Now Charles charity faces probe over €3m in cash from Qatari
THE Charity Commission is considering whether it has a role to play in investigating one of Prince Charles’s charities after it accepted bags of cash worth millions from a Qatari sheik.
It has emerged that former Qatari prime minister Sheik Hamad Bin Jassim Bin Jaber Al Thani donated £2.5million to the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF).
Three donations of nearly £900,000 a time – in 500 euro notes – were stuffed in carrier bags and a holdall. Such massive cash donations are ‘very unusual’, a source from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs said yesterday – although not forbidden.
While it is legal to both hand over and accept cash in the millions, concern about huge ready-money transactions has arisen in recent years. They can be used to help launder ill-gotten gains, and potentially give enormous benefits to tax avoiders.
A supporter of Charles admitted that while ‘the optics are unhelpful’, ‘no rules were broken’, and the unusually packaged donations were likely to have been accepted to
‘avoid causing offence’ to the sheik. But a spokesman for the Charity Commission said yesterday: ‘We’re considering whether there’s a role for the commission to investigate these matters.’
It is only a few months since the Metropolitan Police and Charity Commission launched inquiries into allegations of a different nature surrounding links between Charles’s Prince’s Foundation – a different body to the PWCF – and Saudi billionaire Mahfouz Marei Mubarak Bin Mahfouz’s foundation.
Prince Charles’s long-term confidante Michael Fawcett resigned as head of the Prince’s Foundation at the same time – following claims he promised to help donor Dr Bin Mahfouz get not only British citizenship but a knighthood too. Prince Charles has said he had ‘no knowledge’ of any cash-for-honours offers.
The latest claims involving Middle Eastern money in yesterday’s Sunday Times concerned donations of £2.5million made by Sheik Hamad, 62, between 2011 and 2015.
The donations from the sheik, who was prime minister of Qatar from 2007 to 2013, were said to have been personally accepted by Prince Charles. On one occasion around £900,000 was said to have been handed over in carrier bags from luxury shop Fortnum and Mason.
Another time, the sheik was said to have been in a private meeting with the prince at Clarence House, in 2015, when he gave him £850,000 in a holdall.
Aides are said to have then counted the money – the €500 notes are nicknamed ‘Bin Ladens’ thanks to their popularity with terrorist money launderers, as well as drug barons – before it was paid into the account of the prince’s charity at central London royal bank Coutts.
The meetings with the sheik were not in the official Court Circular cataloguing royal engagements.
There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by anyone involved – but the nature of the dealings is raising many eyebrows. The sheik has a personal fortune of up to
THE future of the monarchy depends upon two simple things: Its probity and its ability to remain above the political fray.
The Prince of Wales’s decision to accept £2.5million in cash from a controversial Qatari politician for one of his charities throws both those qualities into question.
Leaving aside why one of the donations was handed to Charles in carrier bags stuffed with €500 notes – though such a sordid image is a terrible look for a future King.
Questions will inevitably be raised as to how the Prince’s charitable fund secured such generous sums of money.
Clarence House insist the donations were entirely above board.
Perhaps so, but it displays a worrying lack of judgment.
If Charles is to be a successful monarch, he will need much wiser counsel.