Lying MP faces end of career

A Labour MP’s career is in ruins after she was convicted of lying to police to dodge a speeding ticket.

Peterborough MP Fiona Onasanya, 35, was clocked doing 41mph in a 30mph zone on The Causeway in Thorney, Cambridgeshire, shortly after 10pm on 24 July 2017.

She plotted with her brother Festus, 34, to avoid prosecution for the offence by naming Aleks Antipow as the driver of the Nissan Micra.

Mr Antipow, a former lodger, was at home with his parents in Russia 1,800 miles away.

Onasanya initially claimed she had left the form at her mother’s house for her or her brother to fill in because she had no idea who was driving the car and both of them would have had access to it.

She said she ‘mistakenly’ believed she was in London at the time of the ticket and when the prosecution revealed that her mobile phone records placed her at the scene it was suggested she might have been in the car – but not driving.

During her first trial, Onasanya told jurors she ‘didn’t know’ who was behind the wheel when the speed camera was triggered.

She said she was so sure it wasn’t her that she never bothered to ask Festus or carry out any enquiries of her own to establish who the driver was.

Prosecutor David Jeremy, QC, suggested that would have been ‘totally redundant’ because she knew full well that it was her all along and accused her of ‘sacrificing’ Festus during her second trial to get herself acquitted.

He told jurors the MP had ‘invented’ a telephone conversation with her brother in which he confessed to filling in the form out and sending it off without her knowledge ‘to plug that gap’ in her earlier account.

When the mobile phone evidence was pointed out to her she said she must have been in the car with Festus and claimed it was simply a coincidence that they happened to travel down the same road she had driven along hours earlier to attend a meeting.

Mr Onasanya, a musician, admitted three charges of perverting the course of justice days before the trial was due to start and was warned he faces jail when sentenced later.

‘The fact that Ms Onasanya is a determined and resilient teller of her story cannot conceal the implausibilities of that story,’ Mr Jeremy said.

‘Festus hasn’t misled and used her – she has used him.

‘She used his dishonest method to evade points and in court she has told a story that aggravates his crime and is designed to get her off this charge.’

Onasanya had denied a single identical charge but jurors took just xx hours to find her guilty after a retrial. The first jury had failed to reach a verdict against the MP last month.

She showed no trace of emotion as she was unanimously convicted of perverting the course of justice today by a jury of six men and six women.

Mr Justice Stuart-Smith is expected to sentence the shamed MP on a date to be fixed.

Mr Jeremy told jurors: ‘It must, as many of us may know, be very irritating to receive that bit of paper telling us that we have triggered a speed camera and asking us to name the driver of the car.

‘But while irritation is understandable, telling lies to frustrate an investigation into an offence is not.

‘What Miss Onasanya did when her vehicle was trapped on the 24th July 2017, was to adopt her brother’s method of evading prosecution.

‘The two of them were acting jointly in telling lies in order to prevent the prosecution of the driver of her car on that date.’

The court heard how the same ‘method’ was employed by Festus when his Audi A4 was caught speeding on 17 June and 23 August last year.

Onasanya offered no answers when investigators later quizzed her over who was driving the Micra when it triggered the trap.

‘This case did in fact start as a case about an offence of speeding,’ he continued.

‘It has become, as a result of the choices made by Ms Onasanya, a case about lying.’

The first trial was briefly halted when Onasanya’s former head of communications, Dr Christian DeFeo, and his wife approached prosecutors with dramatic new evidence.

Dr DeFeo described feeling ‘morally and legally’ obliged to come forward after reading reports of the trial online.

‘We had a brief discussion as to what to do,’ he said.

‘I believe that she phoned me, and I said we have no choice – we have to talk to the police.

‘Morally and legally we have to do this.

‘I was very reluctant to do it. I’d rather not have to do this at all.

‘I put in quite a lot of time and effort and her election was one of the happier days of my life.

‘I wanted her to be a great MP.’

He explained that his wife saw the article on Tuesday and spotted that the alleged offence had taken place on The Causeway, which is just outside of their home.

‘Ms Onasanya was working with us in my capacity as chairman of the Paston Farm Community Foundation,’ Dr DeFeo continued.

‘As a charity, we didn’t have a signed lease with the council in place. Ms Onasanya is, amongst other things, a property lawyer.’

And so, he said the MP came to his home on the evening of 24 July to discuss the finer details of the lease.

He told jurors he could not specify a particular time she arrived but remembered it being ‘late’.

The court has heard how mobile phone cell site data showed both of the politician’s handsets connecting with masts in the area of the traffic camera at the time it was triggered.

Asked what Onasanya’s ‘attitude’ was to her phones, Dr DeFeo said: ‘I don’t recall seeing her without them.

‘She was attached to them. She would have them on her at all times.’

Onasanya was a former county councillor who won the Peterborough election on 8 June 2017.

The House of Commons rose for its summer recess on 20 July, days before the speed camera trap caught her car speeding.

Jurors were told her expenses form showed claims for hotel stays in London on Friday 21 July, but not again until September last year.

Onasanya told the court how she felt overwhelmed by the step up to Houses of Parliament from her role on the county council.

Within weeks she was appointed to a select committee and became a parliamentary private secretary to the shadow defence secretary.

But those positions were relinquished when Onasanya was promoted to the whip’s office overseeing, amongst other things, party discipline in January this year.

Jurors heard how one of Onasanya’s staffers recalled seeing 5,000 unanswered emails sitting in her inbox.

Onasanya said would leave her car in Cambridge half of the week while she was in Westminster when others, including her mother and brother, would have access to it.

She would also occasionally allow someone else to ferry her around: ‘Because of the nature of my work, sometimes because of a health condition I would be quite tired so I would be a passenger and also so I could get in with work if someone else was driving.’

The MP went on to tell jurors that she suffered a relapse of multiple sclerosis in September last year.

She said: ‘I probably was not in the best head space. I’ve just been told I had got an incurable degenerative disease.’

Onasanya explained how Festus knew she was ‘a public figure with a reputation at stake which he was putting at risk’ but said that her brother told her it was a case of ‘desperate times take desperate measures’.

‘He couldn’t afford to lose his licence,’ she added.

Asked how he could expect to get away with it without her knowledge, she pointed to his other guilty pleas, replying: ‘Because he had done it before.’

Mr Jeremy suggested Festus had ‘betrayed’ and ‘manipulated’ her if her story was true.

‘Yes,’ she agreed.

But the prosecutor contrasted the achievements of ‘the star of the family’, the ‘exceptionally ruthless’ politician, with Festus, the delivery driver who left school before completing his GCSEs.

‘You’re not Festus’ victim are you?’ Mr Jeremy continued.

‘He hasn’t sacrificed you for three points on his licence, has he?

‘He hasn’t used you – you’ve been using him.’

He added: ‘What you have done is create a story that makes his crimes so much worse and you have done it to try and get yourself acquitted of this charge.

‘You have sacrificed your own brother.’

But Christine Agnew, QC, defending, said Festus forged the paperwork ‘because he had done it before and he thought he could get away with it’.

‘I am afraid to say, he is a charming chancer and someone who tries to manipulate situations to get himself out of trouble,’ she added.

‘There is no question of Fiona Onasanya sacrificing Festus.

‘It is the other way around.

‘But perhaps it didn’t cross Festus’ mind for a moment that this would end up in court, or putting Ms Onasanya’s career in jeopardy.

‘He did it with the confidence of an experienced trickster.

‘He thought he’d never get caught. He thought he’d get away with it and none of this would happen.’

Onasanya, of Peterborough, denied perverting the course of justice but was convicted by the jury.

Her brother, of Chesterton, Cambridge, has admitted three counts of the same charge and awaits sentence.