Farmer subsidised for North Sea 'land'

A farmer was able to claim £150,000 in subsidies for "property" that was either in the middle of the sea or abroad because of appallingly lax government controls, a report by MPs said yesterday.

The former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Maff) failed to spot that Joseph Bowden was claiming European Union subsidies for map grid references in the North Sea, Iceland, Greenland and the mid-Atlantic.

Officials at Maff were also unaware that Mr Bowden was claiming for different crops on the same piece of land, until they received an anonymous tip-off. The department and the Intervention Board had not pursued claims with sufficient vigour, the Public Accounts Committee found.

The committee's chairman, the Tory MP Edward Leigh, said: "This is a tale of appallingly lax control systems. The public bodies were slow to identify the fraud, slow to determine its full extent and slow to take recovery action."

Officials have recovered just £1,325 of £157,000 claimed by Bowden, of Eastercombe Farm, Heanton, north Devon.

He was jailed for two and a half years in 2000 after pleading guilty to nine charges of defrauding the Common Agricultural Policy scheme.