MP expense scandal spreads to science committee - May 22, 2009
The chairman and his immediate predecessor on an influential parliamentary science committee in the UK have become enmeshed in the widening scandal over politicians’ expense claims.
Liberal Democrat Phil Willis, the current chairman of the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee, reportedly claimed around £15,000 of expenses for renovating a flat in Kennington, London where his daughter, Rachel Willis, now lives. Willis says his daughter, an actress who appeared in an advertising campaign as a critically panned electronic genie for five years until 2003, was not a permanent resident in the flat (though intriguingly, a BBC report after the actress was mugged in 2002, claims she was yards away from her home… in Kennington). The MP and his daughter have received a death threat since the allegations surfaced.
Meanwhile, Ian Gibson, current member and former chairman of the IUSS committee in its former guise as the Science and Technology select committee, reportedly also claimed expenses for a flat which was the main home of his daughter, Helen Gibson. The MP has offered to resign if his constituents think he should go. Gibson was a geneticist and served as dean of the school of biological sciences at the University of East Anglia from 1991-1997.
