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Galloway to take action against new allegations

Legal Affairs Correspondent,Robert Verkaik
Saturday 26 April 2003 00:00 BST

George Galloway is to take legal action over allegations that he received £6m from Iraq in payments dating back to 1992. The fresh accusations against the Glasgow Kelvin MP were contained in a report carried by The Christian Science Monitor.

The Monitor, based in Boston, reported yesterday that documents it obtained in Iraq indicated that Saddam Hussein's government authorised six payments to Mr Galloway, totalling more than $10m, between July 1992 and January.

The paper said an unnamed general in Iraq's Republican Guard discovered the papers in a house outside Baghdad used by Saddam's son Qusay.

According to the paper, a document dated January 2003 authorised a cheque of $3m in recognition of Mr Galloway's "courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like [Tony] Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people".

Mr Galloway, through his legal team in London, vehemently denied the new allegations and said he would sue the Boston paper for libel. His solicitors, Davenport Lyons, issued a statement yesterday denouncing the claims as "totally untrue".

The statement added: "The newspaper itself accepts that the authenticity of the documents could not be verified. Indeed, the alleged content and wording of the documents referred to in the article raise very serious questions about their authenticity and provenance."

The lawyers said that Mr Galloway had told them that when he heard about the new allegations yesterday morning, he thought the alleged wording was "bordering on farce and is more like a Private Eye spoof".

His lawyers added: "These allegations are also totally untrue. George Galloway did not visit Iraq before 1993 and has never met Qusay Hussein or even heard of any of the other people whose names are supposed to be mentioned in the documents. These documents are also inconsistent with the other documents referred to in the press recently."

The statement said that Mr Galloway had not received any money from Saddam's regime in return for his support or for any other reason and that Mr Galloway intended to take legal action in respect of the publication of these false allegations.

"He hopes that the British media will not further disseminate them under the guise of public interest or otherwise."

Mr Galloway has already instructed his lawyers to bring a libel suit against The Daily Telegraph, which earlier reported on documents found in Baghdad that allegedly indicate that Saddam's government was giving him money.

Yesterday it was announced that a £1m appeal fund founded by the MP is to be investigated by the Charity Commission. The appeal was founded in 1999 to pay for the treatment of Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia, a disease that campaigners claimed was linked to the use of depleted uranium shells during the 1991 Gulf War.

Charity commissioners will decide whether the money for Mariam Hamza's medical care was raised through a charitable appeal but used for a non-charitable purpose.

If the investigation finds evidence of wrongdoing, it could lead to legal action for the recovery of any misspent money. Any evidence of criminal activity, said the commission last night, would be passed on to the police.

The Charity Commission's director of operations, Simon Gillespie, said: "This evaluation is in its very early stages. We have started the process of fact-finding to gain more information about the Mariam Appeal and what its purposes were. If some or all of the funds were charitable, we will need to establish that they were used only for charitable purposes."

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