Times to take Commission to court in Europe over Galloway charity

07 Jun 2017 News

The Times has said it will take the Charity Commission to the European Court of Human Rights over an ongoing freedom of information battle relating to a now defunct charity established by George Galloway.

The Times has reported that the Charity Commission has released some documents in relation to former MP George Galloway’s now defunct charity following a decade long freedom of information battle.

However, it claims the Charity Commission continues to withhold information relating to three separate investigations of the charity established by Galloway and his then wife. As a result, it said it will be taking the regulator to the European Court of Human Rights.  

The Times and the regulator have been locked in a battle over the documents since 2007, when one of its journalists Dominic Kennedy, submitted an FOI request relating to documents from the commission’s investigations into The Mariam Appeal, set up by Galloway in 1998.

The FOI request was rejected, and Kennedy ended up appealing it to the Supreme Court, who ruled in favour of the commission in 2014.

However in a column published today Kennedy, now investigations editor at The Times, wrote: “The Times will ask the European Court of Human Rights to rule on whether the public should have the right to receive state information with the kind of arbitrary blanket exemption that the commission relied on.

“Many pages from its records are still being withheld by the commission because it says it would not be in the public interest to disclose them”.

He also published a news story today based on “three Arch Lever binders” of information released to the newspaper by the commission relating to the investigation under English common law.

The Charity Commission declined to comment on the issue. 

The office for George Galloway, who is currently standing as an independent candidate in the seat of Manchester Gorton, has also been contacted for a comment.

Galloway’s former wife paid £84,000 by charity, says Times

In his story, Kennedy wrote that Doctor Amineh Abu-Zayyad, the then wife of George Galloway, was paid £84,000 worth of money donated to the now defunct Mariam Appeal, a charity of which they were both trustees.

The Mariam Appeal was set up by the then Labour MP George Galloway in 1998. According to The Times, Abu-Zayyad received 20 monthly payments from the fund totalling £42,000, which she claimed were her salary, plus a number of other payments which covered expenses but were not backed by receipts.

According to the Times, Galloway himself was paid £3,192 in a series of “ten cheques” which he said related to his expenses incurred as chairman of the Mariam Appeal fund.

The Times said that the £84,000 total paid to Abu-Zayyad was larger than the amount paid to the Yorkhill NHS Trust in Glasgow, which received £54,000 of money raised by the appeal for treating Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old Iraqi child suffering from acute leukaemia. Mr Galloway discovered Mariam “in Saddam Children’s Hospital in Baghdad in 1998” during a tour with other British MPs.

Galloway, then the Labour MP for Glasgow Kelvin, flew Mariam to the UK for treatment in Glasgow. Mariam’s life was saved and she was reportedly returned to Iraq.

Galloway has long denied any impropriety on his or his former wife’s behalf, and claimed that the Mariam Appeal was a political campaign rather than a charity.

In a statement given to The Times, Galloway said: “The Mariam Appeal was a political campaign not a charity. The Charity Commission decreed it should be a charity and long ago accepted its accounts despite your heroic efforts to the contrary. It closed 14 years ago.

“Dr Abu-Zayyad did not receive any ‘unauthorised benefits’. Neither did I. Nor did anyone else.”

 

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