Earlier this week, the media reported that the Charity Commission had shut down an ostensibly Roman Catholic-supporting charity, sacked its trustees and confiscated £30,000 in gold bullion.
The charity was accused of cheating HMRC out of tens of thousands of pounds and being linked to far-right politics.
That much was widely reported. But not much more. In fact, the story of this charity goes back 30 years to the activities of small group of fanatical ‘Third Position’ fascists and their mentor, the Italian fascist, convicted terrorist, and now leader of his own political party, Roberto Fiore.
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In the early 1980s, the British National Front was falling apart. A group of young activists, styling themselves Strasserites after the German ‘left-wing nazis’ Otto and Gregor Strasser, had already seen off the NF’s veteran leader John Tyndall, and were now plotting against his right-hand man, the longstanding National Activities Organiser, Martin Webster.
The plotters included Nick Griffin, later leader of the BNP, and they were being guided by Roberto Fiore.
Fiore was one of a group of young fascists, associated with the terrorist NAR, who had fled to the UK in 1980 to escape the huge police investigation which followed the bombing of Bologna railway station.
Safehoused by UK nazis
In the UK they were safehoused by British fascists: Steve Brady, the International Liaison Officer of the League of St George, was instrumental in this, as were other LSG member like Mike Griffin, and the Hancock family, the Brighton based publishers of pretty much everything vile on the extreme right.
The Hancock home had been their first port of call when they arrived in the UK.
The scheme was exposed thanks to the work of two Searchlight moles, Ray Hill and Peter Marriner.
The fugitives were arrested in London following an extradition request from the Italian authorities though this foundered in the UK courts, and they were released.
Sitting out their sentences in London
Subsequently convicted, in absentia, of terrorist-related offences (though not the Bologna bombing) they could nevertheless sit out their sentences in London, courtesy of a curious Italian law that means the sentence expires once its term is spent, whether you have done any jail time or not.
In London, two of them in particular set about making money. Serious money. Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello built a dodgy business empire providing temporary accommodation and jobs to young, mainly Italian, travellers.
They became millionaires and used the money later to set up Forza Nuova, the Italian far right party that Fiore now leads.
Political mentor
But in 1983, Fiore was the political mentor to the dissident NF group looking to dump Martin Webster. And the base for organising their coup was a large country house, Forest House, at Liss, in the New Forest.
That house features centrally in our story.
It was owned by a woman called Rosine de Bounevialle, a lifelong fascist but a particular devotee of A K Chesterton, the man who founded the League of Empire Loyalists after the war, and was the first chairman of the National Front when it was born out of a merger of various far right groups in 1967.
She was the keeper of his flame, carried on publishing his journal, Candour, and was the custodian of his substantial archive. Her Liss Forest house had been a base for various extreme right wing grouplets back in the 1970s, but now it had become the organising home for the NF Strasserites.
Looking to the cell structure of the Italian terrorist far right, they decentralised the organisation and started to train for clandestine activity
Martin Webster was duly dumped, the new guard took over and, under Fiore’s guidance, started a transformation of the NF into a semi-secret organisation of ‘political soldiers’, now taking their inspiration not just from the Strasserites but from the Italian fascist philosopher Julius Evola.
But, also looking to the cell structure of the Italian terrorist far right, they decentralised the organisation and started to train for clandestine activity.
In 1986 they split again, with one faction, now called the NF Flag Group, retaining the party name and the other later rebranding itself as the ‘Third Way’.
International Third Position
A split in Third Way followed in the early 1990s out of which emerged the International Third Position, headed up by Nick Griffin, former NF stalwarts Colin Todd and Chris Marchant – and Roberto Fiore.
Griffin stepped away a couple of years later and the organisational base of the new group was established at Forest House in Liss.
It was this group which set up the St George Educational Trust (SGET), the charity which has just been shut down by the Charity Commission.
SGET was established in January 1994. It was registered at the De Bounevialle property, Forest House, in Liss and its two trustees were Colin Todd and …Roberto Fiore.
Fanatical Catholic traditionalist
He had in the meantime become a fanatical Roman Catholic traditionalist and follower of the renegade Archbishop Lefebvre and his Society of St Pius X (SSPX) which rejected ‘modernism’ in the church and the reforms which had taken place since the second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.
Amongst the aims and objectives of SGET were the promotion of the Catholic faith.
Rosine de Bounevialle, the owner of Forest House, died five years later, found dead in her bath on Xmas day 1999, having bequeathed the property to the ITP under a settlement deed which provided that in the event of her death, the trustees of the settlement would hold the property in trust for SGET.
Roberto Fiore was a trustee of both SGET and the settlement.
Open verdict
The circumstances of Ms de Bounevialle’s death were sufficiently curious for the coroner to return an open verdict.
The Charity Commission, which had already investigated the charity in 1997, launched another in 1999, and in 2001 expressed its concern at the charity’s links with far-right groups and publications. It said:
“We look to the trustees to take all necessary steps to ensure the activities of the charities and ITP are kept totally separate, and are seen to be so by the commission and public.”
Blatant longstanding abuse
And now, 25 years later, the Commission has at last taken action against what has been a blatant, longstanding challenge to charity law. But now the allegations against SGET are even more serious.
According to the Charity Commission, the recent investigation discovered that:
“The charity’s chair had allowed the charity’s bank account to receive ‘donations’ from unknown sources, which were then transferred to entities unknown to the trustees…
“The trustees then successfully claimed, from HMRC, Gift Aid in the sum of £80,455.75 on those funds coming into the charity. The charity retained 20% of the Gift Aid element with the remainder being transferred to accounts unknown to the trustees. These claims were later disallowed by HMRC, and the Commission recovered the total sum of £146,166.14 (including interest and a penalty) from the charity.
“The inquiry discovered more than £30,000 of charity assets had been converted into gold bullion held by individuals with no formal connection to the charity. It also found items described as being of religious significance, such as rare books, belonging to the charity, said to have a value in the £10,000s, were in a storage unit that was also not in the charity’s possession.
“The charity’s website and social media accounts contained content linked to far-right activities and a post likely to be interpreted as support for Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist organisation.”
Fiore and Colin Todd are no longer trustees of the charity, which in recent years has been run by three other trustees under the Chairmanship of Michael Fishwick.
Fishwick is another character with an interesting pedigree. From Norwich, he first emerged as a member of the Young National Front secretariat in 1985 and has been a fixture on the far right ever since.
With the Griffin faction he moved from the NF to the ‘political soldiers’ to the ITP and, like Fiore and another ITP leader Derek Holland, embraced a fanatical Catholic traditionalism.
Twelve years ago, he was active in the SSPX with the recently deceased, holocaust-denying Archbishop Richard Williamson, and served as manager of Carmel Books, the Society’s recommended book seller.
In 2014 he joined Bishop Williamson is splitting from SSPX to set up the even more extreme ‘The Resistance’ group, which was a vehicle for Williamson’s own far-right beliefs.
Gold bullion was recovered and sold to repay HMRC £146,166.14 for Gift Aid wrongly obtained by the charity
The Charity Commission’s actions though late, have been dramatic. Over half a million pounds of the charity’s funds and have been frozen and ‘inappropriate’ content has been removed from SGET’s website and social media.
Gold bullion was recovered and sold to repay HMRC £146,166.14 for Gift Aid wrongly obtained by the charity.
The charity’s trustees have been removed and are disqualified from serving as trustees or holding any senior position in any charity in England and Wales. Interim Managers have taken control of charity, secured the items held in storage, and are now identifying the charity’s liabilities in preparation for winding it up and shutting it down. Any remaining funds will be distributed to other Catholic charities.
