Former British MP jailed for fraudulently claiming expenses to fund cocaine addiction
Former British Member of Parliament Jared O'Mara said he consumed cocaine in "prodigious quantities"
A former UK parliamentarian with an autistic health conditionhas been jailed for four years for making untrue and fraudulent claims of expenses of about £52,000 ($63,354)to fund an extensive drug addiction to cocaine when he was still in office.The Labour Party leader Jared O'Mara, who previously represented Sheffield Hallam, about 166 miles northwest of London, was on trial at Leeds Crown Court for submitting "dishonest" invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority. O'Mara was a Labour MP from Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019.
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The 41-year-old was convicted of trying to claim up to tens of thousands of pounds in taxpayers' money to fund an "extravagant lifestyle - drink, cigarettes and, above all, cocaine". The prosecutors said the total value of the fraud was about £52,000 or over $63,000.
Judge Tom Bayliss KC said O'Mara "abused (his)position as a member of parliament to commit these multiple frauds". He said that while O'Mara was "without doubt suffering from autism", this did not reduce his culpability, nor his ability to work as an MP.
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"You knew perfectly what you were doing with this fraud, you were behaving perfectly rationally, if dishonestly, and you were using your autism diagnosis to extract money from Ipsa to fund your cocaine and alcohol-driven lifestyle," he said, while referring to the disclosure made by the MP to theIndependent Parliamentary Standards Authority.
"It was deliberate, it was cynical and it was dishonest."
He said O'Mara's apology to his constituents for not resigning in 2017 was "entirely disingenuous" and he had "shown not the slightest degree of remorse in respect of that".
"You must have realised early on that you were wholly unsuited to the role (of MP), but you carried on regardless, you brazened it out, drawing a salary but doing little or no parliamentary work," he said.
O'Mara's defence
O'Mara claimed he was in "poor mental health" at the time and was abusing cocaine, a class A drug, in "prodigious quantities".
O'Mara's lawyer said he was "an inadequate individual to cope with the stresses and strains of public life" and "resorted to taking drugs, alcohol and distancing himself in many respects from those that were around him".
O'Mara stayed in office till 2019 but did not contest the 2019 general election.
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