Disgraced former MP Jared O’Mara has been jailed for four years over a £24,000 expenses fraud to bankroll his daily cocaine habit.
The 41-year-old politician, who represented the constituency of Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019, submitted a string of fake expenses claims while sitting as an MP.
Leeds crown court has heard lurid details of O’Mara, elected for the Labour Party, taking up to five grams a day of cocaine and drinking a litre of vodka as he struggled to cope with his job as an MP and the resulting media scrutiny.
Sentencing him on Thursday, Judge Tom Bayliss KC said the fraud was spurred on by O’Mara’s financial difficulties.
“Those difficulties were caused by a hedonistic and self-indulgent lifestyle, fuelled by your consumption of large amounts of vodka and, of course, cocaine”, said the judge.
He said O’Mara “did not give one iota about his constituents”.
“You blantantly abused your position as a Member of Parliament to commit these frauds.”
O’Mara’s chief of staff, Gareth Arnold, was given a suspended sentence.
Prosecutor James Bourne-Arton told the court the total value of the fraud was £52,050.
O’Mara was catapulted into the spotlight at the 2017 General Election when he defeated former Lib Dem leader Sir Nick Clegg.
However, within three months of entering Parliament he had been suspended by Labour over historic misogynistic, homophobic and racist comments posted online.
Allegations of sexual harassment followed, and O’Mara ultimately quit the Labour Party and finally resigned as an MP in 2019.
In mitigation, O’Mara’s barrister Mark Kelly KC said: “He wishes to apologise to his constituents for his failure to resign in October 2017, when he felt – perceived – he was being hounded by the media.
“He felt under pressure from the media for circumstances coming to light after he had become an MP. He wishes to profoundly apologise.”
Mr Kelly called the conviction a “sad train of events with this man, an adequate man, unable to cope with the stresses and strains of public life”.
“He came under the microscope of media attention and he was unable to cope. He resorted to taking drugs, consuming alcohol, and distancing himself and alienating himself from those around him.”
The barrister highlighted O’Mara’s autism as a factor which meant he “felt criticisms of others and took them extremely seriously, and felt them profoundly”.
O’Mara was convicted on Wednesday of six counts of fraud over claims for taxpayers’ money for work that was never carried out and jobs that did not exist.
He was convicted by a jury of submitting “dishonest” invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) between June and August 2019, including claims to a “fictitious” organisation called Confident About Autism South Yorkshire.
O’Mara was also found to have submitted a false contract of employment for his friend, milkman John Woodliff, pretending he worked as a constituency support officer. Woodliff was cleared by the jury of having any role in the fraud.
O’Mara was found not guilty of two fraud charges over invoices from Arnold, for media and PR work that prosecutors claimed was never carried out.
But he was convicted of an offence of fraud after emailing Ipsa in February 2020, falsely claiming the police investigation into him had been completed and he was entitled to be paid the two invoices relating to Arnold, which totalled £4,650.
Arnold, who became O’Mara’s chief of staff in June 2019, was found guilty of three fraud charges and cleared of three.
He had been the one to spark the police investigation, after declaring his former boss “disgustingly morally bankrupt” and reporting the MP for fraud.
Mr Kelly told the court O’Mara was not meant to become an MP and criticised the “vetting procedures” in Labour under Jeremy Corbyn which allowed him to stand.
At the start of the trial, Mr Bourne-Arton said O’Mara “viewed Ipsa, and the taxpayers’ money that they administered, as a source of income that was his to claim and use as he wished, not least in the enjoyment of his extensive cocaine habit.”
O’Mara is expected to serve up to half his sentence in prison before being released on licence.
