Osama bin Laden wasn’t just a huge piece of terrorist sh-t, he was also a scion of one of the wealthiest and most well-connected families in Saudi Arabia. The Bin Laden family is still pretty powerful within the Kingdom, and obviously they’re still very rich. They like to travel too, and I would guess that members of the Bin Laden family own commercial and private real estate throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and America, ownership which is mostly hidden through a web of shadowy shell companies. The point is that they have a lot of money and they can still exert a lot of influence when they want. Enter Prince Charles, who thinks it’s perfectly fine to accept literal suitcases full of cash. Apparently, Charles accepted a £1 million donation from the Bin Laden family.
The Prince of Wales accepted a £1 million payment from the family of Osama bin Laden, The Sunday Times can reveal. Prince Charles personally secured the money from Bakr bin Laden, the patriarch of the wealthy Saudi family, and his brother Shafiq. Both men are half-brothers of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda who masterminded the September 11 attacks.
Charles, 73, brokered the payment after a private meeting with Bakr, 76, at Clarence House in London on October 30, 2013, two years after Osama bin Laden was killed by US special forces in Pakistan. The future king agreed to the donation despite the objections of advisers at the Clarence House and the Prince of Wales Charitable Fund (PWCF), where the money was ultimately deposited. According to sources, several of Charles’s advisers, including at least one trustee, pleaded with him in person to return the money.
One of his household staff said it would cause national outrage if the news leaked to the media. They told the prince that “it would not be good for anybody” if it emerged that he had accepted money from the family of the perpetrator of the worst terrorist attack in history. A second adviser also urged the prince to return the money. They told the prince he would suffer serious reputational damage if his name appeared in the same sentence as the terrorist, who was responsible for the murder of 67 Britons alongside thousands of Americans on 9/11.
One source said: “The fact that a member of the highest level of the British establishment was choosing to broker deals with a name and a family that not only rang alarm bells, but abject horror around the world . . . why would you do this? What good reason is there to do this?” They added: “I just didn’t feel any member of the British royal family should be involved in that sort of undertaking.”
However, Charles was said to have felt it would be too embarrassing to hand the money back to the brothers and feared that they would suspect the reason. It is understood that one household staff member believes they were “very vociferous” with the prince but were “shouted down”.
[From The Times]
Think about how odd this is, that Prince Charles already has one ass cheek on the throne and his close, high-ranking staffers think nothing of spilling their guts to the Times about how it’s not THEIR fault that Charles was taking £1 million from Osama bin Laden’s half-brothers. Over the past year, there’s been a whole cascade of grifter dominoes about Charles’s decades of financial impropriety and I cannot for the life of me understand any part of it. One, why was Charles behaving this way for years and Buckingham Palace didn’t shut him down? Why didn’t the government?? Two, why didn’t Charles’s staffers raise their concerns PUBLICLY before now? Three, what is broken in Charles’s brain that he thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to receive tens of millions of dollars from some of the shadiest people in the world as long as the money is nominally used for “charity”?
As for this specific story… holy sh-t. Yes, granted, the Saudi government still treats the Bin Ladens as largely siloed from Al Qaeda operations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorism. I can see how someone could make the intellectual distinction between the family and Osama bin Laden. But it still looks completely awful. Here’s another question: why did Charles even meet with the Bin Ladens in the first place? If his argument is that it would have been rude to return the money, why was he even meeting them or courting them in a fundraising capacity?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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