Former MP Jared O’Mara jailed for four years over fraudulent expense claims
The former Labour MP Jared O’Mara has been sentenced to four years in prison after abusing his elected position to make fraudulent expense claims to fund his cocaine and alcohol habits.
Described by his own barrister as an “inadequate individual” who could not cope with the strains of public life, O’Mara was convicted of six counts of fraud after trying to claim about £52,000 of taxpayers’ money for work that was never done and jobs that did not exist.
The 41-year-old, who represented the constituency of Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019, went on trial for submitting “dishonest” invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) between June and August 2019.
Sentencing him at Leeds crown court on Thursday, the judge, Tom Bayliss KC, said O’Mara’s autism did not reduce his culpability.
“You knew perfectly what you were doing with this fraud, you were behaving perfectly rationally, if dishonestly, and you were using your autism diagnosis to extract money from Ipsa to fund your cocaine and alcohol driven lifestyle. It was deliberate, it was cynical and it was dishonest.”
Bayliss added that O’Mara “abused (his) position as a member of parliament to commit these multiple frauds”.
The court heard O’Mara made four claims for a total of £19,400 from a “fictitious” organisation called “Confident About Autism South Yorkshire”, which jurors were told referred to his friend John Woodliff.
O’Mara was also found to have submitted a false contract of employment for Woodliff, pretending he worked as a constituency support officer.
Prosecutors said the total value of the fraud was about £52,000, including Woodliff’s proposed salary of £28,000 and expense claims relating to Gareth Arnold, who became O’Mara’s chief of staff in June 2019.
Arnold was sentenced to 15 months, suspended for two years, after a jury found him guilty of three fraud charges. Woodliff was cleared by the jury.
James Bourne-Arton, prosecuting, said the fraud was not a victimless crime and that it had an impact on other MPs because it undermined “public trust and confidence in them”.
O’Mara chose not to give evidence in his trial. But at the sentencing hearing, his barrister, Mark Kelly KC, said O’Mara wanted to apologise to his constituents “for his failure to resign in October 2017” when controversial comments he made online before becoming an MP were revealed.
“When he felt that he was being hounded by the media, whether that is the case or not, he felt under pressure from the media for certain circumstances that had come to light,” Kelly said.
Kelly told the court that O’Mara was “an inadequate individual to cope with the stresses and strains of public life” and “resorted to taking drugs, alcohol and distancing himself in many respects from those that were around him”.
“These circumstances were very difficult circumstances for him to cope with, with his particular disabilities,” Kelly added.
The judge said O’Mara’s apology to his constituents for not resigning in 2017 was “entirely disingenuous”.
“You must have realised early on that you were wholly unsuited to the role, but you carried on regardless, you brazened it out, drawing a salary but doing little or no parliamentary work,” said Bayliss, noting that the former MP had shown “not the slightest degree of remorse” for committing fraud.
O’Mara won Sheffield Hallam for Labour from the former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Nick Clegg in 2017, but later left the party after a series of controversies.
He stayed in office as an independent MP but did not contest the 2019 general election.