Turning the Tables


Michael White writing in The Guardian does a good job of turning the tables on Nigel Farage and his Ukip party for their expenses claims as members of the European Parliament. 

The second piece from The Independent newspaper explains the background to Nigel's expenses and the fact that he was claiming £12,000 a year (over and above his utilities and non-rental costs) for running a small office in a farmyard in West Sussex.

And all at the taxpayers' expense of course.  


Diary: Yes, it's Nigel Farage's United Kingdom Expenses party

From Brussels to Yorkshire, the Kippers have shown that at heart they are a traditional bunch of commonsense trough gobbler


By Michael White - The Guardian

The new Ukip symbol? Photograph: David Gray/REUTERS

• So get rid of Maria Miller and vote Ukip for an end to political hypocrisy and expenses greed? Not exactly. Nigel Farage cheerfully admits to his participation in the Great Euro-Gravy Train robbery to the tune of £2m of expenses since 1999 – far more than Ronnie Biggs managed from his 1963 caper. Some fellow-Kipper MEPs do even better, and all this on top of their £79k salaries in a job they all despise, especially the work bit. One was jailed for fraud (£36k diverted to cars and wine), another for benefit fiddling (£65k). That's an even higher proportion than Labour considering Ukip currently has seven MEPs, after losing six to pub sulks and defections since 2009.

• Not convinced? Then take a look at the online battle raging at Cupwith reservoir, on the moorland outside Huddersfield, between locals and William Legge, aka the 10th Earl of Dartmouth (which makes him Princess Di's stepbrother). A Kipper MEP for South West England, he's also a Yorkshire landowner. At stake is a planning application to build a windfarm (each turbine worth £20k a year in rent to its landlord), which critics say makes Legge a hypocrite since Ukip opposes wind nonsense. Harried by activists and a tenacious blogger called Autonomous Mind (they keep finding Legge's name linked to labyrinthine company structures involved), Legge finally abandoned his Maria Miller posture this week. "The land is owned by a relative," he conceded. But who?



Nigel Farage expenses: Ukip leader accused over 'missing' £50,000 EU funding paid into personal bank account

Ex-party assistant says £12,000 per year meant for maintenance of constituency office is unaccounted for
By KUNAL DUTTA  - The Independent

Ukip faces the prospect of financial investigation amid allegations that its leader Nigel Farage is responsible for more than £50,000 of “missing” European Union funding that was paid directly into his personal bank account.

Mr Farage is understood to have received £15,500 a year from Brussels since 2009 designated to the upkeep of his constituency office, a small farmyard building in Lyminster, West Sussex.

However a former political assistant to the party says the office was donated rent-free to Mr Farage by party supporters 15 years ago. Utilities and other non-rental costs amount to no more than £3,000 a year, according to the former office manager, leaving about £12,000 a year unexplained.

The £15,000 a year paid for out of EU allowances since 2009 is an entitlement to all MEPs with no requirement for them to justify their spending. But a former manager at the constituency office told The Times that the correct figure was closer to £3,000 a year, a claim reportedly disputed by Ukip.

David Samuel-Camps, 69, who worked as political assistant to Mr Farage between 2002 and 2010, was responsible for keeping the accounts for the office since about 2005. “Every month I’d contact Nigel one way or the other and say can you send me a cheque, you know the monthly cheque for however much it was,” he told The Times. “He would send me a cheque, which I recall was a personal cheque, which I would then put into our office account in Arundel. And then I would draw on that, as and when, for paying invoices.”

Mr Farage told the newspaper that he transferred £1,000 a month to run the office, without specifying what costs this covered. A Ukip spokesman did not return calls last night.

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