BARONESS WARSI, the co-chairman of the Conservative party, profiteered from parliamentary expenses by charging the taxpayer up to £165 for overnight accommodation despite staying at a Premier Inn for less than half the price.
The cabinet minister received more than double the amount she incurred in hotel costs in order to attend sittings at the House of Lords soon after she became a peer.
The disclosure follows revelations in The Sunday Times last week that Warsi stands accused of claiming overnight allowances while living rent-free at the home of a former friend in Acton, west London.
The Lords’ commissioner for standards is expected to launch a full investigation into her expenses claims after carrying out an initial assessment. Warsi is also facing the prospect of a police inquiry after Scotland Yard received a complaint from a member of the public.
The minister has said that she made “an appropriate payment equivalent to what I was paying at the time in hotel costs” to a Tory official who was also living in the Acton property. However, the owner of the house, Wafik Moustafa, has denied receiving any money from either of them.
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Warsi says she spent “occasional nights” at Moustafa’s home after she entered the Lords in October 2007 and before she moved in March 2008 into a two-bedroom flat she bought in Wembley, northwest London.
The Sunday Times has established that during this six-month period she stayed on several occasions at the Premier Inn in Wembley while waiting for her new home to be completed. She regularly paid about £75 a night, according to informed sources.
Under the expenses regime at the time, peers could claim up to £165.50 a day in “overnight subsistence” to cover accommodation costs while attending the Lords if their main home was outside London. No receipts were required.
Warsi, 41, did not break any rules by using a cheap hotel. However, claiming the maximum allowance — and pocketing the difference — is likely to provoke allegations of seeking to profit from expenses rather than cover costs. The move could have earned her many hundreds of pounds and appears to contradict her insistence that her conduct has always been within “the spirit of the rules”. Public records show that Warsi claimed £12,247 in overnight subsistence from October 2007 to March 2008. This equates to claiming the maximum allowance on 74 occasions. Even if she had claimed overnight expenses for every one of the 79 days she attended the Lords during this period, her average claim would have been £155.
She also claimed £6,518 in “day subsistence” — the maximum, given her number of attendances and the daily rate of £82.50. This allowance was for items such as “the cost of meals and incidental travel”.
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Last week, Lord Hanningfield, a Tory peer who was jailed for claiming overnight expenses to stay in London when he was not in the capital, said most peers claimed the maximum possible regardless of the costs they incurred.
David Cameron has so far backed Warsi despite calls for her to resign “I don’t want to say anything against Baroness Warsi, but, as I said at my trial, 85% of peers were claiming the full allowances,” he said.
Warsi, appointed to the cabinet as minister without portfolio after the 2010 election, has made no secret of her use of Premier Inns, mentioning the budget chain twice in April on Twitter.
This weekend it also emerged that an aid foundation set up by Warsi in 2002 has been operating in breach of Charity Commission rules. The peer was until 2010 chairwoman of the Savayra Foundation UK, which helps destitute women in Pakistan, and she remains a trustee.
The charity’s website says all trustees take a “hands-on” approach and Warsi highlights her involvement in its activities on her personal website.
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Another long-standing trustee is Tabasum Aslam, a former Liberal Democrat councillor from West Yorkshire, who was convicted of a housing benefit fraud in 2007. People who have been convicted of an offence involving dishonesty cannot normally retain such a position, according to Charity Commission guidelines.
On Friday, Javed Iqbal, the chairman of Savayra, said he was unaware of Aslam’s conviction despite it being reported in the local press.
Yesterday, however, Iqbal said Aslam had stepped down as a trustee after being confronted and the charity watchdog had been notified.
David Cameron, the prime minister, has so far backed Warsi despite calls for her to resign and increasing doubts over her judgment.
Warsi has referred herself to Paul Kernaghan, the Lords’ standards commissioner, after allegations that she had claimed overnight allowances while staying rent-free at the home of Moustafa, a GP and Tory member. She also failed to declare to parliament that she had been receiving thousands of pounds in rent since moving out of her Wembley flat.
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Warsi has indicated that she spent only about 12 nights at Moustafa’s house and stayed as a guest of Naweed Khan, a Tory official who later became her special adviser.
Khan failed to respond to calls asking him to produce evidence of any payments he had received from Warsi.
This weekend the Metropolitan police said it would be liaising with Kernaghan after a complaint about Warsi from a member of the public.
Warsi said: “I have sought to ensure that my conduct, including claims for overnight accommodation and subsistence, is in accordance with the letter of the law and the spirit of the rules.”