Every dubious donation risked degrading the monarchy
ASAUDI tycoon who was promised help to get a knighthood, a former Kremlin banker whose money mysteriously vanished and a suitcase stuffed full of cash and handed directly to the future King. It sounds like a far-fetched Sunday night drama, but these are all allegations which have rocked the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Foundation in the past year alone. Two middlemen were dismissed and Charles’s closest aide sacked – not as a result of the Prince’s own findings, but out of embarrassment that The Mail on Sunday made the bombshell revelations public. When Charles accepted £2.5million in cash from a Qatari sheik, much of it was in €500 notes – a denomination dubbed the ‘Bin
Laden banknote’ because of its association with money-laundering and since scrapped. Last night, the name, which will forever be associated with terrorism, has another resonance at Clarence House. For it has now been revealed the Prince’s charity accepted a £1million donation from the Bin Laden family themselves. A source close to the Prince’s Foundation desperately sought to explain away the donation, saying the charity’s trustees had decided the evil wrought by Osama Bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, ought not to impact on the reputation of the rest of the family. Why, they reasoned, should the Bin Ladens become global pariahs due to one bad apple? The money provided by wealthy Bin Laden brothers Bakr and Shafiq was above board, they decided. The charitable goals of the Prince of Wales would be one step closer to being realised thanks to this benevolent cash injection. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth. After all, the public would probably never find out, because donations to Charles’s charity were not disclosed. There’s no suggestion anyone benefited personally from all the cash swilling around the Foundation. Yet it was Charles who decided where it was spent.
He has decided that it is right and proper for millions to be spent on Dumfries House, the Ayrshire mansion he ‘saved for the nation’, for example. It boasts a Japanese garden, an allotment in the shape of the Union Flag, an arboretum and a maze. Inside, gold leaf adorns the walls of the house itself. There is a wellness centre funded by a Chinese-American plastic surgeon who stars on a reality TV show.
And as Charles’s ambitions for his charitable empire grew, so did his desire for the cash to fund it. Desperate to make his mark as a lifelong King-in-waiting, he expended ever more energy on trying to secure his legacy.
Once, upon returning from an official visit to Birmingham where he saw a group of excluded school children watching a performance of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Charles set up a new charity: Children & the Arts.
YET even that was engulfed in a scandal when The Mail on Sunday revealed it had been forced to close, swallowing £200,000 from a former Kremlin banker who believed he was gifting the money to another good cause.
It seems Charles’s sons William and Harry had their suspicions about the ever-expanding tentacles of their father’s charitable kingdom some time ago. Rather than join him, they established their own foundation at Kensington Palace.
This was designed to be completely separate to the myriad of charitable ventures established by their father and which by then required a small army of staff to keep them ticking over. Earlier this year, Harry appeared to distance himself from some of his father’s associates, having reportedly raised ‘major concerns’ in an email.
But Charles’s thirst for donations is perhaps best illustrated in a cache of letters currently on sale in America. Revealed by this newspaper earlier this month, the letters show Charles writing incessantly to his American fundraiser, Robert Higdon, to check whether wealthy philanthropists were paying up.
It was Higdon who first designed the plan that Charles would not sit down with donors until they had parted with the cash. No more indigestion from fearing whether a meal with the ghastly nouveau riche was ‘a waste of my time’.
Charles’s aide Michael Fawcett took up Higdon’s blueprint. On August 18, 2017, Mr Fawcett wrote to Busief Lamlum, an aide to Saudi billionaire Mahfouz Marei Mubarak Bin Mahfouz, saying: ‘In light of the ... generosity of His Excellency... I am happy to confirm to you, in confidence, that we are willing and happy to support and contribute to the application for Citizenship. I can further confirm that we are willing to make [an] application to increase His Excellency’s honour from Honorary CBE to that of KBE.’
The letter, on official headed paper and published in The Mail on Sunday, is now at the heart of an investigation by the Met police.
Charles has been accused of meddling in politics. Now, in using his position to draw in money for his pet projects, he risks the same criticism. For it’s not his fundraising that is the problem. It is his willingness to degrade his office in exchange for cash for causes that he – and he alone – considers worthy.
It is naivety at best and, at worst, shows a worrying lack of judgment from our future King.
During this Platinum Jubilee year, the only plausible way out of this mess now is to publish a full list of those who have donated to his charities and how much.