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Political Criminals and their Punishment
– penalties applied to disgraced MPs and others

January 2008
Conservative MP Derek Conway was suspended from the Commons for 10 working days and required to repay £13,161 for paying £50,000 in salary and bonuses between 2004 & 2007 to his son, Freddie, who was employed as a research assistant but remained 'all but invisible during the period of employment.
 • Mr. Conway also paid £33,000 in salary and bonuses between 2001 & 2004 to his other son, Henry, who was employed as a similarly invisible research assistant.
 • BONUS Tory leader D. Cameron withdrew the party whip from Mr. Conway, so he will be gone at the next general election.

January 2008
Labour MP Peter Hain suffered No Penalty for failing to declare £103,000 in contributions, some from suspect sources, to his Labour deputy leadership campaign.
 • BONUS Labour leader G. Brown, who described Hain as "incompetent rather than corrupt", sacked him from his twin cabinet posts: Work & Pensions Sec. & Welsh Sec.

Jan 2008
Labour Trade Minister Sir Digby Jones suffered no penalty for failing to declare a sizeable share holding in a company which was hired to perform deep cleans in NHS hospitals.

2006
Labour Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott suffered no penalty for having his Council Tax paid out of the taxpayer's pocket.

November 2005
Labour Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkettsuffered no penalty for breaching the ministerial code of conduct over paid work, which he took while he was out of the Cabinet and no penalty for using Commons notepayer to write a letter objecting to a building development near a property which he owned.
 • BONUS Labour leader A. Blair sacked him from the Cabinet.

February 2005
Conservative MP Jonathan Sayeed is looking at suspension from the Commons for 2 weeks for hosting Parliamentary lunches and tours of American tourists on behalf of a company in which he had a 30% stake, although there was no evidence of direct payments. He was convicted because his conduct 'fell well below the standards the House expects and risked damage to its reputation'.
[If that is still possible after 8 years of New Labour cronyism & corruption. Ed.]

December 2004
Labour Home Secretary David Blunkett suffered no penalty for fast-tracking a visa application for his ex-lover's nanny.
 • BONUS Labour leader A. Blair sacked him from the Cabinet.

September, 2003
Sheffield Attercliffe Labour MP Clive Betts was banned from the Commons for 7 days over his part in a bogus immigration bid by a former male escort who worked as his assistant

February, 2003
Conservative MP Michael Trend was suspended from the House of Commons for 2 weeks after he wrongly claimed more than £90,000 worth of expenses

February, 2002
Former Europe minister Labour MP Keith Vaz was banned from the House of Commons for 1 month after a conviction by the Commons standards and privileges committee for 'a contempt' of the Commons and serious breaches of the MPs' code of conduct. Mr Vaz was found to have given 'misleading information' about his financial links to the Hinduja brothers, whose passport applications caused Peter Mandelson to resign from government. Mr Vaz said at the time that the punishment, one of the toughest ever handed down to an MP, was 'disproportionate' to his alleged misdemeanours and against natural justice.

October, 2001
Former paymaster general Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson was suspended from the House of Commons for 3 weeks for failing to register a contract that he entered into in 1990 involving a £200,000 payment from a company belonging to former Labour MP and all-round criminal Robert Maxwell.

March, 2000
Conservative MP Teresa Gorman was suspended from the House of Commons for 1 month for failure to register two properties in Portugal rented out to tenants, giving "seriously misleading" information about her connections with some offshore companies; introducing a Bill to change the Rent Act without registering and declaring her financial interest; and giving misleading information about her interests in offshore companies.

October, 1999
Labour MP Don Touhig was suspended from the Commons for 3 days over the leak of a select committee report on child benefit.
Labour MP Kali Mountford, former member of the Social Security Committee, was suspended from the Commons for 5 days for letting Mr Touhig see a photocopy of the draft document. She denied leaking the document at first but admitted it after an investigation had been completed.

July, 1999
Labour MP Ernie Ross was suspended from the Commons for 2 weeks without pay for leaking a Foreign Affairs Select Committee report to the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.

April, 1999
Labour MP Fiona Jones was disqualified from parliament after being convicted in the courts of falsely declaring expenses for the 1997 general election. She won an appeal against sentence on the grounds that the rules on election expenses were unclear and the High Court in London ruled that she could take up her seat again in April 1999.

March 1998
Labour MP Ronnie Campbell was ordered out of the House of Commons for the rest of the day for calling the Conservative Shadow Agriculture Minister, Michael Jack, a 'hypocrite'.

June 1997
Labour MP Bob Wareing was suspended from the House for 5 days for failing to declare an interest in the Register of Members' Interest.

1995
Conservative MPs Graham Riddick and David Treddinick were suspended from the Commons for 10 and 20 days respectively following allegations that they had been paid to table questions in Parliament.


– Penalties applied to disgraced Others

June 2004
In Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was cleared of corruption charges. He accepted a bung of £300,000 for using his influence in a deal involving a development on a Greek island and his son was put in charge of marketing the project even though he had no experience of the job. But Israel's new attorney general reached the Huttonesque conclusion that there was no question of corruption because, wait for it: the Sharons are too dim to know when they are being bribed!

stop pressApril 2005
Labour councillors Muhammad Afzal, Mohammed Islam, Mohammed Kazi (of Aston, Birmingham), Shafaq Ahmed, Shah Jahan and Ayaz Khan (of Bordesley Green, Birmingham) were all convicted of rigging postal votes in the 2004 council elections. They were all stripped of office and banned from standing again as candidates.
Labour councillor Mohammed Hussain was arrested in June 2003 for rigging postal votes in May 2002 but it took until April 2005 to send him to gaol for 3 years and 7 months.

February, 2006
The Standards Board for England suspended London's mayor Ken Livingstone from his office, with full pay, for 4 weeks for being rude to a Jewish journalist.
   In effect, the Standards Board's Adjudication Panel gave him a 4-week holiday with pay!
UPDATE Mr. Livingstone's suspension was suspended pending an appeal. When the case came to court in September 2006, the judge quashed the suspension. So no holiday with pay for Red Ken. And when the judge released his full decision, he concluded that Mr. Livingstone was off duty 'at the time of the crime' and the matter was nothing to do with the Standards Board, so it had had no right to suspend him in the first place.

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