show that it paid more than £26million in two years into an “employer-financed retirement benefit scheme” and millions of pounds in “loans” to Mr Ismail. The £26million could, of course, represent generous pensions for OneE’s 45 staff, averaging almost £600,000 each, nearly 10 times their average salaries. Or it could be a scheme to save Mr Ismail and his fellow directors paying almost any income tax. HMRC bluntly describes schemes of this type, which are legal, as “tax avoidance.”

Another of Mr Ismail’s companies, the now-liquidated 1st Ethical Tax Planning, was subject to an HMRC investigation, according to documents at Companies House. The directors were reported by the liquidator under the Company Directors’ Disqualification Act, though Mr Ismail has not been disqualified. The auditors of OneE Group resigned in 2013 and the accounts of a related company, OneE Tax, have been revised and resubmitted – twice.

The outcome of the HMRC investigation is unknown. OneE did not return calls seeking comment, though the company has previously said that the pensions wheeze was merely “responsible tax planning” with nothing “aggressive or abusive” about it. Mr Ismail said last night that he had resigned as a director of OneE three months ago, but declined to respond to questions about the company or 1st Ethical Tax Planning. He said that he had “never engaged in tax avoidance of any description”.

Mend’s own accounts are not yet available, but in the last two years Mr Ismail and a fellow director of OneE have donated hundreds of thousands of pounds to their personal charity, 1st Ethical Charitable Trust, which has spent large sums on UK community projects, almost including Mend.

So why are Mend and YouElect urging Muslims to participate in a system which many of the two organisations’ key figures fundamentally reject?

One clue may come in Mr Niamatullah’s speech, in which he said that Muslims should act as an “underground movement… to affect and influence people”.

Mr Ali’s day job is as a community affairs co-ordinator for the Islamic Forum of Europe (IFE), an extremist group based at the East London Mosque, which wants to create a Sharia state in Europe.

According to a training session for recruits, the IFE’s goal is “not simply to give da’wah [call to the faith]. Our goal is to create the True Believer, to then mobilise those believers into an organised force for change who will carry out da’wah, hisbah [enforcement of Islamic law] and jihad. This

certainly will lead to social change and iqamatud-Deen [an Islamic social, economic and political order]”. IFE’s “entryism” helped to install Lutfur Rahman as the Labour leader of Tower Hamlets council. He then gave them millions of pounds in grants. Mend also appears to have been funded byTower Hamlets. Mr Rahman was expelled from the Labour Party, but re-elected as an independent, with IFE help. He represents Islamism’s closest ally in UK political office.

Mend and the IFE cannot, of course, hope to replicate their success in heavily Muslim Tower Hamlets across the UK. But by building links with an unsuspecting political establishment, they can further the Islamist agenda.

Mend’s “Muslim manifesto” attacks the way that the government has treated Islamists as “beyond the pale” and demands they be brought into “partnership” with Whitehall. Mend wants to return to the position under the previous administration where nonviolent extremists were treated as legitimate representatives of their community. Mr Ali, for instance, was the chairman of the main liaison group between the Muslim community and the Metropolitan Police.

Mend has enjoyed some success in this field, building links with some police and crime commissioners, including Greater Manchester’s Tony Lloyd and West Yorkshire’s Mark Burns-Williamson.

The manifesto claims that the Government’s promotion of British values “provides a fertile environment for the festering of far-Right ideas” and says that “integration narratives” are “concerning”. It claims, falsely, that “government policy continues to conflate religion with extremism”.

It makes valid points about discrimination against Muslims in employment and antiMuslim attacks, which are on the rise, albeit from a low base. But it uses selective evidence, often choosing the gloomiest opinion polls and the most damning studies to paint a picture of a community under siege. (Mend’s Facebook page is far more inflammatory, hosting, for instance, an article which says that Muslims may face a holocaust.)

It also claims that far-Right extremism is a “growing problem”. But, according to the anti-fascist group Hope not Hate, the British far-Right is “shrinking” and “in its worst state for almost 20 years”. The