Something that nobody denies, not even GG, is that it is certainly at least a possibility that some money has ended up in GG's bank account that was once the property of the Iraqi people. The undisputed facts are:
1) GG ran the Mariam Appeal, a charity (though not a registered charity in the UK due to a cockup in failing to register it) which had the twin aims of helping a little Iraqi girl who had got leukemia, and campaigning against sanctions in Iraq.
2) GG received travel expenses from this charity and his wife was paid a salary by it - as far as I can tell those who have looked into the matter found that this salary was paid for pukka work related to the aims of the charity and was not a slush-fund payment.
3) An important donor to the Mariam Appeal was a Jordanian called Faraz Zureikat, who did a lot of business in Saddam-era Iraq.
Putative facts which cannot be counted as "established", but which cannot be ruled out and which GG has at least entertained as a possibility are
4) Zureikat received money from trading in oil allocations under the oil-for-food program.
Sidebar 1: I don't know why anyone regards point 4) as so bloody important but they do. As far as I can tell, it was not illegal nor even particularly immoral to trade in oil allocations under the oil-for-food program (the program itself was certainly open to criticism to say the least, but that is another matter). The way that the program was set up meant that the allocations were *intended* to generate a profit for the non-Iraqi traders who got them, and the distribution of the allocation options was put under the control of Saddam. I don't understand the complaint that allocations were used as patronage by Saddam, since I don't see how any other use of them could possibly have been anticipated.
5) Some of the money effectively given to Zureikat through oil allocations was earmarked for him to forward on to the Mariam Appeal.
Sidebar 2: GG has entertained this as a possibility. His view on the subject is that he was at that time raising funds to campaign against the sanctions, which he regarded as an extremely great moral evil, and that in order to fight against that evil he was prepared to accept money no matter what its source. However it is also claimed that ...
6) Galloway knew about 5) and thus the allocations to Zureikat were effectively used to "launder" payments made from Saddam to GG.
... and Galloway does in fact deny this. So at the moment, I think he has basically copped a plea to "accepting money that he knew at least might have come from Saddam". If 6) could be proven, then Galloway wuld potentially be in trouble for not correctly declaring the source of the Mariam Appeal's contributions, but I doubt it and this would be very much a misdemeanour rather than a felony, so to speak. It might not even be all that politically embarrassing, since this kerfuffle refers to the pre-1999 sanctions period, not the period leading up to the second Iraq War.
Now we move on to very contentious allegations indeed, which are vigorously denied. Most of the things below here would be serious criminal allegations and accusations of them would be quite seriously libellous if untrue, which is why I would like to make it clear that I state them without endorsement. It is claimed that:
7) Some of the money received in 5) above came not just from trading in oil allocations, but from taking kickbacks from oil companies to procure allocations for them from Saddam.
Sidebar 3: These are the "illegal payments" referred to in the Senate report. The evidence for these is the disputed (to say the least) documents, plus the interviews with unnamed Iraqi officials.
8) Galloway knew about 7) and was thus involved in arranging corrupt side-payments under the oil-for-food program.
Sidebar 4: This, of course, is the dynamite allegation which would be serious jail-time if proved. But the evidence looks pretty weak so far IMO. The Senate hearing appears to have concluded this way on the basis of an interview with an Iraqi official which says "people named on the documents usually knew all about the transactions discussed" rather than naming Galloway specifically in the context of a specific transaction. One would need an awful lot more than this to get a conviction beyond reasonable doubt; I would personally run a mile rather than take it into a libel hearing as my only grounds for a defence of justification (which of course would not arise because the Senate hearings are covered by privilege).
Summary: So therefore, the case against GG to date is not nothing, but seems to me to be based between equivocating between plausible (but not proven) allegations of things which are not crimes and much less plausible allegations of much more serious crimes. However it doesn't end there. There also appears to be ...
9) Allegations that between 2001 and 2003, Galloway received payments by some means or other from Saddam's government to finance his campaigning against the war.
As far as I can tell nobody has any evidence for this, documentary or otherwise. Indeed, the Senate report itself does not actually make this accusation in so many words. However, it devotes quite a chunk of its text to descriptions of GG's antiwar campaigning in the UK and as far as I can see, positively invites people to draw the inference, which lots of people have duly drawn. While I am no friend of the "innocent until proven guilty" principle when applied to politicians (rather than to criminal defendants in a trial), this seems to me to be too bad. If only for the purpose of prudently managing the risks to their personal credibility, sensible commentators should run a mile from making this allegation; there isn't a shred of evidence to support it, and it is exactly the sort of thing for which evidence ought to be quite easy to come up with (there would be some sort of money trail which ought to have been picked up by normal money-laundering controls, for example).
and 10) that the full accounts of the Mariam Appeal, which were not available to the Charities Commission and were apparently transferred to Faraz Zureikat and lost in Baghdad, will reveal some other forms of skullduggery (presumably extra unauthorised payments to Galloway).
This last one is a bit of a last-ditch hope; it is certainly annoying that key documents have "gone missing" and it is certainly bloody bad form for Galloway to have been managing a charity for which the accounts can't be produced. But to be honest, pinning one's hopes on "lost documents which would tell all if only they weren't lost" is more of a hallmark of the conspiracy-theory community than any sensible politics and if this is the best that the anti-GG posse can raise, then they're in a hopeless situation.
thus concludeth.
best, dd
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