Few people can be unmoved by the plight of a child with leukaemia. George Galloway, then a Labour MP, raised £1.5 million for the Mariam Appeal, established in 1998 and named after an Iraqi girl brought to Britain for medical treatment. Mr Galloway alleged that western shelling of Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein, had caused a rise in childhood leukaemia.
Though Mr Galloway, now an election candidate in Manchester Gorton, has moved on, questions about the appeal’s finances have not. The Times reveals today that the organisation paid more money to Mr Galloway’s then wife, Amineh Abu-Zayyad, than it did towards the Glasgow hospital treatment of Mariam Hamza, aged four. Dr Abu-Zayyad received a total of £84,000 even though there was no recruitment process for her position as the appeal’s medical officer and no contract of employment.
The scale of these payments has long been known to the Charity Commission but not made public. Mr Galloway’s fund failed to respect basic financial standards. He told the BBC in 2003 that he would open the Mariam Appeal’s books, but it emerged that the organisation kept no audited accounts. When pressed, Mr Galloway insisted that the appeal was set up as a campaign to oppose western policy in Iraq and not intended to be a charity; he complains that he was forced into registering it by the regulator.
This is unconscionable. The House of Commons select committee on standards and privileges reported in 2007 that Mr Galloway “consistently denied, prevaricated and fudged” on undeniable evidence that the appeal had received money from Saddam’s tyranny. We now know how much of the appeal’s money went to Mr Galloway’s family. It’s past time he answered plainly where the money came from and where it went.