BANGLADESH newspaper web site THE NATION 21 May 2009:
Baroness Pola Uddin involved in allowance scandal
Baroness Pola Uddin
Agency, London
Bangladesh-origi Baroness Pola Uddin and two MPs who promised support for the victims of the collapsed First Solution money transfer company in 2007 are embroiled in the allowances scandal.
Baroness Pola Uddin claimed allowances for a property in Maidstone which, neighbours say she does not live in. The Daily Mail last week also claimed she is a social housing tenant in Wapping, East London. A parliamentary investigation has been launched.
Government minister Kitty Ussher is said to have asked the parliamentary fees office "to pay what you are able to" of a bill for £20,000 to update her London home.
Luton MP Margaret Moran is said to have received £22,500 to treat dry rot in a property which is neither near Westminster nor in her constituency.
Baroness Uddin, Kitty Ussher MP and Margaret Moran MP have all denied any wrongdoing. Tellingly though, Kitty Ussher and Margaret Moran both voted against full disclosure of expenses and allowances in a House fo Commons vote in July 2008
In June 2007 a money transfer company, First Solution, used by members of the Bangladeshi community, collapsed owing an estimated £1.7 million to up to 2,000 victims. The victims were some of the poorest people in Britain seeking to transfer small amounts of money to Bangladesh to help some of the poorest people in the world
In a debate in the House of Commons a debate initiated by George Galloway MP, in whose constituency many of the victims fell and who had helped to expose the scandal in the first place, Minister Kitty Ussher refused to provide government money to assist the victims on the grounds of "moral Hazard".
However Baroness Uddin, amidst a flurry of publicity, set up a fund to assist victims. Ussher promised government support for the Uddin fund. Margaret Moran, in that same debate, emerged as a member of the ad hoc advisory group for the fund. Both Ussher and Moran heaped praise on Baroness Uddin for setting up the fund.
However, the fund was closed just two months later with only one hundred pounds in the account.
Wednesday 27 May 2009
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Poverty of the MPs is in the grotesque shamelessness... and petty greed
EAST LONDON PRESS says at 0510 Hrs on Tuesday 31 March 2009: It is not just Harry Cohen, the east London MP who used to flaunt a faker beard and spout strings of calculated socialistic confections... Having lost BOTH in order to stay on the bandwagon, Cohen seems to have also lost any sense of rationality. And dignity. How else could he be saying those things, comparing himself to Churchill in that way? There were indeed many flaws in Churchill’s life and character. But Harry Cohen is not remotely convincing as a comparable Member of Parliament...Or as a member of society... What Cohen’s banal boast tells us about him is that he belongs to a parliament of political, mental, moral pigmies with no evident shame...
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