Madeleine McCann’s parents have £750,000 in fund for private search if police end hunt

Kate and Gerry McCann set up fund to handle well-wishers’ donations 12 days after three-year-old disappeared from family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, in 2007

Kate and Gerry McCann have £750,000 in a fund for a private search if police end the hunt for their missing daughter Madeleine McCann (Joe Giddens/PA)

Madeleine McCann’s parents have more than £750,000 in a fund to pay for a private search if the police hunt ever ends.

The latest accounts for Madeleine's Fund: Leaving No Stone Unturned Ltd show a balance of £773,629 for the year ending 31 March 2020.

According to the publicly-available documents, the money will be used to “secure the safe return to her family” of Madeleine McCann and to ensure her “abduction is thoroughly investigated” and her alleged abductors “are identified and brought to justice”.

Madeleine was three years old when she went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in the Praia da Luz resort on the Algarve, in Portugal, in May 2007.

Doctors Kate and Gerry set up the fund 12 days after their daughter vanished as donations from well-wishers flooded in.

According to the accounts, a book written by Ms McCann about her daughter’s disappearance, which was published in 2011, brought in £6,543 in the year to last March.

The documents also show the McCanns were reimbursed £4,229 from the fund to cover legal costs for an ongoing libel case in Portugal against former police chief Goncalo Amaral.

Mr Amaral wrote a book in 2008 that alleged their three-year-old daughter had died in their holiday flat and that they had faked her kidnapping to cover up the tragedy – allegations they have always strongly denied.

Madeleine McCann was three years old when she went missing from her family’s holiday apartment in the Praia da Luz resort on the Algarve, in Portugal, in May 2007 (Family handout/PA)

In June last year, German police identified a convicted paedophile as a suspect in Madeleine’s disappearance.

Investigators said the man, later named as Christian Brueckner in reports, lived in Portugal between 1995 and 2007, apart from brief spells in Germany.

Christian Wolters, of the Braunschweig public prosecutor’s office, said German investigators believed Madeleine was dead.

But London’s Metropolitan Police, which opened Operation Grange in 2013 after the Portuguese police probe into the missing youngster failed to make any progress, reportedly told the McCanns they were continuing to treat their daughter as a missing person.

According to the Daily Star, a spokesman for the Home Office said “careful consideration” was being given to a request for more funding - believed to be about £300,000 - to continue the UK police investigation, which has reportedly cost more than £12.5m to date.