A society fixer who acted as a middleman for more than £500,000 of donations to King Charles’s charities from a wealthy Russian banker has been disqualified from running a charity after a highly critical watchdog inquiry report.
The Charity Commission said the conduct of Michael Wynne-Parker, revealed during its investigation into the Mahfouz Foundation charity, showed him to be unfit to be a charity trustee or director and banned him for 12 years.
The Mahfouz Foundation, created by the Saudi billionaire Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, was used by Wynne-Parker, a former trustee, as a conduit to try to channel donations to the King’s Foundation, the commission inquiry found.
The King’s Foundation, which is registered as a charity in Scotland, has been under investigation by the Scottish charity regulator for the past three years after a Sunday Times investigation into an alleged cash-for-honours controversy.
Michael Fawcett, at the time a close confidant of the king, resigned as chief executive of the King’s Foundation (then called the Prince’s Foundation) in 2021 after claims he allegedly promised to help secure a knighthood and British citizenship for Mahfouz, a donor to the king’s heritage projects.
The Metropolitan police decided to take no action after an 18-month investigation into the allegations just over a year ago. There is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the king – who maintains he had no knowledge of Fawcett’s offers of help – or by Mahfouz.
The commission inquiry found Wynne-Parker and William Bortrick, the publisher of the aristocrats’ bible Burke’s Peerage and an adviser to Mahfouz, arranged for the Mahfouz Foundation to receive £100,000 from the Russian businessman Dmitry Leus in May 2020 before transferring it as a donation to the King’s Foundation.
The King’s Foundation initially accepted the £100,000 but subsequently returned it because of doubts over the provenance of Leus’s fortune. By this time a further £435,000 of Leus’s money intended for the King’s Foundation had been paid into the Mahfouz Foundation bank account.
Wynne-Parker, a founding trustee of the Mahfouz Foundation who was engaged by Leus to provide him with philanthropy advice, used the charity’s bank account as a means to try to indirectly route £535,000 of the Russian’s money to the King’s Foundation, the report found. Leus said he was unaware his donations were routed in this way.
Asked why money intended for the King’s Foundation had been transferred to the Mahfouz Foundation, its trustees told the commission inquiry that “the King’s Foundation preferred large donations to be received by them from a charitable foundation”.
When it was clear the King’s Foundation would not accept Leus’s donation the money was not returned to him. Instead, Wynne-Jones and Fawcett, the then chief executive of the King’s Foundation, transferred £200,000 of Leus’s donations, without his knowledge, to another charity set up by King Charles, called Children & the Arts.
The commission inquiry established that a further £194,000 of Leus’s money held by the Mahfouz Foundation was transferred to a private company owned by Wynne-Parker, on the basis this was commission earned and expenses incurred by him in relation to the donations. Leus told the inquiry he was unaware of the payment.
A further £35,000 of Leus’s donations was intended to go directly to the Castle of Mey Trust, a charity that runs the former summer residence of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The King’s Foundation is a corporate trustee of the trust.
However, the inquiry revealed the money was transferred to Bortrick in September 2020 to reimburse him for the purchase of a Land Rover Discovery eight months earlier. The car was later presented to the Castle of Mey Trust, which wrote to Leus to thank him for his £35,000 donation.
A separate commission report on the Burke’s Peerage Foundation, a charity run by Bortrick, found he and a fellow trustee, Mark Ayre, had misspent more than £100,000 of charity money on paintings and antique furniture, including a £16,000 desk and bookcase used in Bortrick’s home. Both were disqualified as trustees for 12 years.
TheKing’s Foundation and Leus were approached for comment.
