UK MP set to be disqualified after admitting expenses fraud

London, Jan 12, IRNA – Eric Illsley has become the first sitting MP to be convicted of expenses fraud after admitting three false accounting charges Tuesday totalling more than £14,000.

The 55-year old former Labour MP, who was re-elected with a majority of more than 11,000 at his Barnsley constituency in northern England last year, currently sits as an independent but faces being automatically disqualified if he is sentenced for more than a year.

Last week, David Chayler became the first former MP to be jailed over the expenses scandal, when he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for making false claims of more than £22,000.

At Southwark Crown Court in south London on Tuesday, Illsley pleaded guilty to expenses fraud after previously denying all charges but the judge, Mr Justice Saunders, delayed issuing a sentence for four weeks until after a pre-sentence report.

After the hearing, Simon Clements, head of the Crown Prosecution Service's special crime division, said it was a significant sum of money that “could not be attributed to an oversight or accounting error.”

'By his guilty pleas he has accepted that he was dishonest in making these claims. As an elected representative, Eric Illsley took advantage of the trust placed in him by his constituents to act honourably on their behalf,” Clements said.

'Instead, he siphoned off public money into his own pockets and betrayed those who rightly expected the highest standards of integrity from him as a Member of Parliament,' he said.

Two other former Labour MPs Elliot Morley and Jim Devine and Conservative peer Lord Hanningfield are also facing criminal charges following a nine-month police investigation triggered by the leaking of the extent of expenses claims to a national newspaper in 2009.

Several MPs have been suspended from standing for office, while many, including Prime Minister David Cameron and his predecessor Gordon Brown, have been forced to repay over-claimed expenses./end