Inquiry into King’s charity ‘would have offended important people’ | Charities

Asked about the Metropolitan police decision to take no further action in the cash-for-honours allegation involving King Charles’s Prince’s Foundation, the author and former Liberal Democrat MP Norman Baker said wearily: “I’m not actually surprised. To have taken action would have offended important people in society.”

Baker, the author of the 2019 critique of the royal family, And What Do You Do?, wrote to the Met in 2021 calling for an investigation after press reports emerged that a long-time senior aide of the then-Prince Charles had offered a Saudi billionaire (and donor to causes close to the King’s heart) help to secure a knighthood and UK citizenship in return for donations.

That offer, made in 2017 by Michael Fawcett, in a letter to Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, made it clear the Prince’s Foundation (founded by the King, who remains its president) would be “happy and willing” to use its influence to help smooth the way for Mahfouz.

After Baker’s letter, the Met set about considering whether there had been breaches of the laws around the sale of honours and bribery. After 18 months of interviewing witnesses and trawling through documents, and after advice from the Crown Prosecution Service, it decided the investigation would be discontinued.

There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing on behalf of the King – who said he had no knowledge of Fawcett’s offers of help. Nor is there any suggestion of wrongdoing by Mahfouz. Spokespeople for the King have insisted in the past that his charities operate independently of the monarch in matters of fundraising and governance.

And yet it is not the only embarrassing episode involving the King’s charities and wealthy donors. Last year, the Sunday Times reported that between 2011 and 2015 the Prince of Wales Charitable Fund accepted 3m euros in cash stuffed into a suitcase and a Fortnum & Mason carrier bag from a billionaire Qatari Sheikh.

Despite the questionable optics of this transaction (Baker opined that this was “what one might expect from a South American drug baron, not the heir to the British throne”), the Charity Commission chose not to investigate further, concluding that there was no evidence of illegality.

While the King himself has escaped investigation, his charities have not. The foundation’s former chair, Douglas Connell, resigned in September 2021 after a £100,000 donation from a wealthy Russian donor was accepted – and then rejected – by the charity’s ethics committee after doubts over the provenance of the cash.

Two months later, Fawcett, by then the foundation’s chief executive, resigned in the wake of the cash-for-honours allegations. The foundation’s board, acknowledging the reputational damage caused by what it called “historic fundraising practices”, carried out an internal review to ensure the charity in future “always acts with utmost integrity and probity”. It said trustees had been unaware of Fawcett’s alleged actions.

The foundation remains under investigation from the Scottish charity regulator into a series of issues relating to the charity’s use and handling of grants and donations. The Charity Commission for England and Wales is investigating the Mahfouz Foundation charity – set up by the aforementioned Saudi billionaire – over financial dealings involving the Prince’s Foundation.

Baker and other critics of the monarchy believe that police and charity regulators are wrongly reluctant to bring the King himself into the focus of their investigations, but for now a cloud still hovers over the foundation.