Former MP Jared O’Mara jailed for four years over fraudulent expense claims

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Former Labour MP Jared O’Mara has been sentenced to four years in prison for fraudulent expense claims.

A jury convicted him of six counts of fraud after trying to claim about ?24,000 of taxpayers’ money for work that was never carried out 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.

Leeds crown court heard he 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.

Woodliff was cleared by the jury of having any role in the fraud.

O’Mara was found not guilty of two fraud charges over invoices from another friend, Gareth Arnold, for media and PR work that prosecutors claimed was never carried out.

But he was convicted of an offence of fraud after emailing Ipsa in February 2020, falsely claiming the police investigation into him had been completed and he was entitled to be paid the two invoices relating to Arnold, which totalled ?4,650.

Arnold, who became O’Mara’s chief of staff in June 2019, was found guilty of three fraud charges and cleared of three. He was spared jail by the judge, Tom Bayliss KC, and given a 15-month sentence suspended for two years.

Opening the case to jurors just over two weeks ago, prosecutor James Bourne-Arton said: “O’Mara viewed Ipsa, and the taxpayers’ money that they administered, as a source of income that was his to claim and use as he wished, not least in the enjoyment of his extensive cocaine habit.”

Jurors heard that the invoices for Confident About Autism looked different every time and were all rejected by Ipsa.

At around the same time Ipsa was raising concerns about the claims, Arnold went to South Yorkshire police to say his employer was suffering a “severe psychotic episode” and had been “submitting fake expense claims to the government”.

His conversation with officers painted O’Mara as “plainly unable to cope with the office he held, in poor mental health and heavily addicted to cocaine that he was abusing in prodigious quantities”, jurors heard.

O’Mara won Sheffield Hallam for Labour from 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.