Watchdog questions Government grant to Islamic group with SNP link

Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 22:07

THE Scottish Government's decision to award more than £400,000 to an Islamic group run by an SNP activist was last night branded "unusual" by a senior figure in the body which oversees voluntary groups.

Stephen Maxwell, a director of the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), said First Minister Alex Salmond had been exposed to attack because of the presence of SNP activists in the group.

And Maxwell – himself a senior SNP figure – suggested the grants should have been postponed until legal formalities at the Scottish Islamic Foundation (SIF) had been completed.

Opposition MSPs are now demanding an independent inquiry and are calling on Salmond to publish all the correspondence and documentation behind the funding deal.

The newly-formed SIF is currently being run by Osama Saeed, the SNP's parliamentary candidate for the Glasgow Central constituency. The organisation's board also includes SNP activists and members of Saeed's family. Documents creating the group as a company were signed in the SNP's headquarters in Glasgow.

In March, the SNP handed the body 215,000, most of which will be spent on promoting an "IslamFest" event next year, to be run by the SIF.

A further 190,000 was awarded earlier this month from the Government-run Race, Religion and Refugee Integration Fund (RRRI) which supports organisations that assist ethnic minority communities.

Writing in Third Force News, the in-house paper of the SCVO, Maxwell, an associate director of the body, says: "The grant of significant sums of public money to an apparently unincorporated association is unusual, to say the least. Could the launch of the foundation not have been postponed until the legal formalities were complete?"

Salmond has faced criticism from other members of the Muslim community, who claim that the generous awards to SIF were due to "political favouritism".

But there are also questions surfacing about SIF's application. An assessment of the 33 organisations that received RRRI funding shows that it was the only organisation which was neither a company nor a charity at the time of applying for funds.

Applications for RRRI money had to be with assessors by April 14 this year. The SIF was finally incorporated as a company on May 23.

In a statement, the SIF insisted that the group's books had been in order when it made the application to the assessors of the RRRI fund, the Voluntary Action Fund (VAF).

Labour MSP Frank McAveety said: "Every week brings new and troubling details about the unorthodox funding given to the SIF. We are coming up for two months since parliamentary questions were first asked about this and we have so far had no answers. This is an uncharacteristic silence from Mr Salmond and his crowd."

A Scottish Government source said: "There have been a number of parliamentary questions tabled which will be answered comprehensively and will demonstrate that all funding decisions were properly made.

"Unfortunately, the article by Stephen Maxwell is based on press reports which contain inaccurate information."