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 “a thoroughly inadequate and also thoroughly rotten – in the dishonest sense – MP who viewed the resources administered by Ipsa as his for the taking”.
Wright said O’Mara had “stuffed the parliamentary payroll with his mates and cronies who didn’t do any parliamentary work at all”.
The jury has heard evidence of O’Mara taking up to five grams of cocaine, often drinking a litre of vodka and smoking 60 cigarettes a day.
The prosecution alleges that invoices submitted for media training by Gareth Arnold, 30, his chief of staff in 2019, were fraudulent.
It was Arnold who went to police to say he believed O’Mara was committing fraud. Wright said Arnold only did so because Ipsa was saying it would not pay the claims. “Alarms are being raised – that’s when he chooses to go to the police.”
Wright said Arnold was “setting up his defence if Ipsa did blow the whistle”.
Invoices submitted for an organisation called Confident About Autism SY were also bogus, the prosecution alleges. The postcode given for Confident About Autism SY in fact corresponded with a McDonald’s on Penistone Road in Sheffield.
O’Mara, who is attending the hearing via videolink from his home in Sheffield, has declined to give evidence in his defence.
Mark Kelly KC, defending, said O’Mara did not understand how rigid the Ipsa process was. He asked if O’Mara was failing to follow proper procedures “because of administrative ignorance or incompetence?”
Kelly said jurors must have regard to O’Mara’s mental state at the time of the alleged offences. “We submit that you can properly have regard to the fact that he suffered from autism,” he said. “He had been diagnosed with autism, he had the input of someone assisting him because of autism, and this had been approved by Ipsa.”
O’Mara is accused of making four fraudulent claims for 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 employment contract 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, 43, jointly charged with one.
All three men deny all charges. The trial continues.
