Tag: Expense

The Conservative MP Christopher Davies has been found guilty of submitting fake expenses invoices for £700 of landscape photographs to decorate his office, meaning he could be kicked out of parliament under the recall process. Davies has not been suspended by the Conservative party but he will now face a recall petition to see whether his constituents want to force him to face a byelection. “It’s shocking that the Conservative party has still failed to take action against Christopher Davies, over a month after he admitted stealing from the public purse,” he said. He then created two fake invoices, so the £700 cost could be split between the two budgets – £450 to the startup and £250 for the other. MPs ask the public to place their trust in them and in an election that’s what happens. “The recall process may end your political career – that’s part of the machinery.” The process can result in MPs who are handed prison terms of less than a year being subject to a petition to oust them. It is not a financial cost, it is a harm to the integrity of parliament.” Forster said his client underspent across every single budget. For the prosecution, Stott said it was accepted that Davies had not sought to profit financially from the action and that he was entitled to claim for the pictures. However, he said Davies was not entitled to split the costs across two budgets, and any claims had to be accompanied by genuine invoices. Davies served as a councillor in Powys before he was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election.

Italy's Catholic bishops offered to care for a majority of 140 migrants the country's government had prevented from leaving an Italian coast guard ship docked for days in a Sicilian harbor because politics shouldn't be practiced at the expense of the poor, prominent churchmen said Sunday. Cardinal Gualtiero Bassetti, president of the Italian bishops' conference, told Italian state TV the bishops worked with Italy's Interior Ministry "in a spirit of collaboration" to help end the stalemate over where the asylum-seekers the coast guard ship rescued would go. Anti-migrant Interior Minister Matteo Salvini refused to let passengers who were not minors or ill off the ship until fellow European Union nations volunteered to take the asylum-seekers. Albania is not an EU member, and Cardinal Bassetti expressed appreciation to leaders there and in Ireland, which Pope Francis was visiting over the weekend. On Sunday, Bassetti urged more "involvement by Europe, but also by the whole world" in addressing the needs of migrants and refugees. A government office that safeguards the rights of people who have been detained determined last week that the migrants were being kept on the ship unjustly and without proper authorization. A Sicily-based prosecutor formally notified Salvini on Saturday he was being investigated for suspected abduction, illegal arrest and abuse of office. Any prosecution of Salvini would be handled by a special tribunal for government ministers, and Salvini's fellow senators would have to vote on whether to lift his Parliamentary immunity if the case progresses. Salvini staunchly defended his actions, saying he was keeping Italians safe. Much of his electoral base blames migrants for crime.

The Labour MP Keith Vaz has been accused of bullying one of his clerks in parliament who sought to uphold the rules of the House of Commons. The MP for Leicester East is alleged to have told one woman she was poor at her job because “she was not a mother” after she questioned his conduct during taxpayer-funded trips abroad. Vaz has denied the allegations, which will be broadcast on BBC2’s Newsnight at 10pm on Wednesday night. Jenny McCullough, the former clerk to the home affairs select committee, which Vaz chaired, claimed she was bullied after attempting to control the MP’s behaviour during trips abroad. He stood down from the committee in 2016 following a newspaper sting which claimed that he had hired prostitutes and offered to buy cocaine. An investigation into those allegations is ongoing. McCullough claims that in 2008, after an “opulent” unscheduled dinner with mysterious Ukrainian politicians, she raised concerns over who was paying for the event and was subjected to a “tirade” from Vaz in a hotel lobby in Kiev. She said: “He told me that I wasn’t capable of serving the committee because I wasn’t a mother. All I knew was, it wasn’t normal to be harangued about my fertility status in the reception of a hotel room, at public expense, in front of my colleague on the team.” A representative for Vaz told Newsnight the hospitality did not need to be declared and that no rule was broken. McCullough alleged that Vaz subsequently subjected her to continued personal criticism and made jokes about whether she posed a security threat because of her Northern Irish background and accent.