I’M NOT DODGY.. I’M A BARONESS
LUXURY LOVER
THE House of Lords has been rocked by many scandals over the years.
Most notoriously, Lord Archer, 77, was jailed in 2001 after it emerged he had lied in a 1987 libel case.
A probe by our sister paper the Daily Mirror found disgraced Tory peer Lord Hanningfield claimed £3300 in allowances over 11 days by “clocking on” but spending as little as 21 minutes in Westminster.
The 76-year-old, jailed in 2011 for fiddling £14,000 in expenses, was cleared of false accounting last year when Parliament intervened.
In 2015, Labour peer Lord Sewel, 71, resigned after footage showed him with two prostitutes, snorting what appeared to be cocaine.
Lord John Taylor of Warwick, 64, was jailed in 2011 for cheating taxpayers out £11,000 by lying about where he lived. TORY peer Baroness Mone was yesterday accused of abusing her position by using the BBC to plug her boyfriend’s £250million Dubai property development.
The Glaswegian bra tycoon urged Breakfast viewers to snap up flats using unregulated crypto-currency Bitcoin, which is popular with organised criminals.
And when fears were raised, the 45-year-old said: “I wouldn’t be involved in anything – I’m a Baroness in the House of Lords – if anything was dodgy.”
She twice referred to the website for the Aston Plaza project by Doug Barrowman – who runs a firm accused of tax avoidance schemes – and also plugged her new interiors business.
Sir Alistair Graham, former chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, said it was “monstrously inappropriate”.
He added: “There are rules against bringing the Lords into disrepute and I would have thought this goes jolly close.”
The tycoon, who founded underwear firm Ultimo, was invited to appear on the BBC show as part of a season on top businesswomen’s careers.
Labour MP John Mann said: “Baroness Mone has shamelessly abused her position. It is a grubby spectacle.”
After stepping down from Ultimo in 2015, the entrepreneur became a Tory business tsar and was later appointed to the House of Lords.
Her spokesman said: “Michelle Mone believes the Dubai development offers a great opportunity to purchase an apartment not only with all major currencies but for the first time in crypto-currency.” Meanwhile, Barrowman’s Isle of Man-based payroll firm AML are to fight an HMRC ruling that could bankrupt some clients. A spokesman said schemes were “compliant with UK law” at the time and AML halted them when the law changed in
2011.