Billy KenberPolitics investigations correspondent
A police investigation into claims former Conservative MP Mark Menzies misused donors’ money to pay “bad people” has been dropped after he agreed to repay the money.
Police opened an investigation into Menzies last year after accusations the then-MP for Fylde had used campaign funds for personal expenses.
News understands that at least some of that money was used to pay sex workers.
It was reported by The Times newspaper that Menzies had telephoned an elderly Conservative party volunteer at 3am in December 2023, to say he had been locked in a flat by “bad people” and needed thousands of pounds immediately.
He made other calls that morning and eventually borrowed a total of around £8,500 from his office manager and another aide.
The majority of that – some £6,500 – was repaid from a bank account set up for money raised from local political supporters.
Questions were also raised about a further £14,000 in donor funds which Menzies had used for what he described as medical expenses, according to a party volunteer who was a signatory on the bank account.
Menzies, who did not respond to a request for comment, stood down at the last general election but has continued to face two investigations from the police and expenses watchdog into his conduct.
Both have now concluded they will not take action against him.
The police investigation followed Labour demanding a probe into potential fraud and misconduct in public office offences and officers spent months interviewing several people with knowledge of Menzies’s spending.
A spokesman for Lancashire police said that a “full and thorough investigation” had found “no evidence that any criminal offences have taken place”.
Two people interviewed as part of the police investigation said they had been told by officers that it was dropped in part because Menzies had agreed to repay borrowed money.
It is not clear how much he has agreed to pay, but he repaid £1,000 into the bank account containing donors’ money in June.
Katie Fieldhouse, the life-long Conservative supporter who had received the late night phone call from Menzies, said she was recently contacted by Lancashire police with an update.
“The police rang me. They told me there’s insufficient evidence to prosecute and he’s agreed to pay it back,” she said.
Another source involved with the business account said they also understood the ex-MP’s agreement to repay funds to be part of the reason the police had closed the investigation.
Menzies is not thought to have found employment since he stood down as an MP but the Conservative party confirmed they had given him a hardship loan which is understood to be a five-figure sum.
He was first elected in 2010. He resigned as a ministerial aide in 2014, after being accused of paying for sex from a male sex worker, allegations which he denied at the time.
Menzies’s political career ended in April last year after a newspaper report revealed that he had been accused of misusing campaign funds given by local donors in his constituency.
The money had been paid to a “business group”, with a bank account set up and administered by Ms Fieldhouse and another local Conservative volunteer.
In December 2023, he called Ms Fieldhouse at 3am, waking her from her sleep and asking her to send him thousands of pounds of the donated money.
He claimed it was “a matter of life and death”, she has said, with men holding him in a London flat and refusing to release him unless he paid up.
The former MP subsequently denied the men in the flat he labelled “bad people” were sex workers.
A source close to him instead told The Times that he’d met a man on an online dating website, subsequently gone to the flat of a second man, and then been falsely accused of being sick before facing demands for a large sum to pay for cleaning.
However, one of the men present at the flat has admitted they had agreed to have sex with Menzies for payment.
The man, who is Brazilian, advertises himself as a “high-class male escort” and said he had participated in a “party” with Menzies and several other escorts.
The gathering lasted from Wednesday night to Friday morning, with Menzies absent from a full day of parliamentary work.
At its conclusion, Menzies didn’t have sufficient funds to pay his bill, which amounted to more than £14,000, according to an account he later gave a close aide.
The Brazilian man denied that Menzies had ever been locked in but said there were “lots of other guys” and the then-MP “hadn’t paid anyone”.
He said he was not aware that Menzies was a politician and when informed of this added that he was “surprised [b]ut that’s his problem, I have nothing to do with it”.
“My contact with him was just for work and ended there,” he said.
As well as telephoning Ms Fieldhouse to demand money from the campaign funds account, Menzies summoned a male aide in his 30s to travel from Manchester to London to meet him at the flat where the “party” had taken place.
The aide said he was also asked for money, and he and a family member ended up handing over around £1,500.
Menzies received a further £6,500 from his office manager. She was subsequently reimbursed from the campaign fund.
After meeting the MP at the flat, the male aide said he accompanied Menzies and two sex workers to a nearby bank, waiting in a neighbouring cafe while the politician withdrew cash.
Menzies’s alleged efforts to repay the male aide led to an investigation by Ipsa, the expenses watchdog.
The aide said that Menzies’s office manager gave him £1,000 from the money she had been reimbursed from the local business group’s account, but he was still owed £500 which the MP told him he couldn’t afford to pay.
He alleged that Menzies instead told him he would arrange for a bonus payment to be made through his parliamentary staffing budget.
Ipsa, which investigated this claim as an allegation of fraud, found that Menzies had signed off a bonus payment for the aide “a few days after the incident in question”. This was the only time the aide received a bonus and was described as being for work he had done on a wind farm application.
The bonus was for £700, amounting to around £500 after tax.
In a report on its investigation published on Tuesday, Ipsa’s compliance officer said that he had found the case “not proven”.
He wrote that there was “evidence of wrongdoing”, including the timing of the payment, but stated that the aide was “non-committal” in his statement to the police on whether it was for wind farm work or to reimburse him, and that there was a discrepancy over the amount because he’d claimed to be owed £1,000.
Another of Menzies’s former staffers also told Ipsa the payment was legitimately for the aide’s wind farm work.
The aide told the that he had done work on a wind farm, but that was just the excuse Menzies used for the bonus which he told him was actually to reimburse him for the money he had lent him to pay sex workers.
