Fraudster behind plan to boycott badger cull farms
A LEADER of the anti-cull movement is a convicted fraudster, it emerged last night.
Jay Tiernan, one of the founders of Stop The Cull, has presented himself as the respectable front of animal activism, promoting his cause on BBC Newsnight. A judge even praised his ‘good character’ while sentencing him earlier this year for breaking an injunction on harassing people involved in the culls.
But the 44-year-old is really Gamal Eboe, an activist who once defrauded the Government out of thousands of pounds.
He has been described in court as an ‘extremist’ and was linked to the Stop Huntingdon Life Sciences group which ran a violent hate campaign against the laboratory’s workers in the late 1990s. Eboe was arrested in 2001 for protesting against HLS.
In 2003, he was handed an eight-month suspended sentence after submitting claims for £3,000 to the Department for Education for training students when he was actually on holiday in Greece. The staunch vegan, who claims to have ‘grown up in the countryside’, was born in Hammersmith, west London, to retired Lebanese property developer Abdul Eboe and his wife Maureen.
Eboe is believed to have served in the Army before becoming involved in activism. He married campaigner Louise Watson in 2002, but a source close to the family said they split less than three years later. His ex-wife was said to ‘want to forget the whole episode’.
Although he claims to live in Bristol, he gives his address as Bath on a dating website.
Much of Eboe’s activism is funded by crowdsourcing websites – which appeal to the public for donations – under his pseudonym Freeda Brocks, a pun on ‘free the badgers’.
He has received more than £30,000 since 2013 via such sites, including £9,820 towards court costs after he was ordered by a judge to pay the National Farmers’ Union £25,000.
He is listed as a full-time ‘campaigner’ in his company Direct Action Team’s records. Asked if calls for a boycott would hurt farmers, he said this week: ‘I really hope it does … not only in terms of sales; I hope it saps morale.’