Sunday Sleaze Round-Up

February 3rd, 2008

Peter Hain is using his Commons expenses to pay his 80-year-old mother £5,400 a year for “secretarial assistance”. Although Hain was supported by civil servants, special advisers, private secretaries and secretaries on becoming a minister in 1997, he continued to pay Adelaine Hain.
Sunday Times

Bob Spink, employs his former wife as a £28,000-a-year secretary, even though she lives 150 miles from his constituency. Apparently this is not alimony, she manages databases for him. He also employed his lover and her daughter.

Mail on Sunday

Nicholas and Ann Winterton claim rent subsidy allowance to pay the rent on a flat they owned outright and which they put in a trust for their children. Effectively meaning the taxpayer pays their children £30,000 a year for nothing.
Mail on Sunday

Alan Johnson, the health secretary, gave special access to a National Health Service contractor owned by one of the biggest donors to his deputy leadership campaign, holding a private meeting in his offices with Dr Reg Race of Quality Health, who had earlier given £5,000 to Johnson’s deputy leadership campaign.

Johnson met Race at the Department for Health on November 12, according to questions answered under the Freedom of Information Act. Unusually no civil servants were at the meeting and no minutes were kept. Quality Health has millions in contracts with the NHS.

The Times

Electoral Commission to investigate dodgy proxy donor via 50 year-old Pakistani “student” to Alan Johnson’s campaign.

Sunday Mirror

Wendy Alexander faces prosecution over foreign donations scandal.
Sunday Herald