Justice delayed but not denied

I wrote in March, (and updated here) when the CPS decided there was 'insufficient evidence' to prosecute Baroness Uddin:

So Baroness Uddin will not be facing criminal charges over her designation of a flat she hardly ever visited as her 'main residence', in order to claim between £25k and £30k a year in attendance allowances for the House of Lords. The property was not, according to neighbours, occupied or even furnished. Constantly Furious points out that her claim for 2007/8, even at the maximum rate allowable, represents more days than the Lords actually sat. But no charges are to be brought.

Well, the good ol' House of Lords have shown themselves made of sterner stuff. According to the BBC, the House has demanded that she repay £125,349 in expenses unfairly claimed, and has suspended her until Easter 2012. She has also been suspended from the Labour Party.

In other news, Lord Paul (Labour) has offered his resignation from the Party after being suspended from the Lords for four months and being ordered to repay his overclaim. Interestingly, he has tried to play the race card on this one:

The Labour peer and donor Lord Paul "freely admitted" he never spent a night at the one-bedroom flat in Oxfordshire he designated as his "main residence" between late 2005 and end end of July 2006, the report said.

The report on his claims states: "Lord Paul explained his interpretation of the term 'main residence' by reference to his cultural background. He insisted that 'anyone coming out of India would not understand what main residence means'. He accepted that he had 'not once' looked at the guidance on the back of the claim forms."

The House of Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee report said:

... they could not claim, on the balance of probabilities, that he acted dishonestly or in bad faith but added: "However, his actions were utterly unreasonable and demonstrated gross irresponsibility and negligence."

In other words, bang to rights. I wrote at the time

Reminder: Lord Paul is a billionaire who gave £400,000 to Labour, and £45,000 to Gordon Brown's leadership campaign. Totally unconnected to this, he was made a peer in 2006 and a Privy Councillor in 2009, despite the allegation that he was spectacularly unqualified for either role.

Lord Bhatia (cross-bench peer, but a big Labour donor), meanwhile, has been suspended for eight months and has already repaid the £27,446 he overclaimed.

The committee found he did "not act in good faith" in the way he designated his "main home" - for the purposes of claiming an overnight allowance - nor in mileage claimed for journeys to that property, in Reigate.

All I can say is that I am delighted. I never thought we would see justice for the taxpayer in all the greasy corruption of the expenses scandal. Most of the others have got off lightly - and you could say that suspension and paying back what you stole is still a fairly lenient 'punishment' - or got away with it completely, but at least some form of justice has been done here.

Meanwhile, David Chayter (Labour), Elliott Morley (Labour) and Jim Devine (Labour) want their cases to be heard by Parliament and not a criminal court. They say:

... this is not an attempt to ''take them above the law'', but to ensure they are adjudicated by the ''correct law and the correct body''.

That's a bit like a gang of armed robbers saying it would only be fair if they were tried by a jury of other robbers, and judged against the laws of the criminal underworld. I hope and trust that the Supreme Court will see through this impertinent and self-serving stunt.

Can anyone see the common thread in all of the above - one factor that binds all of these thieving scoundrels together? Thank God we threw the whole nasty, corrupt lot out in May.

Peers' Expenses - More Disgrace

The Times is reporting on the collapse of criminal inquiries into the expenses claims of Baroness Uddin and Lord Paul:

THE HOUSE of Lords has used parliamentary privilege to hide the details of a ruling that caused the collapse of criminal inquiries into the expenses claims of two Labour peers.

Officials blocked the release of a secret memo outlining the reasons for the changes in expenses rules that made it impossible to prosecute Baroness Uddin and Lord Paul.

The memo, written by Michael Pownall, clerk of the parliaments, proposed a peer’s main home could be somewhere they visited as little as once a month. His proposal was passed in January by the leaders of the Lords on the house committee.

However, when The Sunday Times used freedom of information rules to discover the reasons for the new definition, Pownall signed a privacy certificate blocking disclosure of his memo. On Friday Keir Starmer, the director of public prosecutions, said Pownall’s new definition was the reason for the collapse of the Uddin case.

So they are happy to take expenses from the taxpayer by claiming that a property they do not and never have lived in (in one case an empty housing association property, in the other a flat in a hotel that was already occupied by the manager) was their 'main residence', thereby making themselves eligible for an attendance allowance, worth £100,000 to Uddin and £38,000 to Paul. Bear in mind that these are already rich people.

Then they change the rules to ensure that they can't be prosecuted for this extortion.

Then, when we ask why, they claim Parliamentary privilege and refuse to tell us. Us, the people who pay for it all.

Reminder: Lord Paul is a billionaire who gave £400,000 to Labour, and £45,000 to Gordon Brown's leadership campaign. Totally unconnected to this, he was made a peer in 2006 and a Privy Councillor in 2009, despite the allegation that he was spectacularly unqualified for either role.

It's like a banana republic. Wrinkled Weasel takes it all apart better than I can, so I will leave it to him. I am speechless.

This weekend the Taxpayers’ Alliance and Sir Paul Judge, who runs a campaign for independent MPs, said they may fund private prosecutions.

I wish them every success. Surely someone, somewhere has the guts to release this memo in the public interest?

Uddin off the hook - for now

So Baroness Uddin will not be facing criminal charges over her designation of a flat she hardly ever visited as her 'main residence', in order to claim between £25k and £30k a year in attendance allowances for the House of Lords. The property was not, according to neighbours, occupied or even furnished. Constantly Furious points out that her claim for 2007/8, even at the maximum rate allowable, represents more days than the Lords actually sat. But no charges are to be brought.

Well, well, well.

The rules surrounding the claiming of Lords' allowances were even more vague than the Green Book used by the Commons, and basically, a noble Lord or Lady's 'main residence' was wherever they said it was. There was a vague rule about visiting at least once a month, but that was too imprecise to make a prosecution viable. Evidence from neighbours and utility companies suggested she hardly ever went there, but Kier Starmer, Director of Public Prosecutions, didn't think the evidence would stand up in court:

Director of Public Prosecutions Mr Starmer said the definition of a peer's "main home" in the Lords expenses scheme would always have been "critical to any possible criminal proceedings against Baroness Uddin".

He said it was his job to decide whether there was a "realistic prospect of conviction" resulting from the police evidence, not to make "findings of fact".

He added there was "insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against the peer adding: "Baroness Uddin is entitled to be presumed innocent and that is the basis upon which I have approached the case."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of her innocence to my eyes.

However, it's not all over yet:

An inquiry by the House of Lords authorities into her case was opened last July but put on hold pending the police investigation.

Let's hope their Lordships have a sense of decency and an understanding of the public outrage over this, and take some positive and rigorous action against Noble Troughers who bring the entire edifice into utter disrepute. What is the most shameful aspect of this for me is the fact that the flat she called her main residence is part of a social housing complex, subsidised by the taxpayer, and by keeping it as her 'main residence' (to qualify for the attendance allowance) she was presumably preventing someone in genuine need from having a roof over their head.

What an utter, utter disgrace.

Uddin was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1998.