Fiddling Commons Clerk Follows Crooked MPs Lead

An ex-House of Commons official was caught swindling £6,000 in bogus secretarial expenses by forging MPs’ signatures on claim forms.

Andrew Gibson, 50, (pic.l.) of Athol Square, Limehouse, Docklands, a former enquiry officer in the House of Commons fees office, was only discovered because of the huge probe into MPs expense claims.

He pleaded guilty at Southwark Crown Court to three counts of obtaining money transfers by deception.

His friend and co-defendant Toni Pomfret, 49, (pic.r.) of Pembroke Drive, Goffs Oak, Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire, pleaded guilty to three counts of acquiring criminal property.

The pair - both keen gamblers who ran up huge debts - met while working at the Royal Mail during the 1990s and after taking voluntary redundancy found new jobs.

At the request of the Audit Committee, former MPs were asked to examine past expense claims before they were published in the media under the Freedom of Information Act.

When copies of claims for the years 2004/2005 were sent to former MP for Linlithgow, West Lothian, Tam Dalyell, his wife – his parliamentary secretary –spotted a bogus signature, which was not his.

The MP had never received services of that nature from the company described.

The form had been submitted to the House of Commons 'Department of Finance & Administration' in July 2005, for the allowance years 2004/2005.

The claim purported to be from Tam Dalyell.

Attached to the claim form was an invoice from 'TP Typing & Secretarial Services'.

The invoice described 'four weeks typing and secretarial services, April 2005' and amounted to £1,600.

The total charge (including VAT at 17.5 per cent) was £1,880.

The claim was not questioned at the time as Tam Dalyell had already left Parliament when this claim was submitted.

Further enquiries conducted by the House of Commons revealed that a further two false expense claims had been submitted in the name of two other MPs by the same 'company'.

These were in the name of Linda Perham, former MP for Ilford North, and Matthew Green, former MP for Ludlow, Shropshire, both of whom had also left the House of Commons after the 2005 election.

All of the claims - totalling £6,000 - had been paid in to a bank account opened in the name of T Pomfret.

Staff at the House of Commons alerted officers from the Metropolitan Police Service's Economic and Specialist Crime Unit who began an investigation.

Officers quizzed Pomfret and shortly afterwards they were contacted by Gibson, who was arrested.

It emerged that Gibson - whose job as an enquiry officer involved advising MPs on expenses procedures - owed Pomfret money.

Using his intimate knowledge of the Common's expenses system he submitted the false claims in a bid to repay his debt.

Both defendants will be sentenced at the end of the month.