Bad company

A recent post of the moroccan press agency, MAP, reported on 25 Feb 2010 that britannic MP, Derek Conway told that moroccan autonomu plan is « a viable and serious proposal » that will help settle the Sahara issue.It’s important to highlight that the Derek Conway who proposed, two years ago, a deliberately deceptive Early Day Motion in the UK Parliament in favour of Morocco’s autonomy plan is the same Derek Conway that later faces fraud investigations after being sacked by his party for using public funds to “employ” family members.

Mr Conway was suspended from the Commons for 10 days and ordered to return £13,161 of the money he paid his son. A Commons standards committee said there was no record of Freddie, a student, doing work at Westminster in return for £40,000 of taxpayers’ money. The committee report, which said Freddie was “all but invisible” at Westminster, concluded the arrangement was “at the least an improper use of parliamentary allowances” and “at worst, a serious diversion of public funds”.

Police say they cannot investigate disgraced MP Derek Conway, even though he was reprimanded by Commons authorities for paying his student son nearly £40,000 to be a researcher. Scotland Yard said a “lack of systems” for accounting for MPs’ expenses meant it was ruling out an investigation.

It is said that a man can be known by the company he keeps. When it comes to Conway and his buddies in Rabat, this dictum appears to work both ways.

I don’t know if Conway’s relationship with the Moroccan government extends to financial remuneration – one wonders what motivated him to propose the EDM in favour of normalising Morocco’s occupation, if not some sort of financial reward. Perhaps he could have paid his sons in Dirhams and saved himself a lot of bother. He wouldn’t be the first foreign political figure to have been bought by the Moroccan state. After publishing a glowing analysis of the king’s fine new clothes (i.e. the Moroccan autonomy plan for Western Sahara), by ex US ambassador to Rabat Frederick Vreeland, the New York Times felt obliged to publish an Editor’s Note pointing out that Vreeland was chairman of a company that had contracts with the Moroccan government. I’m sure there will be many more such unmaskings as Morocco steps up its propaganda campaign with the help of its western stooges.