Galloway suspended over charity's link with Saddam

George Galloway, a prominent opponent of the Iraq war, is to be suspended from the Commons for 18 days after being found guilty of not disclosing his links with Saddam Hussein's regime.

Parliament's anti-sleaze watchdogs found "strong circumstantial evidence" that the United Nations' discredited oil-for-food programme was used by the Iraqi government, with Mr Galloway's connivance, to fund the Mariam Appeal he set up partly to campaign against sanctions imposed on Iraq.

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The Standards and Privileges Committee said the Respect Party MP for Bethnal Green and Bow had brought the Commons into disrepute and breached its rules after failing to register his links with the Iraqi regime. However, a long-running inquiry into Mr Galloway's activities found no evidence that he personally received money from the Iraqi government.

The MPs said they would have merely asked Mr Galloway to apologise to the House but had opted for a more severe punishment because of his conduct during the investigation. They accused him of trying to conceal the true source of the appeal's Iraqi funding and not co-operating fully with a four-year inquiry by Sir Philip Mawer, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner. The Commons looks certain to vote to ban the former Labour MP from Westminster for 18 sittings from 8 October, when the House returns from its summer break.

Mr Galloway launched a strong counter-attack against the committee, claiming the political establishment had turned on him because of his vocal opposition to the Iraq war.

"They seem to be oblivious to the grotesque irony of an overwhelmingly pro-war Parliament censuring one of the leaders of the anti-war movement for the way that they conducted the anti-sanctions, anti-war campaign," he said.

He said he was only facing suspension because he had fought hard against false claims about him. "I am not a punchbag. If you aim low blows at me I will fight back. That's what I've done and that's what I've been suspended for," he said.

Ridiculing Sir Philip and MPs on the committee, he added: "I challenged everything that Sir Humphrey and Sir Bufton and Sir Tufton put to me because the points they were putting to me were false. I will not allow people to make false allegations against me."

The inquiry was put on hold while Mr Galloway fought a successful libel action against The Daily Telegraph, which suggested that he received money from the Iraqi regime. He won £150,000 in damages.

However, the committee said the MP should apologise to David Blair, the Telegraph journalist who found documents mentioning Mr Galloway in the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad after Saddam's fall. The committee concluded the documents were authentic and true. Sir Philip found "powerful" if circumstantial evidence that "a substantial part" of donations to the appeal from its chairman, the Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat, "came from moneys derived, via the oil-for- food programme, from the former Iraqi regime".

"Consequently Mr Galloway's political activities conducted through the appeal were thus, in part, funded by the regime and Mr Galloway at best turned a blind eye to what was happening and, on balance, was likely to have known and been complicit in what was going on."

Sir Philip said the MP had "consistently failed to live up to the expectation of openness and straightforwardness" and considered the inquiry part of an "attempted political assassination". He repeatedly denied facts, attacked witnesses "without justification" and made "wholly incorrect allegations without any factual basis", Sir Philip's report said.

The Mariam Appeal

The Mariam Appeal was set up by George Galloway in 1998 to highlight the plight of Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old Iraqi leukaemia patient, and to appeal for funds to treat her.

She was flown to Glasgow for treatment in a children's hospital. Mr Galloway said the child was suffering because of the use of uranium-tipped weapons in the 1991 Gulf War. He said her case illustrated the plight of children in Iraq under UN sanctions. The appeal then became a broad anti-sanctions campaign.