George Galloway’s former wife received £84,000 donated to a fund set up to save a child’s life and end sanctions against Iraq, according to the unpublished findings of an inquiry.
The former Respect Party leader, who is standing as an independent candidate in Manchester Gorton in the general election, raised £1.5 million by launching an appeal named after a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia.
The Times has been fighting a decade-long battle to force the Charity Commission to hand over paperwork from its inquiries into the former MP’s Mariam Appeal. The documents show:
• His wife at the time, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, a Palestinian, was appointed as the appeal’s medical and scientific officer without any tendering process or written contract of employment.
• Her payments of £84,000 were larger than the amount given to the Yorkhill NHS Trust in Glasgow, which received £54,000 for treating Mariam, and almost as much as the £100,000 total estimated cost of her care.
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• Mr Galloway was paid cheques worth more than £3,000, which he said related to legitimate travel expenses.
Mr Galloway, 62, and Dr Abu-Zayyad, 49, were trustees of the fund. Legally, a person in a position of trust within a charity is not entitled to benefit directly from it without proper authority.
The former MP insists that the Mariam Appeal was set up as a political campaign after receiving legal advice. However, the commission ruled that the appeal should have been registered as a charity.
Dr Abu-Zayyad received 20 monthly payments totalling £42,000, which she explained were her salary. She said the rest, which included occasional payments of four-figure sums, covered expenses which would have been backed by receipts.
The money she received as earnings was unauthorised because the appeal’s constitution did not enable payments to executive committee members. The Charity Commission decided against demanding repayment because Mr Galloway’s wife provided service of value and had been unaware the salary was in breach of trust. However, the regulator withheld from its statement of the inquiry findings the scale of the payments made to Dr Abu-Zayyad.
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These had been calculated at £18,000 after Mr Galloway told a reporter that she was paid £25,000 pro rata “but she didn’t work for a full year”. His lawyers, Davenport Lyons, explained that he had been abroad and without access to his documents.
Mr Galloway’s lawyers, who also represented his then wife, said she was the “natural choice” as the appeal’s medical and scientific officer because she spoke Arabic, knew the Middle East and was a cancer research specialist.
The commission said in its report that it “accepts that none of the executive committee acted in bad faith”. But it declined to comment when asked by The Times why it had decided against publishing the size of his wife’s financial benefits.
The watchdog’s draft guidance to its media team stated that, if reporters asked how much Dr Abu-Zayyad was paid, “we’ll have to explain that we cannot disclose the information. Suggest they contact Mr Galloway for details.”
On top of her salary, she received more than a dozen cheques to cover her expenses. Two cheques for £5,500 each stated on the reverse “cash to be made payable” alongside her name.
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David Rich, the commission’s head of investigations, said in an internal memo that the inquiries “uncovered trustee benefits that may be explained, but not excused, by ignorance”.
Dr Abu-Zayyad told the commission in writing that the regular sums had been her salary. “The others no doubt represent reimbursement of travel and accommodation costs in Jordan and Iraq for me, Mariam, her grandfather and her father” plus campaigning, medical and medicinal costs, she said.
The commission received assurances from Mr Galloway that the £3,192 paid to him in ten cheques related to his expenses incurred as chairman.
Mr Galloway, then a Labour MP, launched the Mariam Appeal in 1998 in response to western military shelling against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Campaigners claimed there had been a rise in children’s leukaemia because of depleted uranium used in Allied ammunition in the Gulf War in 1991.
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Mr Galloway told The Times: “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.”
The latest documents were released to The Times by the Charity Commission after a freedom-of-information battle that went to the Supreme Court. An appeal will be heard by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. 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.
dkennedy@thetimes.co.uk