Galloway's Iraq charity given improper cash, says watchdog - June 25th 2007

Charity, Volunteering and Grant News

Galloway's Iraq charity given improper cash, says watchdog

George Galloway's Mariam Appeal, the campaign he set up to oppose UN sanctions on Iraq, received at least £230,000 in improper donations, the Charity Commission will report today. The money came from the Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat, chairman of the charity, after he paid illicit kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's regime in exchange for a big contract under the oil-for-food programme, according to the report.

The commission found that the trustees were not sufficiently vigilant and did not properly discharge their legal duties when they accepted the donations. It said it remained "concerned, having considered the totality of the evidence, that Mr Galloway may also have known of the connection between the appeal and the [oil-for-food] programme".

The commission found that Mr Zureikat donated £448,000 to the appeal, nearly a third of its total income between 1998 and 2003 when it stopped operating.

Mr Galloway, the Respect MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, has always insisted that he did not know whether Mr Zureikat was passing kickbacks to Baghdad, or whether his donations came specifically from oil sales. The MP and two other UK-based trustees, Sabah al-Muktar and Stuart Halford, repeated that denial to the commission. Mr Zureikat did not respond to the commission's request for information.

Today's report is the third into the Mariam Appeal. The first two found that it should have been properly registered as a charity, but that its funds were largely spent on humanitarian purposes. The final inquiry was set up in December 2005 after the Volcker report, a UN-backed investigation into abuses of the oil-for-food programme, accused Mr Galloway of receiving illicit payments in return for campaigning for the lifting of sanctions on Iraq. Similar accusations were made by a US congressional committee chaired by a Republican senator, Norm Coleman.

The report says: "There is a risk to the appeal and to the trustees that claims could be made to recover funds improperly given."

The report concludes that the "trustees knew about the sanctions placed on Iraq and the UN oil-for-food programme. Given the complex setting within which the Mariam Appeal had to work, the commission's view is that the trustees should have been extremely vigilant in their acceptance of these donations. The trustees did not make sufficient inquiries as to the source of the donations, or assess whether it was proper and in the interests of the appeal to accept them."

Mr Galloway said last night: "For the second time the Charity Commission has concluded that there was no misuse of the funds paid into the Mariam Appeal. The claim that the appeal's humanitarian and political campaigning was funded improperly is palpably false. The man who is claimed to be the source of 'improper donations' has never been charged with any wrongdoing, travels freely in the US and continues to do business in Iraq under the puppet government."

Source: http://society.guardian.co.uk/voluntary/story/0,,2098405,00.html