A SOUTH-EAST MEP has launched fierce criticism of the Department of Work and Pensions after the Court of Appeal rejected his appeal against conviction for benefit fraud. Binsted father-of-two Ashley Mote, 71, was jailed for nine months on September 4 after being found guilty at Portsmouth Crown Court of 21 offences. He was also ordered to hand back the £67,000 of overpaid benefits. Released from prison in November, Mr Mote denied any wrong doing. But on December 14, Lord Justice Richards upheld the court's original decision that he should pay back the £32,000 in income support he received between 1996 and 2002 and the £35,000 housing benefit. Mr Mote had failed to declare he was a signatory to a bank account on the Isle of Man and had signed a statement that a company in which he was involved had had a turnover of £4,000 a month while receiving benefits from the government and Chichester District Council. This week Independent MEP for South-East England Mr Mote described the jury that found him guilty as "plainly confused" and said he would consider a further appeal. He added: "Never – ever – would I seek to defraud the public purse. Nor did I intend to do so. If I have to apologise for anything it is my failure to support my own family after we lost everything in the ERM fiasco of the early 1990s. "For that I am truly sorry. My family was and is my responsibility. I come from a generation where self- reliance and personal responsibility are the norm. Going to the benefits office was an agonising acknowledgement of at least temporary defeat." Mr Mote continued: "I had a proven track record of generating new wealth, new employment and bringing millions in foreign earnings into this country. "Instead of support while I tried to create those circumstances again I encountered a bureaucratic culture of dependency which turned to envy and suspicion. "My only purpose was to get myself off benefit. Chichester District Council and the Department of Work and Pensions had a duty of care to my family at that time. "Instead, because they had government targets to meet, they set out to prove I was just another idler on the fiddle. "They could not have been more wrong Later, the government saw the opportunity to turn my case into a political hatchet job. "British taxpayers have to ask themselves why their government decided to spend over £1million of public money on a five-week trial about an alleged wrongful benefit payment of some £45,000 over a period of seven years? "The government's legal machine has thrown at me everything it could. It employed a top QC, supported at times by as many as nine advisers. It turned a simple allegation into 25 separate charges with 147 alleged justifications of guilt." Mr Mote says that after the verdict "one of the 180 press officers at the Department of Work and Pensions briefed the media using allegations which had been totally refuted during enquiries years before, and which were demolished again during sworn evidence. "The DWP's press briefings were not just spin. They included barefaced lies. Their purpose can only have been to destroy my political reputation."
