Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Galloway sticks knife in over SWP sleaze

Further to yesterday’s post on the ongoing row over Respect/SWP leader John Rees accepting foreign donations from Tory “privateers”.

George Galloway (of all people) puts his oar in with a letter sent to the Secretary of the now tainted “Organising for Fighting Unions”, published last night on Socialist Wreakers & Splitters (use to be known as Socialist Unity).

Saint George, who of course, is that well known purveyor of truth and probity accuses Rees of being misleading, disingenuous, unaccountable, reckless, being obfuscation etc. Utterly unlike the gorgeous one himself.

Red Marie posted a comment yesterday about “schadenfreude”?

18 December 2007

Dear,
I have been sent a copy of a letter to you from John Rees, distributed by email to SWP members, along with an apology from the SWP Central Committee concerning the donation to OFFU of £5,000 from Dubai.


I think it would be appropriate for me to give you my side of this unfortunate story as John Rees’s letter is misleading. When a cheque arrived in January at the Respect Office made out to Respect from a person I did not know but who was clearly a foreign national who said he admired and supported me, I took the position obvious to everyone involved in these things, except perhaps the Labour Party’s former General Secretary, that we were grateful for the offer but we had to refuse it on legal grounds.

When John Rees suggested an alternative organisation for the money to be donated to, my assistant Kevin Ovenden had a discussion with him and with Elaine Graham-Leigh saying this might be potentially difficult with the Electoral Commission but that, if such a proposal were to be made, an obvious organisation to suggest was the Stop the War Coalition. This organisation had no formal links with Respect, pre-existed Respect and was an organisation, given the likely nature of the support of the individual concerned, which he might be happy to donate to. The Stop the War Coalition also has robust structures and would have been able to come to a collective decision over whether it might accept such a donation. Kevin, on my behalf, categorically argued against the suggestion by John Rees and Elaine Graham-Leigh that the cheque be reissued payable to OFFU.

There was no further communication between me or my staff and John Rees about this matter until the end of August. In particular, I and my office were unaware that John Rees had written back soliciting the donation for OFFU. He did not circulate that letter to me, to the officers of Respect, or, it seems, to the OFFU committee.

It is utterly disingenuous therefore to say that neither I nor John Rees knew of the company connections of the individual concerned when the donation was made to OFFU in June. I did not know the donation had been made to OFFU. It also seems to be the case that the committee and officers of OFFU were not told that a £5,000 donation from Dubai had been accepted in their name. A Google search after I did learn of the donation, in late August, established the unfortunate links which have caused so much embarrassment.

I did not include this issue in my letter to the Respect National Council in late August as I wanted to resolve matters concerning this donation as quickly as possible and without any possibility of it embarrassing either Respect or OFFU. It was however part of the my opening remarks at a meeting with SWP Central Committee members John Rees, Lindsey German, Chris Bambery and Alex Callinicos on 4 September. These remarks were made in the context of my accusation against John Rees of his lack of accountability and his recklessness on this and another matter. However, they were dismissed by John Rees as being a cover for a right wing attack on the left in Respect. At a meeting of 250 London SWP members later that week, Alex Callinicos referred to my having spent 25 minutes going on about an obscure cheque.

Despite this, I continued to deal with John Rees and Elaine Graham-Leigh on a confidential basis with regard to this cheque. I insisted on referring the matter to the Electoral Commission on the grounds that the donation might still have been illegal and, in any case, to demonstrate that we were complying with our obligations of transparency. However, my best efforts met with resistance and obfuscation all the way down the line by both Rees and Graham-Leigh.

I raised the connection between the Dubai donation and the Interserve privateers in an email to John Rees, Elaine Graham-Leigh, Alex Callinicos, Lindsey German and Chris Bambery three months ago – on 10 September.

John Rees breezily dismissed these concerns in an emailed response on 13 September. He wrote:
“…this was an individual donation not a corporate donatation (sic). Many people work for firms that do bad things~but accepting money from them as individuals does not imply either that they endorse the actions of their employers or that we endorse the actions of the firms. Consequently, the whole ‘anything in the world can be connected by six degrees of separation’ argument falls at the first hurdle.
“More broadly, why should any labour movement body not accept a bit of the profit coming back to the workers so long as there are no strings attached.”

I continued to press John Rees and Elaine Graham-Leigh to refer this to the Electoral Commission until finally I felt obliged, not least for my own reputation, having been the victim of a genuine witch-hunt over donations from the Middle East to the Mariam Appeal, to refer the matter myself. The Electoral Commission are currently looking into the matter.
Given how widely the SWP leadership raised this issue in their own organisation, it was only going to be a matter of time before the issue got into the press, and so it has proved. I am sorry that it has taken press exposure to bring the necessary action to bear on this issue, although I note that John Rees’s letter does not actually suggest the return of the donation, which is the recommendation of the SWP Central Committee.

It would certainly be my view that the cheque should never have been solicited for OFFU for two reasons. Firstly, OFFU was set up as a result of a decision by the Respect Officers’ Committee, its National Council and resolution of the Respect Annual Conference. Its leading officers were members of Respect and one of the signatories to the bank account was an employee of Respect. Respect employees were engaged more or less full time in arranging OFFU’s only conference thus far, a conference which lost £5,000. These are connections to Respect which made the donation to OFFU potentially illegal and certainly potentially politically embarrassing. The second reason is, of course, the fact that the major shareholder in the Dubai company is leading PFI privateer Interserve – a connection which is far from “tenuous”. The Stop the War Coalition might have felt able to accept that money – I cannot see how a body of trade union militants would.

I am very sorry that this embarrassment has occurred for all who are involved in OFFU in good faith, but it entirely vindicates my criticisms of the way in which John Rees has operated both with respect to Respect and OFFU.
With best wishes,
George Galloway MP

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a slightly forgotten episode where George was involved with two associates of Osama Bin Laden.
Saad Al Fagih and Mohammed al Massari.
The former has been named as an Al Queda Terrorist associate after his credit card paid for a satellite phone used in the East African Embassy bombings.
The latter,a vicious anti semitic Islamist who had been trying to set up a London base for Bin Laden.
Both Afghan vets.

Galloway seems a little,err unclear on the true nature of his finacial relationship with the pair.



“Last year the Saudi opposition hired a hall in Westminster, and as the MP sponsoring it I had to pay for the hire; they then paid me that money back. Those are the only circumstances in which a single penny changed hands.”
Sunday Times 1996


actually.

” I have now had the chance (having paid for the privilege) of studying my Visa Card records going back to September 1994.

Or course it is impossible to say with absolute certainty what each and every transaction from that long ago represents. But for the Committee’s interest, I list herewith transactions which strike me as having been likely to have been paid by me, by Visa, and reimbursed by Dr Sa’ad and Al Fagih of the CDLR.

19/5/95 British Airways £120.00
26/5/96 Open Flight Ltd £490.00
31/5/95 James Richardson Ltd £ 95.15
27/9/95 British Airways £122.00
28/9/95 British Airways £ 91.00
11/11/95 Open Flight Ltd £553.90
30/11/95 American Express £135.00
12/12/95 Open Flight Ltd £824.00
19/2/96 American Express £ 30.00
26/2/96 Sime Malloch Ltd £440.62



Evidence to a House Of Commons Committee
1997

Anonymous said...

sorry, missed this bit

Mr Galloway was paid £5,000 in cash by Al-Fagih in late 1995 to early 1996 to repay costs incurred on behalf of others during the campaign to prevent Al-Masari's deportation.

He was also given £1800 in cash by Al-Fagih to pass on to academics to help with the same campaign. Mr Galloway has never identified the academics.

Full record

In the parliamentary committee's concluding report they found that: 'It is unacceptable for any member to be involved in recycling cash between third parties.

"It is also highly undesirable for any member to act on behalf of any organisation where no full record is kept of all financial transactions with which the member is associated.

"It is bound to be susceptible to misinterpretation and risks bringing the house into disrepute. We are particularly concerned that Mr Galloway's actions were on behalf of an overseas interest.'