The personal representative office of Iran’s supreme leader in London was given more than £100,000 by the British government as part of its coronavirus furlough scheme, annual accounts show.
Figures lodged with Companies House last month show that the Islamic Centre of England received £109,476 from the coronavirus job retention scheme, as the government furlough grants were officially titled, despite long-running disputes with Tehran.
The centre is a mosque and cultural office in a former cinema and bingo hall in Maida Vale, west London. It is a major centre for Shia Muslim worship, education and outreach.
It also serves as an office for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who has appointed its director, Seyed Hashem Moosavi, a mid-ranking cleric.
The centre operates as a company limited by guarantee under UK law, which made it eligible for the furlough scheme. Many of its activities would have been curtailed or stopped by the UK coronavirus lockdown, including worship.
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It is unclear how many employees benefited from the payments. The Islamic Centre has not replied to a request for comment.
The use of UK taxpayers’ money by what is essentially an outpost of the Iranian regime will be controversial.
The centre’s website explicitly condemns western materialism, comparing it with the religious and spiritual focus of Islam. Iranian officials regularly condemn Britain as “the Little Satan”, regarding it as a hostile power.
During lockdown, the centre, which is also registered as a charity, was criticised by the Charity Commission for having hosted a vigil in memory of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Soleimani was killed in January last year by an American drone strike in Baghdad.
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He had been designated as a terrorist by the UK government for his organisation of Shia militias in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq where they were responsible for kidnapping and killing British soldiers and civilians.
The commission said: “The event risked associating the charity with a speaker who may have committed an offence under the Terrorism Acts, as the speaker was filmed during the event appearing to praise and call for support for Soleimani.
“The trustees failed to intervene or provide a counter narrative. The following day the trustees organised a further event for Soleimani and published statements on the charity’s website offering condolence and praise for him.”
A speaker at one of the events was Massoud Shadjareh, head of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, another organisation linked to Tehran. He told the crowd: “We work hard to make sure there will be many, many more Qasem Soleimanis. We aspire to become like him.”
At the time, it was reported that the government was also investigating the Islamic Centre’s finances. That did not stop it applying for furlough scheme grants later that year.
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The use of the furlough scheme to support wages of the Islamic Centre’s staff is one of several indications of the unusual relationship between Iran, its outreach centres and Britain.
The UK has taken a hard line against the Islamic Republic, though it refused to follow President Trump’s lead in 2018 when he pulled out of the deal to restrict its nuclear programme in return for the lifting of sanctions.
The British government is outspoken in its condemnation of Iran’s use of western prisoners, particularly dual nationals such as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, as bargaining chips in disputes with the UK.
Richard Ratcliffe, Nazanin’s husband, is on a hunger strike outside the Foreign Office in protest at the government’s failure to resolve the issue, because of the hard line it has taken in negotiations with Tehran over an unresolved debt.
Iranians travel freely to the UK, however, and people close to the regime have been granted citizenship. Ali Avaei, the son of the director of the equivalent Islamic Centre in Manchester, stood for parliament for the Liberal Democrats in 2019. His uncle, a former judge, was Iran’s justice minister, and has been sanctioned for alleged human rights abuses.
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Avaei has said that he has ideological differences with the Iranian regime, some of which are highlighted by the London centre’s director in his introduction on the organisation’s website.
Moosavi says the centre’s purpose is to help protect people from the “misleading and extravagant worldly life” pursued “especially in the West”.
Moosavi was appointed to the post by Khamenei in 2019. He has the clerical rank of Hujjat-al-Islam, one step below an ayatollah. His predecessor, Mohammad Ali Shomali, who has the same rank, is a leading advocate of dialogue between religions and is head of the International Institute for Islamic Studies in the Iranian holy city of Qom.