Prince of Wales Charitable Fund accepted donation from Bin Laden family

[SnottyLottie]

POWCF have been caught accepting donations from dodgy people again (this time from Osama Bin Laden’s brothers in 2013).

His advisors reportedly urged Charles to return the money.

Clarence House claim that the money was accepted by the charity’s trustees rather than Charles himself and was done so with due diligence and research.

news.sky.com/story/the-prince-of-wales-charitable-fund-accepted-donation-from-osama-bin-ladens-family-12662569

What, a major charity or foundation in dodgy donors shocker? Sunday is a slow news day, obviously 😀

Isn't the money earmarked for Dumfries House? Prince Charles is saying he's renovating Dumfries House for the nation but it's a pet project of his. Didn't he borrow 20 million pounds to buy it? I'm sure the nation could find better things to spend 20 million on than Dumfries House.

I shouldn’t be surprised and disappointed by the Times publishing such a smear story, but hey, they are owned by Murdoch, so there you go.

This is such a non-story. For those who don’t know, the Bin Laden family is very large, very rich and very well connected in Saudi Arabia. Their wealth largely comes from handling huge infrastructure projects in Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden was one of the family - the 17th of 53 children of the family patriarch (his father had multiple wives!). When he turned to fundamentalism in the 1990s the Bin laden family publicly disowned him, and he was stripped of his Saudi passport. There has never been any suggestion that his wider family had anything to do with his terrorist activities.

The Bin Laden family is known for philanthrophy - they have donated large amounts to Harvard to fund various Islamic studies. There is also a Bin Laden Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies that the family have funded for 30 years or so.

So, a family that is known to donate monies to charities gives Prince Charles’ charity a donation that was accepted, scrutinised, and accepted by the charity’s trustees, not Prince Charles personally. 🤷‍♀️

Isn't the money earmarked for Dumfries House? Prince Charles is saying he's renovating Dumfries House for the nation but it's a pet project of his. Didn't he borrow 20 million pounds to buy it?

Yep. Dumfries House and I'm not sure the nation particularly cared although the multi millionaire previous owner did quite nicely out of the deal.

Charles didn't personally borrow the money to buy it. He set up a charity to score the loan and seemingly has been courting wealthy donors to repay it ever since.

I fully expect due diligence was carried out just as it apparently was when he was stuffing carrier bags full of cash into the hands of his lackeys for banking on behalf of the folly but as ever when it comes to appalling optics he wasn't there, guv.

Oh for a Fawcett The Fence to take the heat. Again.

It might be brushed off, he was strongly advised not to accept this money... but went ahead anyway, PC personally secured this donation against advice. What's the point in him having aides and advisors if he doesn't listen to them?
I am quite sure the Bin Laden family have totally distanced themselves from Osama, but it's always about the optics and what it looks like isn't it?

I wonder how much more of this sort of thing will come out. Cash for honours for Saudi donors, bags of dosh from the PM of Qatari, it just goes on and on. I think PC gets a pet idea like Dumfries House etc and he will do anything to get funding for it, whatever it looks like to the rest of us.

The RF do like their links with ME characters don't they

This^. Written perfectly.
But conspiracy theorists will always twist things

It's not being a conspiracy theorist or twisting anything to say his aides advised him against acceptance of this, is it? That is reported everywhere.

Why have advisors if you go against what they advise?

🙄
You said “caught accepting donations from dodgy people this time from Osama Bin Laden’s brothers in 2013).“

how are the bin laden family “dodgy people”? When you know for a fact that Osama was publicly disowned by his family, cut off financially from them, stripped of his Saudi citizenship and deported from the country well before he did his terrorist acts.

You’re peddling a conspiracy theory of blood money.

That doesn't sound good.

@Discovereads

No, I didn't say that at all. You are muddling me up with the OP. I questioned the fact that the RF have very expensive aides and advisers and then they ignore them.

They haven’t clarified why the aides advised against it, have they? And if it was because of “optics” - I.e. how it will be spun against you and what the ignorant reader might make if it, is that really such a compelling reason?

Yeah... just plough on, and who cares what the public think of you.

The RF have advisers for a reason. It's just a shame they don't listen to them. I have no idea why they advised against it; they obviously had their reasons.

I don’t care who the donor was. I am more interested in why the future king (maybe) needs yet another house, needs his acquisition and refurbishment to have charitable ie tax preferential status when it doesn’t seem to be for anyone else’s benefit, and can’t pay for it himself out of his very considerable income.

I bet when he finally finishes it he will find something wrong with it, as a Highgrove where he was astonished and disgusted to find that moss grows more prolifically on the shady side, thus rendering things unbearably asymmetrical.

Dickhead.

I presume you also think Oxford should have cancelled its visiting fellowship, or insisted on renaming it, then?

Sorry I did mix you up with the OP.

It does raise questions about whose interests are not represented if they are too poor to make a similar donation.

No problem

Honestly, never let ignorance of the facts stand in the way of your bias, why don’t you. 🙄

Prince Charles doesn’t live in Dumfries House. His charity restored a historically important house and it’s contemporary contents so it’s now a rare example of an unchanged house and interior. It’s open to the public and also used for educational courses offered by the Prince’s Foundation- largely these involve training in traditional, but dying crafts, like weaving, smithing, wood carving etc.

According to Wiki it is largely used as a Visitors Centre, cafe, bistro, guided tours, private function venue and a wedding venue with luxury rooms for rent.
I think any connection to the Princes Trust is good, and there is an educational centre in the grounds, but on reading more, it does seem to be more of a commercial enterprise.

You missed out that it is also the home of the Jameel House of Traditional Arts and Building Skills in Scotland. This is a fully-equipped, residential institute for teaching the traditional arts, and is the largest traditional arts institute in the world (I’m copying from its website here, that’s not my assessment 😀)

The website also mentions that “With courses developed and delivered by the Prince’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts as an integral part of its full portfolio of teaching programmes, Jameel House in Scotland is also intrinsically connected to the other Jameel Houses of Traditional Arts – in Cairo and Jeddah”. Which gives a fair indication of why a Saudi family that has already demonstrated an interest in fostering the development of Islamic arts (it’s funding in Harvard, for example) might be interested in donating to he Prince’s projects here…

Yes I did miss that out. It wasn't on the lengthy Wiki page.

If anyone is interested I found about about Dumfries House relatively recently, after my husband watched this programme on Sky Arts (he likes Vic Reeves and works in a creative industry himself). It’s a really nice series to watch, and the final programme sees the participants visiting Dumfries House and you learn about the restoration project and the Prince’s Foundation.

www.skygroup.sky/article/sky-arts-and-prince-charles-set-out-to-reinvigorate-heritage-crafts-in-brand-new-series-the-prince-s-master-crafters-the-next-generation

Osama bin Laden's father had twenty-two wives and fifty-two children. He divorced Osama's mother when Osama was a baby and Osama was raised for pretty much his entire childhood as part of his stepfather Mohammed al-Attas's household. He had very little connection to his half-siblings on his father's side.

If Bakr bin Laden is dodgy in his own right then they should focus on that rather than on "wooooah! Osama bin Laden's family....".

It's also allegedly used as a milking machine giving those who stump up a minimum £100k private access to our morally upstanding prince:

www.express.co.uk/news/royal/1483856/prince-charles-donors-pay-100-thousand-royal-dinner

Didn't he borrow 20 million pounds to buy it?

£45 million actually - the £20 million is just what he borrowed from his Foundation towards the cost