FORMER UKIP MEP Tom Wise is facing jail after confessing to a �36,000 expenses fiddle. Wise, 62 had claimed �3,000 a month in Euro cash for secretarial assistance over a year while paying a researcher Lindsay Jenkins �500. Wise, who first represented UK

FORMER UKIP MEP Tom Wise is facing jail after confessing to a �36,000 expenses fiddle.

Wise, 62 had claimed �3,000 a month in Euro cash for "secretarial assistance" over a year while paying a researcher Lindsay Jenkins �500.

Wise, who first represented UKIP before turning Independent, spent a year channelling taxpayers' cash into a bank account he secretly controlled.

Mrs Jenkins, 61, was acquitted in a joint trial, when Bedfordshire MEP Wise changed his plea to guilty to a charge of false accounting at a trial at Southwark Crown Court.

Wise will be sentenced on Wednesday and the scam, had it not been discovered, could have netted �180,000 over the five years he had planned.

Reacting to the guilty plea, Dr Rupert Read, councillor for Norwich and former European election lead candidate, said: "If only Tom Wise had, had the basic decency to admit that he is an expenses fraudster a few months back, I surely would have been elected for Green MEP for Eastern England in June.

"For this admission would have destroyed the public's sense of UKIP as a party that could potentially stand up against expenses fraud.

"It is shameful that UKP managed to get in on an 'expenses scandal vote' under these circumstances.