A former Labour MP accused of expenses fraud was thousands of pounds in debt to a drug dealer and regularly took up to five grams of cocaine a day, a court has heard.
Jared O’Mara also once drank a litre of vodka before a television interview with BBC Look North and believed “a shadowy government cabal” was out to get him, his former chief of staff Gareth Arnold said in messages and police interviews read to jurors at Leeds crown court.
O’Mara, 41, was MP for Sheffield Hallam after he defeated the former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg at the 2017 election. He is on trial at Leeds crown court accused of making fraudulent parliamentary expense claims amounting to nearly £30,000. Prosecutors allege he was living beyond his means and was in dire need of cash to fund a substantial cocaine habit.
On Thursday jurors heard details of dozens of WhatsApp and text messages exchanged between O’Mara and Arnold The prosecution has said the mobile messages contain references to money-making schemes, rule bending, deleting records and demanding money from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa).
On Thursday, the prosecutor James Bourne-Arton read a number of messages to the court. One was from April 2019, with Arnold messaging a friend saying: “He’s a few k in debt with a dealer.” The friend replied: “That’s a very dangerous game that. He wants to be careful no bad lads come for him. He’s on 80k a year ffs.”
In another message from Arnold to O’Mara in July 2019, he says he has seen the MP’s mental health deteriorate over a number of years and his drug abuse spiral into something “quite strange”, saying he is “definitely no longer the great, motivated person I once knew”.
In a message from O’Mara to Arnold, the former MP talks about being “three days clean in a couple of hours and that’s the longest I’ve gone in longer than I can remember”.
A message from Arnold to O’Mara reads: “Jared I’ve tried but you got shit-faced before Look North TV interview and then harassed a young female member of staff.”
In police interviews Arnold said O’Mara’s parents would bring their son a litre of vodka if not every day, then every other day, “along with 60 fags and bottles of Mountain Dew”.
On the Look North incident, Arnold said: “He drank a litre of vodka before the interview and then denies it … I even asked his parents about it and they’re like, ‘he wasn’t drunk, he was hammered’.”
The court was played audio of the phone call Arnold made to police in July 2019 in which he accused O’Mara of making false expense claims. Arnold tells the call handler that O’Mara has delusions of a conspiracy. “He’s started to entertain the idea that some kind of shadowy government cabal is trying to bring him down and loads of other absolutely irrational beliefs.”
DI Andrew Shields, now retired, was the South Yorkshire police officer in charge of the investigation. He said he met Arnold on 2 July 2019. “He appeared to be agitated, quite stressed, possibly at the end of his tether a little bit.”
There were three strands to Arnold’s claims, Shields said. The first was around O’Mara’s mental health and wellbeing. “He believed him to be in crisis.”
The second was around the submission of invoices to Ipsa. The third was around O’Mara’s use of cocaine, “anything up to five grams a day”.
O’Mara is accused of making four fraudulent claims to Ipsa between June and August 2019 from a “fictitious” organisation called Confident About Autism SY, and submitting two invoices from Arnold for media and PR work that prosecutors say was never carried out.
It is also claimed that O’Mara submitted a false contract of employment for a friend, John Woodliff, “pretending” that he worked as a constituency support officer.
O’Mara is charged with eight counts of fraud by false representation, with Arnold jointly charged with six of the offences, and Woodliff jointly charged with one.
All three men deny all charges.
O’Mara was MP between 2017 and 2019, resigning from Labour in 2018 and serving as an independent. He appeared at Leeds crown court via video link from his home in Sheffield.
The trial continues.
