LONDON (Dispatches) -- Britain’s Prince Charles is facing more questions over his charities after a newspaper reported that one of his funds accepted a 1 million pound ($1.2 million) donation from relatives of Osama bin Laden.
The Sunday Times reported that the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund received the money in 2013 from Bakr bin Laden, patriarch of the large and wealthy Saudi family, and his brother Shafiq. Both are half-brothers of the former Al-Qaeda leader, who was reportedly killed by U.S. special forces in Pakistan in 2011.
The newspaper said advisers had urged the heir to the throne not to take the donation.
Charles’ Clarence House office disputed that but confirmed the donation had been made. It said the decision to accept the money was taken by the charity’s trustees, not the prince, and “thorough due diligence was undertaken in accepting this donation.”
The fund’s chairman, Ian Cheshire, also said the donation was agreed “wholly” by the five trustees at the time, and “any attempt to suggest otherwise is misleading and inaccurate.”
The Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund was founded in 1979 to “transform lives and build sustainable communities,” and gives grants to a wide variety of projects in Britain and around the world.
Charles, 73, has faced a series of claims about the operation of his charities. Last month the Sunday Times reported he had accepted bags of cash containing
$3 million from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former prime minister of Qatar.
London police are currently investigating a separate allegation that people associated with another of the prince’s charities, the Prince’s Foundation, offered to help a Saudi billionaire secure honors and citizenship in return for donations. Clarence House has said Charles had no knowledge of any such offer.
The head of The Prince’s Foundation resigned last year after an internal investigation into the allegations.
Michael Fawcett, chief executive of the foundation, had initially agreed to suspend his duties following newspaper revelations about his links to a Saudi national.
The man, tycoon Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, had donated large sums to restoration projects of particular interest to Charles.
Fawcett, a former valet to the Prince of Wales who has been close to Queen Elizabeth II’s heir for decades, is alleged to have coordinated efforts to grant a royal honor and even UK citizenship to Mahfouz.
Mahfouz reportedly denies any wrongdoing.
The Charities Commission, which registers and oversees charities in England and Wales, said in November it had opened a formal probe into donations received by Mahfouz’s charitable trust which were intended for the prince’s foundation.
The Prince’s Foundation, set up in 1986, is not regulated by the Charities Commission but is registered with the Scottish Charity Regulator.
The Scottish body in September launched its own probe into reports that the foundation accepted cash from a Russian banker previously convicted of money laundering.
Neither Charles nor other members of the British royal family who had ties with Nazis or were entangled in numerous sexual affairs have been strangers to controversy and scandals.
From the 1970s to 90s, Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles were in a publicly-acknowledged illicit affair, which eventually resulted in Queen Elizabeth forcing the Prince and Princess Diana to get divorced in 1995.
Another one of the many scandals was when the Queen’s second son, the Duke of York, was embroiled in a sex-slave relationship with an underage girl.
Buckingham Palace initially tried to defend the “honor” of Prince Andrew and quash the spreading news.
When the facts came out eventually, Andrew was stripped of all his titles by the Queen.