Analysis
Inquiry into King’s charity ‘would have offended
important people’
Patrick
Butler
Social
policy editor
MP who first called for inquiry says he is not
surprised the Metropolitan police have decided to take no further action
Mon 21 Aug
2023 20.06 BST
Asked about
the Metropolitan police decision to take no further action in the
cash-for-honours allegation involving King Charles’s Prince’s Foundation, the
author and former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said wearily: “I’m not
actually surprised. To have taken action would have offended important people
in society.”
Baker, the
author of the 2019 criticism of the royal family, And What Do You Do?, wrote to
the Met in 2021 calling for an investigation after press reports emerged that a
longtime senior aide of the then-Prince Charles had offered a Saudi billionaire
(and donor to causes close to the king’s heart) help to secure a knighthood and
UK citizenship in return for donations.
That offer,
made in 2017 by Michael Fawcett, in a letter to Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin
Mahfouz, made it clear the Prince’s Foundation (founded by the king, who
remains its president) would be “happy and willing” to use its influence to
help smooth the way for Mahfouz.
After
Baker’s letter, the Met set about considering whether there had been breaches
of the laws around the sale of honours and bribery. After 18 months of
interviewing witnesses and trawling through documents, and after advice from
the Crown Prosecution Service, it decided the investigation would be
discontinued.
There is no
suggestion of any wrongdoing on behalf of the king – who said he had no
knowledge of Fawcett’s offers of help. Nor is there any suggestion of
wrongdoing by Mahfouz. Spokespeople for the king have insisted in the past that
his charities operate independently of the monarch in matters of fundraising
and governance.
And yet it
is not the only embarrassing episode involving the king’s charities and wealthy
donors. Last year, the Sunday Times reported that between 2011 and 2015 the
Prince of Wales Charitable Fund accepted 3m euros in cash stuffed into a
suitcase and a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag from a billionaire Qatari
sheikh.
Despite the
questionable optics of this transaction (Baker opined that this was “what one
might expect from a South American drug baron, not the heir to the British
throne”), the Charity Commission chose not to investigate further, concluding
that there was no evidence of illegality.
While the
king himself has escaped investigation, his charities have not. The
foundation’s former chair, Douglas Connell, resigned in September 2021 after a
£100,000 donation from a wealthy Russian donor was accepted – and then rejected
– by the charity’s ethics committee after doubts over the provenance of the
cash.
Two months
later, Fawcett, by then the foundation’s chief executive, resigned in the wake
of the cash-for-honours allegations. The foundation’s board, acknowledging the
reputational damage caused by what it called “historic fundraising practices”,
carried out an internal review to ensure the charity in future “always acts
with utmost integrity and probity”. It said trustees had been unaware of
Fawcett’s alleged actions.
The
foundation remains under investigation from the Scottish charity regulator into
a series of issues relating to the charity’s use and handling of grants and
donations. The Charity Commission for England and Wales is investigating the
Mahfouz Foundation charity – set up by the aforementioned Saudi billionaire –
over financial dealings involving the Prince’s Foundation.
Baker and
other critics of the monarchy believe that police and charity regulators are
wrongly reluctant to bring the king himself into the focus of their
investigations, but for now a cloud still hovers over the foundation.
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