There remain a great many questions to be answered — especially to whom the charity’s assets have been demised — and without a proper inquiry we will probably never know. I wrote to David Cameron in January 2010, when he was still leader of the opposition, so I can understand why he didn’t want Liam Fox to be properly investigated: he knows just how bad things really are. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
Tory MP Louise Mensch, née Bagshawe’s, performance on Have I Got News for You this weekend, will probably be best remembered for assertion that protesters occupying the City of London who have bought coffee from Starbucks should not be listened to; ‘if they prop up a corporate titan like Starbucks they really need to think about how much capitalism they don’t like’. This is rather like saying that anyone who opposes nuclear power should stop using electricity or anyone who has a problem with the agriculture industry should give up food.
But regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to learn that it was her defence of Liam Fox raised my eyebrow, although not that much as I’d seen this coming.
This flags a problem former Guardian editor Peter Preston discussed at the weekend; there is a lack of due process. But I don’t agree with Preston that Fox had a ‘raw deal’. Just the opposite. A resignation is not necessarily a political death, after all Peter Mandleson resigned twice from the last Labour government, but it is a cleansing act.
If the Conservatives succeed in convincing enough of us that Fox resigned over a relatively minor personal indiscretion – an infatuation with a Walter Mitty character – he will return, while those of us who blew the whistle on the bigger issues will be told he paid for all that stuff. This is why it remains important that all accusations around Liam Fox, the Atlantic Bridge, the running of a parallel foreign policy, who funded him and how are fully investigated. His resignation should draw a line under nothing. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
In a remarkable aside in today’s Sunday Telegraph Amanda Bowman, chief executive of Atlantic Bridge Inc., is quoted as describing her organisation’s UK charity as a ‘shell game’. So how did this confidence trick work and who was being conned? My guess is that she’s referring to the arrangement described in the UK charity’s accounts dated 3 February 2007, that is: ‘When events occur in America, expenses are paid by the Atlantic Bridge Inc (US), run by Scott Syfert. If a British citizen wishes to attend an event in the US, and prefers to give a donation in GBP, the UK charity will accept the donations on behalf of Atlantic Bridge Inc.’ This sounds very much like a shell game to me, with the taxpayer playing the role of the mark who subsidised the operation.
Perhaps if the Charity Commission had chosen to investigate this aspect of my 2009 complaint, they would have identified the shell game for sure. The commission insists the charity’s trustees were co-operative, but handicapped by their ignorance of the law (poor fools). I would imagine that successful confidence tricksters come across as something they are not, almost by definition. And it certainly suited these trustees to play dumb.
But this piece is concerned mainly with role of Tory minister Lord Astor of Hever, an Atlantic Bridge trustee and so personally responsible for ensuring its operations stayed within the law. It’s about time this hereditary peer faced closer scrutiny. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
In a clear act of cowardice, the Conservative Party has moved to scapegoat Ursula Brennan, permanent under secretary at the Ministry of Defence, in order to protect the prime minister from scrutiny in the wake of Dr Liam Fox’s resignation. But I can now reveal that David Cameron’s office has been fully aware of Dr Fox’s involvement with the Atlantic Bridge since at least January 2010.
Earlier this week Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, claimed that Ursula Brennan had been aware of concerns about Dr Fox’s behaviour in the summer but ‘did not take further action’ and went on to tell MPs: ‘It should have been escalated to the cabinet secretary who would then have notified the prime minister. Had that happened in this case, this probably would have been addressed at a much earlier stage.’ This was a cowardly act by Young, who knows Brennan cannot defend herself.
If it is the case that Ursula Brennan should have rung the alarm bell over Liam Fox’s activities in the summer, then it must also be the case that David Cameron’s own office should have taken action in January 2010, when I wrote to the then leader of the opposition. I made Cameron aware of the three concurrent investigations that I had triggered into Atlantic Bridge; with the Charity Commission, HM Revenue and Customs and, in the USA, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
With no less than four members of the cabinet closely associated with the Atlantic Bridge — George Osborne, William Hague, Michael Gove and Fox — Downing Street could and should have been keeping a close eye on developments. It is hard to believe the prime minister was not aware that Fox’s charity had been ordered to cease its unlawful activities and Cameron should have known that it had had to be bailed out by Michael Hintze after the HMRC investigation led to Atlantic Bridge being presented with a tax bill it could not pay.
Had Cameron made himself fully aware of Atlantic Bridge activities in January 2010, his office would inevitably have come across its executive director, Adam Werritty. They would also have become aware of Atlantic Bridge Inc. and through that links to ALEC. In short, Fox’s shadow foreign policy network would have been uncovered; assuming, of course, that Cameron does not secretly endorse neoconservatism himself.
But with so many of the then shadow cabinet members – five including then shadow home secretary Chris Grayling – Cameron was simply not strong enough to take Fox on just a few months before an election. Even in disgrace Fox enjoys such wide and open support that the Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts has counselled that their defiance may be ill-judged with Fox’s resignation speech sounding like an Oscar acceptance.
Even if Cameron has the will, this secret society of US style neocons and Tea Party fanatics is too powerful to take on and is as big a problem for Britain’s Conservatives as the Tea Party Movement has become for America’s Republicans. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
If true, it seems my two year campaign to see tax foregone in favour of the charity clawed back may have been successful after all. The FT story, which quotes an anonymous trustee who should know, implies the Atlantic Bridge was rendered insolvent by this tax bill. In this case trustees – which included Liam Fox and Lord Astor of Hever (still a defence minister) at the time the money was misspent – may have been personally liable.
But this account appears to be contradicted by briefings to other journalists including Jason Beattie, the Daily Mirror’s political editor, who told me: ‘Charity commission tell me they got assurances from Trustees that the surplus was handed to another charity but refuse/cannot say what these assurances were!’
Having been rendered insolvent by an unexpected tax bill, one would think there were no assets to hand over. In addition, the Charity Commission asserted, in its response to my proposed judicial review of its handling of the case, that action to recover misspent charity money would be disproportionate. The FT report implies it made this assertion after HMRC presented the tax bill.
Geraldine Peacock, who chaired the Charity Commission from 2002 to 2006, explains: ‘The commission chose not to use its statutory powers in this case and, when it does that, it ends up skimming across the top of the issues. Atlantic Bridge is an example of when the Charity Commission doesn’t do itself any favours. It should have done what it is supposed to do, which is to investigate all aspects of a complaint. It didn’t do that.’
Had the Werritty scandal not broken when it did, it is unlikely that we would have discovered that Liam Fox and Lord Astor’s charity had been forced to return money to the taxpayer that they should never have claimed. It is clear that the commission worked with the trustees to keep the story out of the public eye. It is also clear that authorities were happy to give these most senior Conservative politicians the benefit of the doubt when found to be on the wrong side of the law; lesser mortals should not expect to be so lightly treated. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
Predictably, Sir Gus O’Donnell’s ten page report into the Fox-Werritty scandal has failed to silence any critics. As I reported yesterday, it does not examine the Atlantic Bridge and others will have many more questions to ask. While Atlantic Bridge, the charity closed as a result of my complaint to the Charity Commission, is mentioned briefly for having exposed Lord Astor of Hever the parliamentary under secretary of state at defence (and a Tory despite Professor Patrick Minford’s odd description of him as ‘from the left’) to Adam Werritty, it otherwise ignored.
For clarity, it is important to point out that Dr Liam Fox is unlikely to have benefitted from Atlantic Bridge personally, but as I explain here to Sky News, he certainly benefitted. This Telegraph front page is good example of a typical Atlantic Bridge event; ‘Liam Fox and Adam Werritty were both guests at the [Atlantic Bridge] fund-raising dinner at the Mandarin Oriental hotel [Washington] where they mingled with American-based lobbyists for the defence industry and leading US military officials.’
There should be little doubt that the Atlantic Bridge significantly benefitted Fox’s career and while this event appears to have been for the US non-profit, Atlantic Bridge Inc, the UK charity organised similar bashes. No misspent charity money has been recovered. None of the tax foregone to subsidise the Atlantic Bridge has been clawed back. The charity’s assets have been demised to an organisation the Charity Commission cannot or will not name. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
Earlier today I excitedly broke the news to you, via Civil Society, that the Charity Commission is to scrap regulatory case reports. It’s since been pointed out to me that you need to be a bit of geek to see why this matters, so I will explain simply – and quickly – before you click off somewhere.
Regulatory case reports were the commission’s informal mechanism for dealing with charities that had broken the rules. They were supposed to be cheaper than full on statutory inquiries (which makes a nonsense of the official reason for scrapping them; to save money). And importantly they were supposed to happen under-the-radar. So when journalists contacted the commission to ask about the Atlantic Bridge, the commission denied it was investigating and instead told people that it was merely ‘engaging’ with the charity and providing friendly advice. As time has gone on the commission found this facade impossible to maintain and now reluctantly admits that these are indeed investigations.
But these semantics were one reason why the Atlantic Bridge story has been buried on my blog for two years. Had the commission opened a statutory inquiry in 2009 (as, presumably it would now do), we might have broken this story just a few months before the 2010 general election. Instead Liam Fox and company have enjoyed two years of regulatory advice and guidance, plenty of time a cynic might say, to tidy up the place.
In a further twist, readers of Civil Society will note that the commission revealed that regulatory case reports are to be scrapped to an audience of charity lawyers in response to the question: ‘Can we assume we have seen the back of regulatory investigations, which many of us thought were unlawful anyway?’
In a letter to this blogger, whose complaint to the Charity Commission led to the closure of Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge charity, the Ministry of Defence confirms that Gus O’Donnell’s investigation will not examine questions raised by the Atlantic Bridge. This comes despite assurances previously given to journalists by 10 Downing Street that “All unanswered questions will be answered”.
In a further development the Charity Commission has announced that it is to scrap regulatory compliance cases. This was the informal process by which Atlantic Bridge was originally investigated. The announcement was made by Kenneth Dibble, the commission’s head of legal services, at a Charity Law Association conference in response to suggestions regulatory compliance cases were unlawful. However, the commission plans to ignore those – including its former chair Geraldine Peacock – who have called for its investigation into the Atlantic Bridge to be re-opened.
Today I make my début on the Guardian’s comment pages and Comment is Free. CiF has something of a reputation for attracting trolls; socially challenged individuals who spend their days posting provocative comments on blogs in an attempt to provoke and upset. So I was interested see how my piece would go down. Well, at the risk of speaking too soon, it appears to me that it’s all gone quiet over there with remarkably few critical comments. Obviously, that’s rather gratifying.
Predictably Joe DeM attempts to draw parallels between the Atlantic Bridge and ‘the network of Trade Unions and left wing charities that fund left wing politicians’. My advice to Joe DeM, and anybody else who believes they have discovered a charity funding politicians, is to report them to the Charity Commission regardless of their political affiliation. In fact, I’d go further: Joe DeM and company have a duty to disclose what they know to the commission and their failure to do so makes them a party to the crimes they allege. The Labour Party’s links to trade unions, on the other hand, are something in which to take pride. Taken together the Labour Party and the unions are the democratic Labour Movement. It is no secret that the unions founded the Labour Party in 1900 to secure political representation for people who work for a living. It is right and proper that unions continue to openly — an important point — support the party and take part in its policy making processes.
At the end of July the Charity Commission published the conclusion of what it called an ‘engagement’ with Tory charity the Atlantic Bridge. The trustees had agreed to relaunch the charity within a year as a non-party political organisation and that their ‘current activities must cease immediately’. The new new Atlantic Bridge will not merely pay for senior Conservatives to rub shoulders with their US allies, but will make a meaningful and positive contribution to Anglo-US relations.
But documents released under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI) confirm that the Charity Commission decided not recover any money misspent by the Atlantic Bridge on activities that even its trustees agree did not further its charitable objectives.
This Q&A sheet, produced by the Charity Commission press office, shows that the commission was expecting questions around the roles of trustees Liam Fox, now defence secretary, and Tory peer Lord Astor of Hever. It was also ready to stonewall any questions around misspent charity money. Elsewhere in the commission’s FoI responses it is clear that the commission deliberately chose not to recover any misapplied assets, a decision it refuses to explain.
It is hard not to conclude that the Charity Commission has bent over backwards to protect the Atlantic Bridge — whose advisory board includes William Hague, George Osborne, Michael Gove and several other Tory MPs — from scandal. And this claim is not as bizarre as it may seem. The commission has a statutory obligation to protect the reputations of charities and Michelle Russell, who heads up the commission’s compliance division, has explained that formal inquiries are to be avoided. The commission has gone as far as burying its own inquiry reports to reduce any damage to the reputations of the charities investigated.
The Atlantic Bridge case shows what happens when this policy it taken so far the commission forgets its other statutory obligations; to ensure charities comply with the law and to enhance their accountability. The case raises serious questions around how much discretion the Charity Commission should have to pick and choose the complaints it investigates. So last week my solicitor, Mark Lewis of Taylor Hampton, who is also at the centre of the current News of the World phone hacking scandal, wrote to the commission to propose a judicial review.
We are prepared to ask the court to declare that the Charity Commission has a statutory duty to investigate allegations of wrongdoing and to do its utmost to recover charitable assets that have been misapplied, regardless of any damage that might be done to the reputations of those involved.
But we hope it won’t come to that and that over the next week or so the commission — or maybe even the trustees of the Atlantic Bridge themselves — will agree to take action to ensure that charity money that everyone agrees has been used to promote the Conservative Party is recovered and spent on charitable activities. Posts on the Atlantic Bridge are collected here.
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In a clear act of cowardice, the Conservative Party has moved to scapegoat Ursula Brennan, permanent under secretary at the Ministry of Defence, in order to protect the prime minister from scrutiny in the wake of Dr Liam Fox’s resignation. But I can now reveal that David Cameron’s office has been fully aware of Dr Fox’s involvement with the Atlantic Bridge since at least January 2010.
