph has established that, between 2005 and 2008, Mr Wilshire paid up to £3,250 a month to the business. Extra invoices were also submitted and the total paid to the firm was £105,500. However, there is no official record of the company’s existence and it has never filed public accounts.

…more at the Telegraph

Mr Wilshire told the BBC that he had referred himself to the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner as the only way to answer the questions about his expenses.

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Reader comments

I wonder if he has paid tax on it.

Anyone want to bet if he will be jailed for it?

Isn’t this similar to what Jim Devine was done for?

This sounds more like outright fraud than the previous cases, which were more a matter of taking the piss than breaking the law.

Who authorised these expenses?

Why has the Telegraph waited until now? I’m glad we had a proper audit, even if some of Legge’s decisions are a bit weird, rather than just trial by Telegraph, if stuff like this didn’t come up the first time.

He’s claiming like a broken record that it was within the rules? Which rules is he taking into account?

Likewise, the constant claim that Legge is changing the rules retrospectively isn’t true; he is simply taking into account that any claim must be wholly necessarily incurred and appear to be free from any corrupting motive, rules which they all ignored.

Approved by the fees office? That just adds a potential charge of conspiracy to defraud as well. And was the fees office ever intended to act in a scrutinising role, or where they merely there to carry out the administration side of things?

Unbelievable. What rules are these that he’s claiming he abode by? Not the ones that say it’s fine to create invoices from a non-existant company and pay them from public funds, surely, because I thought they got rid of those a little while ago.

Also, I notice that the media seem to be being quite soft on him, for example in the Telegraph piece the headline (as linked to by the OP) says “Tory David Wilshire pays £100,000 to company he owns with girlfriend”, when the company doesn’t even fucking exist!

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