Labour peer pays back grandson’s £90,000 drug pushing profits
Dealer was caught after death fall of reality TV star
A SCOTS Labour peer has paid £90,000 his drug convict grandson owes to the courts.
Gus Macdonald stepped in after grandson Daniel Lewis was jailed for three years for dealing a wide variety of illegal drugs.
Lewis, 31, made almost £100,000 and was ordered to pay back £90,000 under the Proceeds of Crime laws, which take illegal profits away from criminals to fund good causes.
Lord Macdonald, a former television boss and minister during Tony Blair’s premiership, agreed to pay the cash – even though his grandson has assets worth £431,000. These assets will still be in Lewis’s name when he is released from jail.
During his trial, it emerged that Lewis did not need to deal drugs for money because he lived off a family trust fund. The drug dealer also lived rent-free in a flat owned by his grandfather in an exclusive seafront area of Brighton.
Lewis was arrested after Aimee Spencer, who appeared on reality TV show Geordie Shore, suffered catastrophic head injuries after falling from a second-floor window of the flat.
Miss Spencer, 27, was naked and high on cocaine and ketamine when she fell in July 2016.
Miss Spencer’s mother Jean expressed outrage that the £90,000 confiscation order could be paid by Lewis’s grandfather.
‘That is not fair at all,’ she said. ‘It is quite surprising that they allow that. I appreciate he is in prison, but he has had no financial penalty whatsoever. I wish I had a grandfather like that.
‘It should be part of the deterrent. How can that be a deterrent when he has got the funds to pay it?’
Mrs Spencer added: ‘His whole defence was based on him being a low-level [dealer]. The sum of £90,000 doesn’t sound like a lowlevel dealer to me.’
Her daughter died in hospital a week after the fall when her parents made the heartbreaking decision to turn off her lifesupport machine.
Lewis was arrested on suspiCrown cion of murder and later released without charge.
He was then charged with supplying drugs and later pleaded guilty to dealing cocaine, LSD, ketamine, banned steroids and meow meow, a synthetic amphetamine.
He received a two-year suspended sentence at Lewes Court in November 2018. But in January three High Court judges ruled his punishment was ‘unduly lenient’ and jailed him for three years.
Lewis, who is serving his sentence at Rochester prison, appeared before Hove Crown Court on Friday for a Proceeds of Crime Act hearing.
The court heard that an investigation into Lewis’s finances found he had made a profit of almost £100,000 from dealing drugs. He was ordered to part with £90,000 – which Lord Macdonald agreed to pay.
Prosecutor Nicola Shannon said most of the money that Lewis had earned was from dealing cocaine.
‘The £90,000 can be paid immediately by a third party,’ she said. ‘His grandfather is to make the order. It is to be paid within three months, but it will be paid today.’
Kate O’Raghallaigh, who represented Lewis, confirmed that Lord Macdonald would pay the debt that day.
Lord Macdonald of Tradeston is a Labour life peer who retired from the Lords in April 2017.
A newspaper journalist, he moved into TV in the 1960s, editing World In Action and other current affairs shows.
He later became an executive at Scottish Television and was given a CBE for services to broadcasting in 1997 and made a peer a year later.
It was while he was a government minister that the-then Labour home secretary David Blunkett steered The Proceeds of Crime Act through the Commons in 2001 and 2002.
‘It will be paid today’