A second MP faces jail today after pleading guilty to fiddling his Parliamentary expenses.
Eric Illsley, 55, the MP for Barnsley Central, admitted three charges of false accounting at Southwark crown court.
In a three-year period he claimed over £14,500 more than he was entitled to on his second home in London.
The father of two had been due to stand trial today but entered a guilty plea, three days after his former colleagueDavid Chaytor was jailed for 18 months in the same court.
During the 10-minute hearing Mr Justice Saunders granted Illsley unconditional bail until his sentence hearing, likely to take place next month. But the judge told him that the fact he was walking free from court today was "no indication of what your ultimate sentence is likely to be".
Illsley was re-elected to his Barnsley Central seat at the general election, but was suspended by Labour after being charged and now sits in the Commons as an Independent.
William Coker QC, defending, applied for an adjournment for a pre-sentence report and further medical bulletins on the MP's wife Dawn Webb who, the court heard, is unwell.
The judge agreed there should be a pre-sentence report. Illsley left court without commenting.
Simon Clements, head of the Crown Prosecution Service special crime division, said: "Eric Illsley has admitted taking more than £14,000 of the public's money that he was not entitled to.
"This was a significant sum of money and the grossly inflated claims he
submitted could not be attributed to an oversight or accounting error. By his guilty pleas he has accepted that he was dishonest in making these claims. As an elected representative, Eric
Illsley took advantage of the trust placed in him by his constituents to act honourably on their behalf.
"Instead, he siphoned off public money into his own pockets and betrayed those who rightly expected the highest standards of integrity from him as a Member of Parliament."
On Friday, former Labour MP David Chaytor was jailed for 18 months for fiddling his expenses, the first parliamentarian to be convicted over a 2009 scandal that engulfed the nation's political system and disgusted Britons.
Chaytor had admitted at an earlier hearing to fraudulently claiming more than 20,000 pounds in taxpayer-funded expenses.
Daniel Elombah
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Publisher: www.elombah.com
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"Denial is a temporary mechanism by which we deceive ourselves, but deep down below the surface of the average conscience, there is a still small voice that says to us, something is out of tune" - Carl Jung
"As a class, you and I and our friends who comprise the elite are incredibly blind. We refuse to see what we do not want to see. That is why we have not brought about the changes which our society must undergo or be written off. We have no option really; if we do not move, we shall be moved. The masses whose name we take in vain are not amused; they do not enjoy their punishment and poverty." -- Chinua Achebe in the "The Trouble with Nigeria" (p 25)
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