Former Labour MP came up with ‘a series of scams’ to fund ‘galloping’ cocaine habit, court told
A former Labour MP accused of expenses fraud has been described as “thoroughly inadequate”, “thoroughly rotten” and “stuffing the parliamentary payroll with mates and cronies” who did no relevant work.
Jared O’Mara came up with “a series of scams” to help fund his “galloping” cocaine habit, prosecutor Richard Wright KC told a jury on Thursday.
He said O’Mara had used fraudulently claimed money to enable friends “to hang around his flat, getting drunk and snorting lines of coke, all paid for by you, ladies and gentlemen, the hardworking and honest taxpaying public”.
O’Mara, 41, was MP for Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019 after unexpectedly defeating the former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg.
He is on trial at Leeds crown court accused of submitting fake invoices to fraudulently claim about 30,000 of taxpayers’ money. His defence lawyer says the claims were incompetent, not dishonest.
Summing up the prosecution case, Wright said invoices and contracts for work submitted to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) were “entirely bogus, fake, fraudulent, utterly dishonest”.
The court has heard evidence that O’Mara fired his constituency office staff or they resigned.
Wright said it was not the case of a “rather useless and wholly inadequate member of parliament trying to do his honest best to submit claims when his experienced staff deserted him”. Instead it was...
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