TAYLOR: CORRUPT PEER GETS A YEAR
A corrupt Tory peer today became the first member of the House of Lords to be jailed in the expenses scandal.
Lord John Taylor of Warwick cheated the taxpayer of £11,000 by lying about where he lived.
The 58-year-old registered a house in Oxford as his main residence, enabling him to claim expenses for travel to-and-from London, and for overnight stays in the capital.
In reality the property belonged to his nephew’s partner, and Lord Taylor – who actually lived in Ealing, West London – had never even stayed there.
At Southwark Crown Court today, the disgraced peer was jailed for a year after he was convicted of false accounting following a trial in January.
Mr Justice Saunders told him he was guilty of a ‘protracted course of dishonesty.
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The disputed property in Henley Street, Oxford was owned by Tristram Wyatt, a university academic who lived with Robert Taylor, the son of Lord Taylor’s half-brother.
Lord Taylor named it as his primary residence in order to claim second home expenses while staying in London.
Between March, 2006, and October, 2007 Lord Taylor handed in a series of expense forms to the House of Lords Members Expenses Section (MES), claiming for nights spent in London and travel costs between London and Oxford.
Jonathan Calvert, a Sunday Times journalist who investigated Lord Taylor’s expenses arrangements in July 2009, told the trial the peer had sent him an email stating that he had declared his main home for expenses purposes as his mother’s address in Birmingham.
The email stated that Lord Taylor had been looking after her, and had stayed at the address while doing legal work in Birmingham.
In fact, Lord Taylor’s mother had died in 2001, and that Bar Council records suggested he had not been a practising barrister since 1993.
Lord Taylor’s whose motto is ‘Strive to be not only the best in the world but the for the world’ told the court he believed his expense claims were correct
He insisted the House of Lords expenses system was generally seen as an ‘allowance in lieu of salary’.
Tayor said that unlike MPs in the House of Commons, the Lords did not receive a salary, but were still required to work hard attending debates and votes.
He described the House of Lords, as ‘a place for the retired and the rich’ and his salary fell from £100,000 a year to £30,000 when he became a peer.
Taylor wept in court and banged his fist on the witness box as he told jurors: ‘I don’t want to make money.
I just want to serve people.
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Asked if he done anything dishonest he said ‘No I haven’t.
‘I don’t want to make money.
I just want to serve people.
‘That is all I care about.
I don’t care about money.
Some millionaires in the House of Lords are some of the most miserable people I have ever met.
Money doesn’t bring you anything.
Serving people does.
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Lord Taylor, whose full name John David Beckett Taylor, of (39) Lynwood Road, Ealing, West London, denied six charges of false accounting, on March 31, July 3 and October 31 2006 and April 5, July 3 and October 31, 2007.
He was convicted on all six counts by majority verdicts of 11 to one.
He was born in Birmingham, the son of a professional cricketer and a nurse, both originally from Jamaica.
His father played for Warwickshire and the West Indies.
The former barrister was made a Tory peer four years after unsuccessfully fighting the 1992 general election in Cheltenham.
He resigned the Tory whip in July last year.
Lord Taylor is the first peer to be sentenced for expenses fraud following the scandal which engulfed both Houses of Parliament in 2009.
Former Labour MPs David Chaytor, 61, Elliot Morley, 58, Jim Devine, 57, and Eric Illsley, 56, have all been jailed for false accounting.
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A second Tory Peer, Paul White, Lord Hanningfield, 70, also faces a prison term after he was convicted of fraud earlier this month.
MFL
ENDS
