Political

Boris Johnson in expenses hot water

Two pieces of troubling news regarding London Mayor Boris Johnson and his approach to expenses: he’s been running up big bills himself and he also personally signed off expenses on the controversial corporate credit card, the use of which resulted in (yet another) Deputy Mayor having to quit.

Paul Waugh has the details of Boris Johnson’s expensive taxis for the Evening Standard:

I know Boris loves London’s cabbies, but this is ridiculous. A new written answer to City Hall today shows that the Mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of Ken Livingstone when it comes to his love of the hackney carriage.

Boris’s total bill since taking over as Mayor is a massive £4,698 – even higher than the last time it emerged his bills were published (for just three months).

But what is extraordinary – and will horrify most Londoners who pay these bills – is that Boris has run up huge bills for keeping his cabs waiting.

Meanwhile, Dave Hill over at The Guardian has the story on how Boris Johnson personally signed off expense claims on Ian Clement’s corporate credit card months after he’d said that the card should not be used:

New rules governing the approval of advisers’ expenses came into force on 11 March. They require the Mayor himself to sign off his team members’ expenses, and he did so for the first time in April. He did it again in May. The documents to which he added his signature were called GLA corporate credit card logs. In these were compiled the (arguably) legitimate expenses of Ian Clement, with any “personal use” ones already stripped out by the City Hall staff responsible. But if Boris thought Clement shouldn’t any longer have had a corporate card at all, why was he content to effectively endorse his continuing use of one? Had he forgotten all about it? Had he assumed Clement had handed it in? Had he just changed his mind? Or did he simply not look at what he was signing?

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