Judge spares ex-MP longer jail sentence because of ill-health

TO his colleagues and the public, Elliot Morley was a hard-working and “distinguished” Minister, an environmental expert who was at the forefront of raising the profile of the green agenda.

But in private for at least three and a half years he was conning the taxpayer out of up to £800 a month, exploiting the lax House of Commons expenses system to pocket more than £31,000 by lodging fraudulent claims.

Between May 2004 and May 2006 the then-MP for Scunthorpe claimed £15,200 in expenses which he said was to cover mortgage interest payments on his constituency home in Winterton, but in reality his dwindling mortgage meant he had only paid out £666.46.

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He used bank statements to show he was paying £800 each month knowing that rather than this being for an interest-only mortgage, the monthly sum included an overpayment he had negotiated himself to pay off the capital, for which MPs are not allowed to claim expenses. In fact the monthly interest varied between just £5 and £52.

And even when the mortgage was paid off, he submitted another 21 claims for £800 in non-existent mortgage interest – totalling £16,800 – until November 2007.

Pursued by the parliamentary Fees Office for evidence backing up claims, he failed to produce mortgage interest statements because “to do so would reveal the falsity of the claim”, prosecutor Peter Wright QC told Southwark Crown Court yesterday.

Eventually the false claims ended when Morley changed the designation of his second home to a property in London and made legitimate claims. But his world began to fall in on the 13 May 2009, when, with the expenses scandal raging, an email from the Daily Telegraph dropped into his inbox asking for an explanation about the phantom mortgage. It was the “most uncomfortable question”, said Mr Wright, and Morley immediately contacted Fees Office officials to tell them he had realised an error and immediately repaying £16,800.

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Three weeks later he wrote again with a £20,000 cheque – £5,000 more than he had actually overclaimed – after telling the Fees Office he had been “horrified” at the discovery of further mistakes.

Morley, 58, admitted two charges of false accounting. Jailing him for 16 months, Mr Justice Saunders said: “I am satisfied from the nature of the mortgage transactions and the correspondence that the excessive claims were made deliberately and are not explicable even in part by oversight.

“The continuation of the claim for £800 a month after the mortgage had been redeemed can properly be described as blatant dishonesty. When the Fees Office asked for further information, Mr Morley evaded giving answers in the knowledge that to give truthful answers would reveal the fraud.

“When it was discovered, Mr Morley’s answers to the inquiries that were made were lies.”

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Defending Morley, Jim Sturman QC said he would pay a heavy price having repaid the overclaims as well as facing having to pay legal costs to the prosecution and Legal Services Commission and also having the £64,000 golden goodbye he would have received for standing down as an MP withheld by the House of Commons.

Mr Justice Saunders said he was sparing Morley, who is severely depressed and in poor health, a longer sentence because he had not falsified documents and because of his public service.

He is the fourth ex MP to be jailed for expenses fraud. The others were Eric Illsley, David Chaytor and Jim Devine.