Friday, November 02, 2012

I blame Denis Macshane



Is the fact that Comet, a company founded nearly eighty years ago, has called in the administrators on the same day that Denis MacShane  has resigned from Parliament simply a coincidence? Listening to the number of computers (laptops and PC's) that Denis had claimed for made me wonder whether or not he had been a one man campaign to keep the company trading.

If anybody has managed to give fraud, politics and a combination of both a bad name it has to be the man who will now be known as 'the disgraced former MP for Rotherham." What he did wasn't clever, I mean clever in the sense that it took much in the way of brains to do it, it was fraud straight from the school of St Trinians although even Flash Harry would have been too embarrassed to submit 19 invoices from an organisation (the wonderfully named European Policy Institute) that didn't exist in any sense beyond the confines of this fraud. Denis was raising an invoice and then sending that invoice to himself and then writing himself a cheque which would later be repaid as part of an expenses claim.

The good news is I suppose that he was eventually caught, repaid the money and has had the sense to get out now. What I don't get though is why this shouldn't be treated as a criminal case, regardless of whether or not he ultimately did not gain from it, because he repaid the money. Surely when criminals are caught they are tried and then are imprisoned and (in the case of white collar crime) fined or asked to pay compensation, he has repaid the money but served no sentence other than losing his job as M.P.

2 comments:

Span Ows said...

I agree with the getting out: I hate the guy but he did take the right road. That said, he should have gone ages ago and the attempted justification was poor "I did some good so doing wrong wasn't so bad was it?"

Paul said...

Yes, he was a bit like the burglar who felt remorse and returned some of the goods he had stolen.