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The former MP who claimed expenses fraudulently let off due to mental health condition (14 December 2012)

Date: 14/12/2012
Duncan Lewis, Legal News Solicitors, The former MP who claimed expenses fraudulently let off due to mental health condition

The former Labour MP who was found to have fraudulently claimed more than £53,000 of expenses from the taxpayer has been given only a two year supervision and treatment order and has been spared criminal conviction as a judge has ruled that she was unfit to plead.
The former Labour MP Margaret Moran, 57, who represented Luton South for 13 years claimed nearly her entire annual allowance in one bogus expensed entry and forged invoices for more than £20,000 for non-existent goods and services.
It was the largest amount claimed, which has been uncovered in the wake of expenses scandal, but she would not receive a criminal conviction because she was not fit to plead due to her mental health condition.
She was sentenced on Friday at Southwark crown court to a two-year supervision and treatment order, to be supervised by Southampton city council. Moran was not present to hear Mr Justice Saunders make the ruling.
Saunders said that the order would seem to many as if Mrs Moran had got away with it. But the court has done and has to do to act in accordance with the law of the land and on the basis of the evidence it hears he added.
The judge said two distinguished psychiatrists instructed by the defence lawyers had concluded she was unfit to plead, and a psychiatrist instructed by the prosecution broadly agreed.
The whole argument centred around the evidence that she was not fit to plead. Any other conclusion out of it would have made his decision perverse and would inevitably have been unsuccessful if it went for an appeal he said.
A jury decided that she did the acts alleged against her, and the defence played little if any part in the hearing.
The findings of the court were not convictions and the findings enabled him to make orders requiring her to undergo treatment for her mental health the judge said.

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