Army major axed over £39k school fees fraud
He’s the second top officer to be convicted this year
A TOP officer who fraudulently claimed £39,000 for his sons’ boarding school fees has been thrown out of the Army and given a criminal record.
Marcus Heslop, a decorated major in the Royal Tanks Corps, was given a 15-month suspended sentence in June after pleading guilty to two charges of fraud over the false claims.
He was dismissed from the Army, which he had joined over three decades ago, and ordered to pay £39,000 in compensation – which has now been overturned. Heslop, 47, who had two sons at boarding school in England, conned the Army by falsely claiming its Continuity of Education Allowance, intended to cover boarding school fees when an officer and his partner go overseas and their children stay in the UK.
In a similar case earlier this year, Major General Nick Welch was the most senior officer to be courtmartialled since 1815. He was convicted of dishonestly claiming almost £50,000 to cover his children’s boarding school fees.
Heslop’s sons were boarding at Gordon’s School in Surrey, which charges fees of over £17,000 per year for full boarding. He initially applied for the allowance in good faith, stating his wife would be joining him when he deployed to Germany in 2017.
But Heslop later failed to disclose that his wife had not joined him as their marriage was under increasing strain. Last week London’s Criminal Appeal Court upheld his bid to overturn the £39,000 compensation order.
The court heard he falsely claimed £39,439 in total. His barrister Matthew Bolt argued the Ministry of Defence could not claim it had suffered a loss as Heslop may have received the payout anyway if he had admitted to his change of circumstances.
Heslop ‘felt his sons needed to be protected by remaining in boarding school’, the court heard.
Lord Justice Holroyde told the court he had ‘sympathy for the human reality of the unhappy situation in which Heslop found himself when his wife decided she no longer felt able to accompany him’. Heslop, now working in security, rose from the rank of trooper to major and served with distinction in Kosovo and Afghanistan.
On top of his sentence, suspended for 22 months, at Bulford Military Court, Wiltshire, he was ordered to do 200 hours’ unpaid work and given a 90-day curfew.