Mr Ken Livingstone, the favourite in the race for mayor of London, has bowed to pressure and is prepared to make a formal apology in the House of Commons following a parliamentary rebuke yesterday over his failure to register outside interests worth up to £159,000.
In an embarrassing development that could cause problems for his election campaign, the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee said the MP had breached the rules on registering outside interests and did not observe the required principle of openness.
The outside interests relate to earnings from after-dinner speeches and journalism - he writes a column for the London Independent and is a restaurant critic for the Evening Standard. The committee said that of £220,992 channelled through his company, Localaction Ltd, in the past 18 months, £158,599 represented regular earnings, rather than one-off payments that MPs are not required to declare, and should have been listed in the register of members' interests.
"In view of the scale of the payments and the period of time over which they increased, we recommend that Mr Livingstone should make an apology to the House by means of a personal statement," the committee said.
Mr Livingstone should have submitted contracts with media organisations to the Commissioner for Standards once his writing and work in the media became a regular source of income. In addition, he should have listed his media earnings and income earned from public speaking.
After the committee released its findings, Mr Livingstone defended his conduct but said he was prepared to apologise to the House of Commons: "I contacted the parliamentary committee in 1996, asked their advice, and I was led to believe that anything paid into my company I didn't need to actually declare. As soon as they raised it I was happy to declare it," he told the BBC.
The Conservative spokesman for London, Mr Bernard Jenkins, said the report exposed Mr Livingstone as "just another fat cat, rather than the `man of the people' which he pretends to be".