ERIC Illsley, an MP for a seat in the northern English town of Barnsley, admitted dishonestly claiming more than 14,000 pounds in expenses' payments when he appeared in court on Tuesday.

Illsley was re-elected as a Labour MP last May, but has been sitting as an independent after Labour withdrew the party whip over his expenses case. The court will sentence the former mining union official next month.

"This was a significant sum of money and the grossly inflated claims he submitted could not be attributed to an oversight or accounting error - indeed he claimed that the expenses system was a way of supplementing members' salaries," said Simon Clements, head of the Crown Prosecution Service Special Crime Division.

"He siphoned off public money into his own pockets and betrayed those who rightly expected the highest standards of integrity from him as a Member of Parliament," he added.

Illsley changed his pleas on three charges of false accounting relating to three years of expenses claimed on his second home in London, the Press Association reported.

On Friday, former Labour MP David Chaytor was jailed for 18 months for fiddling his expenses, the first parliamentarian to be convicted over a 2009 scandal that engulfed the nation's political system and disgusted Britons.

Chaytor had admitted at an earlier hearing to fraudulently claiming more than 20,000 pounds in taxpayer-funded expenses. Reuters, 11/01/11