A former Labour Minister who The Mail on Sunday outed as an alleged Communist spy has been referred to police over a suspected ‘irregularity’ in Commons payments.
Geoffrey Robinson now faces questions over the £30,000-a-year taxpayer-funded salary paid to a long-term friend for working in his constituency office at the age of 89.
This newspaper has discovered evidence that Mr Robinson, who was Paymaster General under Tony Blair, told Commons authorities that Brenda Price was working virtually full-time for him just two months before he disclosed that she was so frail that she required round-the-clock nursing care.
Mr Robinson had also been granted power of attorney over Ms Price while she was still receiving her salary – potentially giving him control over her finances.
Shared passion: Former Attorney General Geoffrey Robinson attends a Coventry City Premier League match with Brenda Price in 2000. He is pictured talking to Gordon Brown’s former spokesman Charlie Whelan, while bottom right is Sarah Schaefer, who would become David Miliband’s special adviser
After seeing our dossier, Commons watchdogs alerted police. Parliamentary authorities suspect that they may have continued to pay the salary – on Mr Robinson’s authority – after doctors concluded Ms Price was losing her mental faculties, a senior Commons source told this newspaper.
The Labour grandee also charged the Commons nearly £1,000 a month for renting a room from her, even after she needed 24-hour care. Mr Robinson, who stood down at the Election after 43 years as a Labour MP, declined to comment last night.
The police involvement comes just months after this newspaper unearthed intelligence files which identified Mr Robinson as a spy who allegedly handed defence secrets to Communist Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. Mr Robinson described the allegations as ‘a complete fabrication’.
Now emails leaked to The Mail on Sunday reveal that Mr Robinson told the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) that Ms Price was working for him 30 hours a week as his ‘constituency financial officer’ in Coventry North West. She had worked for him since 1997, but this submission came in January 2018 – three months after she had granted Mr Robinson power of attorney over her.
The process gives authority to control someone’s financial affairs if they go on to lose the mental capacity to do so themselves. Ipsa, the official body which governs MPs’ salaries, staffing costs and expenses, expects to be informed if staff are no longer fit to work.
Power trip: Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown arriving at Coventry University with Geoffrey Robinson in 2017
Sources estimate Ms Price was paid about £30,000 a year.
This newspaper has also established that Mr Robinson claimed a total of £43,060 from the Commons in rent for a room in Ms Price’s home. He billed £960 a month rental costs from May 2015 until February of this year, £15,380 of which came after he drew up the power of attorney. Ms Price had apparently needed 24-hour nursing care since at least March 2018
She died at her £600,000 detached home in Balsall Common, near Solihull, last month at the age of 90.
Mr Robinson was with her when she passed away, and paid tribute to her at her funeral, which was attended by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and former Labour Cabinet Minister Ed Balls.
The Commons source said: ‘After looking at The Mail on Sunday’s evidence, and examining their own records – which contained no notification that Ms Price was unwell – Ipsa decided that the prima facie evidence of wrongdoing was so potentially serious that it could not be handled internally and should be referred to the police. Ipsa officials have met with Scotland Yard.’
The Metropolitan Police last night confirmed: ‘Ipsa made a referral to the Met in relation to possible expense claim irregularities in relation to an individual. This is currently being assessed.’
Mr Robinson’s former constituency came within 208 votes of falling into Tory hands in this month’s Election, with Taiwo Owatemi narrowly retaining the seat for Labour.
Earlier this year, this newspaper revealed claims that Mr Robinson passed a trove of confidential information to a Communist spy at the height of the Cold War. Intelligence files state that Czech secret police chiefs judged Robinson – apparently codenamed Karko – was one of the agency’s ‘most productive sources’ in Britain at the time.
He is said to have provided at least 81 pieces of intelligence over three years, including a series of handwritten documents concerning Government policy on subjects such as estimated military spending cuts. This newspaper was able to compare the notes in the files with a letter and samples of the MP’s handwriting
Mr Robinson has strenuously denied the claims.
Ms Price and Mr Robinson are longstanding friends who shared a love for Coventry City Football Club and, when he stood down as a director in 1997, because he had been appointed as a Government Minister, she was elected in his place.
Ms Price was also on the board of the New Statesman, a Left-wing magazine owned by Mr Robinson, in the late 1990s.
Neighbours and friends of Ms Price said that, while Mr Robinson regularly visited his friend in Balsall Common, a prosperous commuter village near his constituency, they did not think that he regularly stayed overnight at the property he was claiming rent for.
Lodgings: Ms Price’s West Midlands home, where Robinson was claiming rent for overnight stays
The rental agreement states that he was provided with a bedroom, bathroom and study in her house, plus shared use of a sitting room, dining room, conservatory and kitchen.
One friend said: ‘She was ill on and off for the last year, but for the last few months she was really ill. She died at home and Geoffrey was with her.’ The friend said Mr Robinson used to stay regularly when he was on constituency business, but appeared to stop staying overnight ‘a few years back’.
A neighbour said: ‘He would be here most weekends quite a while ago when he would have his surgeries. You would see the Jaguar arriving most Thursdays and he would stay. His car would stay most of the weekend. It was happening until four or five years ago or even longer. After that, he would still visit [but only during the day].’
Another neighbour said he would arrive in his Jaguar and visit for short periods but she did not think he stayed overnight because his car would not be there the next day. ‘I don’t think he ever did stay there,’ she said. Ipsa rules do not state how many nights a month MPs should stay overnight in constituency homes which they claim rent for. MPs are, however, instructed to ‘have regard to value for money when making claims’.
In his tribute to Ms Price at her funeral, Mr Robinson said: ‘During Brenda’s final years she was very fortunate to find a wonderful companion and carer… every one of the team came to love Brenda in the closing stages of her wonderful life and all felt blessed to know her.’
Ms Price was also an investor in a private sixth-form college in Coventry that Mr Robinson co-founded in 2015. The National Mathematics and Science College, which charges fees of £29,500 a year, has posted a series of hefty financial losses since it opened, including a £1.7 million loss in 2018.
The mission of the college, which has received at least £3.4 million of funding from Chinese investors, is to place pupils on to science, engineering and maths courses in top universities. An email sent by Mr Robinson in November 2016 blamed the losses in that financial year on a shortfall in students.
It said a £1 million ‘stand-by facility’ was being created, of which UK investors would put up £330,000.
He explained that ‘Brenda has proposed that she will provide the security for this by way of a mortgage on her property till September 2019’. It is unclear whether her home was remortgaged to support the college.
This is not the first time that Mr Robinson has been in trouble with the Parliamentary authorities.
In October 2001 he was suspended from the Commons for three weeks over his 1990 invoice asking for £200,000 from notorious tycoon Robert Maxwell, which Mr Robinson had failed to register in his list of parliamentary interests.
The MP complained that the official report into the matter had condemned him as ‘a liar’ who had ‘evaded tax, deliberately misled parliament and deliberately misled his closest and trusted colleagues’.