Tower Hamlets’ ex-councillor jailed over £125K housing scam

A FORMER councillor of Tower Hamlets was jailed over a £125,000 housing scam.

The former London councillor will serve his jail term for 16 months and has been ordered to pay £17,500 in costs, besides the £125,000 he has already paid back to the council.

The housing scam, in which Muhammad Harun, 49, was involved, cost the local authority £125,000

Harun bid for hundreds of social rent properties in Tower Hamlets while owning a home in Barking he bought for £230,000 over a decade ago.

Harun is the third Tower Hamlets councillor in seven years to be convicted of housing fraud.

While living in social housing in Poplar, he then purchased his parents’ house in Solander Gardens, Wapping, with a Right to Buy discount.

Those who own their own home cannot legally bid for council housing.

Harun gathered the two properties, now worth an estimated £750,000, over a decade he lived in low-rent accommodation.

The council estimated it cost about £12,000 a year to house Harun as a social housing tenant.

The fraud was uncovered seven months after he was elected as a Tower Hamlets Labour councillor last year.

Jailing Harun at Snaresbrook crown court recently, Judge Sanders said: “You were a beneficiary of accommodation you were not entitled to.”

At a previous hearing, he pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud.