A FORMER Calderdale councillor has been jailed for 18 months for fiddling his expenses.
David Chaytor, 61, worked at the University of Huddersfield in the early 1970s and was a Calderdale councillor for Todmorden in the 1980s.
He became the first politician to be convicted and sentenced over the expenses scandal which has rocked Westminster.
He submitted bogus invoices to support claims totalling £22,650 for IT services and renting homes in London and his Bury North constituency.
But the properties were owned by him and his mother, and he did not pay out any of his own money, Southwark Crown Court in London heard.
Chaytor, of Lumbutts, Todmorden, pleaded guilty last month to three counts of false accounting between November 2005 and January 2008.
The former MP is now facing a large legal bill for both his defence and the costs of bringing the prosecution against him.
Chaytor made the false claims in order to "siphon off" public money to which he was not entitled, the court heard.
But he has now repaid £19,237, more than the £18,350 he received from the House of Commons fees office based on his fraudulent claims.
Chaytor submitted claims totalling £15,275 and was paid £12,925 for renting Flat 152 Hide Tower in Regency Street, Westminster, central London.
But it turned out that he and his wife had bought the property in 1999, two years after he was first elected to Parliament, and paid off the mortgage on it in 2003.
He used the first and two middle names of his daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Rastrick, on a bogus shorthold tenancy agreement submitted to the Parliamentary authorities.
Chaytor also falsely claimed £5,425 between September 2007 and January 2008 for renting a cottage in Castle Street in Summerseat, near Bury, Lancashire.
A police investigation later revealed that this house was owned by his elderly mother, Olive Trickett.
She had lived in the cottage for about 40 years before her dementia meant she had to move to a local care home in May 2007. She died in May 2009, aged 81.
A tenancy agreement was drawn up listing Mrs Trickett’s address as Holme Manor, Rossendale, but there was no indication that this was a nursing home.
The document, which was apparently signed by both parties in August 2007, was witnessed by a Sarah Fairlead, the married name of Chaytor’s daughter.
