Former MP Jared O’Mara sentenced to four years over fraudulent invoices

Former Labour MP Jared O’Mara has been sentenced to four years in prison for trying to claim around £52,000 of taxpayers’ money through fraudulent invoices to help fund a cocaine habit.

O’Mara, who represented Sheffield Hallam from 2017 to 2019, was today sentenced to four years, having being convicted on Wednesday of six counts of fraud and cleared of two.

The former MP went on trial for submitting “dishonest” invoices to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) – the body that regulates MPs’ staffing and business costs – between June and August 2019.

The court heard that O’Mara had submitted four claims to IPSA, totalling £19,400, for a “fictitious” organisation called Confident About Autism South Yorkshire, which jurors were told referred to his friend John Woodliff, for whom he also submitted a false £28,000 contract of employment.

O’Mara was also found guilty of trying to claim £4,650 for services he said had been provided by Gareth Arnold, who became his chief of staff in 2019. The court heard that the total value of the fraud was around £52,000. All the invoices were rejected by IPSA due to a lack of detail about the work carried out, jurors were told.

Arnold – who submitted invoices to IPSA on O’Mara’s behalf – was given a 15-month jail term, suspended for two years, after he was found guilty of three counts of fraud. Woodliff was cleared by the jury.

Judge Tom Bayliss KC said O’Mara had “abused [his] position as a member of parliament to commit these multiple frauds” and said the former MP’s autism did not reduce his culpability.

Bayliss said: “You knew perfectly what you were doing with this fraud. You were behaving perfectly rationally, if dishonestly, and you were using your autism diagnosis to extract money from IPSA to fund your cocaine and alcohol-driven lifestyle. It was deliberate, it was cynical and it was dishonest.”

At the sentencing hearing, O’Mara’s barrister Mark Kelly KC said the former MP – who chose not to give evidence during the trial – wanted to apologise to his constituents “for his failure to resign in October 2017” when homophobic and sexist comments he had posted online before his election to parliament emerged.

Kelly said O’Mara was an “inadequate individual to cope with the stresses and strains of public life” and “resorted to taking drugs, alcohol and distancing himself in many respects from those that were around him”.

Bayliss called the apology “entirely disingenuous”. He said: “You must have realised early on that you were wholly unsuited to the role, but you carried on regardless, you brazened it out; drawing a salary, but doing little or no parliamentary work.”

He added: “You are not here because of that and I do not aggravate your position because of it. It is irrelevant to these proceedings. That is a matter between you and those who elected you. You are here because you abused your position to commit fraud and you have shown not the slightest degree of remorse in respect of that.”

O’Mara was elected as a Labour MP but resigned from the party in July 2018 just days after he was reinstated following a suspension after the offensive online posts were revealed. He remained in parliament as an independent MP before stepping down at the 2019 election.