Sheep abuser Quentin Davies insured antiques on expenses

I shall bleat on about this one.....A minister claimed more than £10,000 from the taxpayer to repair window frames at the 18th-century mansion he designated as his second home.

Quentin Davies, who employs his French wife, Chantal, as his parliamentary assistant, nominated the listed building in Lincolnshire as his second home, while his main home was a small flat near Westminster.

Mr Davies, a former Tory frontbencher who defected to Labour when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, spent close to the maximum under the additional costs allowance (ACA) in each year from 2004 to 2008.
Among the items he claimed for were buildings insurance for his historic home and contents insurance to cover antiques and other valuable items.

“Window frame works”, at a total cost of £10,033.33, appeared in a claim submitted by Mr Davies for January to March 2005, which was funded by the Commons fees office.

In May 2008, the minister wrote to the fees office to say he had “inadvertently miscalculated” the amount of mortgage interest he paid when making a claim under the ACA for the period November 2007 to March 2008.

He asked officials to “destroy” his previous claim form, which included a mortgage claim for £9,100.38, and to replace it with a new form which included a lower mortgage interest claim — this time for £3,675.

However, instead of offering to repay the extra money, Mr Davies added new claims for utility bills, council tax and insurance, making a total of £9,057. This, he noted in his letter, was precisely the sum which had already been paid to him as “the balance remaining available to me in the ACA”.

The extra items included £1,079.81 for insurance, £172 for a fire extinguisher package, £423.13 for the annual maintenance of a burglar alarm system and £115 for having an Aga serviced.

If anyone is wondering about the sheep related pic at the top, I commented before on how Quentin was convicted of 2 charges of animal cruelty. 

From Wikipedia:

Quentin was fined for 2 charges of animal cruelty relating to sheep on his estate. He was when he arrived back in the Commons with retorts of "BAAAAAAA!!!!!!!" by Labour MP's.

Gordon's wee little sheep (which I covered before), when he left to join the labour flock:

"a leader I have always greatly admired, who I believe is entirely straightforward, and who has a towering record, and a clear vision for the future of our country which I fully share."

16 MARCH 2005 - When still a Tory:

"the Chancellor has been losing control… His projections… have been consistently wrong. He has been wrong about both revenues and expenditure… The Chancellor took risks… he is imprudent… a great worry… very worrying… he simply wanted to win the next election—if he can… it does not matter what happens afterwards… the Chancellor went in for an orgy of self-congratulation… deceiving other people… complacency… he is not prudent and responsible, and not a person to be entrusted with the management of anybody's finances, let alone the country's finances… unattractive and frankly problematic… an absolutely devastating misjudgement and mistake—the destruction of our pensions system… We have not had a word of apology from the Chancellor… He was just incredibly imprudent… extraordinarily incompetent… extraordinarily naïve… desperately complacent… As a result of that self-congratulation and complacency, the Chancellor is becoming so cut off that he is beginning to underestimate the intelligence of the electorate… I trust and believe that something nasty will happen to the Chancellor in electoral terms before too long. He will have no one but himself to blame.

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

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