Former Rep. Jared O’Mara Convicts Drug Dealer in the Thousands | UK News

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A former Labor MP accused of expense fraud owed thousands of pounds to a drug dealer and had regularly taken up to five grams of cocaine a day, a court heard.

Gareth Arnold, his former chief of staff, said in letters and interviews with police read to the jury at Leeds Crown Court.

O’Mara, 41, was MP for Sheffield Hallam after he defeated former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg in the 2017 election. He is on trial at Leeds Crown Court for making fraudulent claims over parliamentary expenses amounting to nearly £30,000. Prosecutors allege that he was living beyond his means and was desperate for money to fund his large cocaine habit.

On Thursday, jurors heard details of dozens of WhatsApp and text messages exchanged between O’Mara and Arnold. Prosecutors said the cellphone messages contained references to money-making schemes, rule-bending, deleting records and demanding money from the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa). ).

On Thursday, Attorney General James Bourne-Areton read a number of letters to the court. One was from April 2019, where Arnold texted a friend saying, “He’s in debt with a dealer.” The friend replied, “It is a very dangerous game. He wants to be careful not to have bad men come upon him. He is 80,000 a year.”

In another letter from Arnold to O’Mara in July 2019, he said he had seen the MP’s mental health deteriorate over several years and his drug use turn into something “completely bizarre”, saying he was “definitely no longer the cool, passionate person I once knew”. “.

In a letter from O’Mara to Arnold, the former MP spoke of “three days of cleanliness in two hours which is the longest I’ve ever been in than I can remember.”

A letter from Arnold to O’Mara reads: “Jared you tried but you got dirty before your Look North interview and then harassed a young employee.”

In interviews with police, Arnold said that O’Mara’s parents would get their son a liter of vodka if not every day, then every other day “with 60 men and a bottle of Mountain Dew”.

In the Look North incident, Arnold said: “He drank a liter of vodka before the interview and then denied it… I even asked his parents about it and they’d say, ‘He wasn’t drunk, he was beaten up’.”

Court audio was played of the phone call Arnold made to police in July 2019 in which he accused O’Mara of making false claims about the expenses. Arnold tells the call handler that O’Mara has conspiracy delusions. “He’s starting to entertain the idea that some kind of shadowy government cabal is trying to bring him down and many other totally irrational beliefs.”

Andrew Shields, now retired, was the South Yorkshire Police officer in charge of the investigation. He said he met Arnold on July 2, 2019. “He seemed agitated, very nervous, maybe a little bit on the end of his bond.”

Shields said there are three leads to Arnold’s allegations. The first was about O’Mara’s mental health and well-being. “He thought he was in crisis.”

The second is related to submitting invoices to Ipsa. The third was about O’Mara’s cocaine use, “anything up to five grams a day”.

O’Mara is accused of making four fraudulent allegations to Ipsa between June and August 2019 from a “bogus” organization called Confident About Autism SY, and presenting two Arnold media and PR bills that prosecutors say were never enforced.

It is also alleged that O’Mara provided a bogus employment contract to a friend, John Woodliffe, “pretending” that he worked as a precinct support officer.

O’Mara is charged with eight counts of fraud by perjury, with Arnold charged with six of the offences, and Woodleaf jointly with one.

The three men denied all charges against them.

O’Mara was a Member of Parliament between 2017 and 2019, and he resigned from the Labor Party in 2018 and ran as an independent. He appeared at Leeds Crown Court via video link from his home in Sheffield.

The trial continues.

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