Charity Commission will investigate Mariam fund

The £1M appeal fund founded by George Galloway MP to help treat a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from Leukaemia is to be investigated by the Charity Commission.

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 to the police.

The decision to launch the inquiry was triggered by a complaint made by a member of the public to the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith QC who has joint jurisdiction over charity regulation in this country.

The involvement of the Charity Commission is a further setback for Mr Galloway who denounced moves yesterday to investigate the Mariam Appeal as part of a "witch hunt" against him and warned it would be "perverse" for Lord Goldsmith to try to rule his anti-war campaigning were illegal.

Mr Galloway also repeated his intention to sue the Daily Telegraph after it claimed on Tuesday it had found documents in Baghdad showing he received at least £375,000 a year from the Iraqi regime.

Although the Mariam Appeal is not a registered charity, it falls within the jurisdiction of the Charity Commission and the office of the Attorney General because it may have involved a public appeal for money for a charitable purpose.

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

The appeal was founded in 1999 to pay for the treatment of Mariam Hamza, a four-year-old Iraqi girl suffering from leukaemia, which campaigners claimed was linked to the use of depleted uranium shells in the 1991 Gulf War.

However, in a letter to Lord Goldsmith released yesterday, Mr Galloway said he had always made clear the appeal was also a campaigning organisation, which pressed for the lifting of UN sanctions on Iraq. He wrote: "The Mariam Appeal which I founded has been involved in highly publicised, highly political campaigning against the Government's policies for some years without a whisper of complaint from anyone in your department.".

The appeal's activities had, he said, included taking a busload of medicines to Iraq, arranging visits by politicians and journalists, and organising an international conference on the links between depleted uranium and childhood illnesses in Iraq.

He said those activities were well known to the fund's three principal backers – the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Jordanian businessman Fawaz Zureikat, who was the appeal's chairman. Mr Galloway said his own travel on behalf of the appeal had been declared in the Commons Register of Members' Interests.

He said that of the total of almost £1m raised over four years, the UAE donated more than £500,000 in 1999, the Saudis gave £100,000 in 1999 and 2000, while "the bulk of the rest" came from Mr Zureikat.

The full list of donors to the Mariam Appeal – including several undisclosed donors who have given up to £4,000 – are likely to be revealed when the company opens its books.

Mr Galloway said yesterday the appeal had received several smaller financial gifts which have never been disclosed to protect the donors' identities.

Mr Galloway insisted yesterday that the provenance of the documents found by The Daily Telegraph was "extremely suspicious" and confirmed he would be pursuing his libel action against the paper.