Internal emails reveal that the Dutch government suppressed White Helmets’ financial fraud – what else are they hiding?
10 May, 2021 18:31
The epicestablishment clean-up operationlaunched in the wake of James Le Mesurier’sapparent suicidewas effective in the short term, but determined digging by critical journalists means the scandal definitely isn’t over yet.
A Dutch newspaper, De Volkskrant, has published a stunning exclusive based on internal government emails, exposing how officials conspired to prevent a minister publicly raising concerns aboutfraudulent activity at Mayday Rescue,the now-defunct “humanitarian” organization behind Syria’s highly controversialWhite Helmets.
The internal communications show that, following the ever-mysterious demise of Helmets and Mayday founder James Le Mesurier in November 2019 in Istanbul, Sigrid Kaag, the Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation, planned to formally caution parliament about financial impropriety on Le Mesurier’s part. Several draft statements were produced over the ensuing Christmas period, in which Mayday was openly named.
Her anxieties were well-founded. On November 8,three days before his death,Le Mesurier openly confessed in an email to his organization’s numerous international donors – of which the Netherlands had been but one – that he was guilty of misconduct and fraud, admitting to forging receipts to hide the disappearance of $50,000 in cash, paying himself and his wife Emma Winberg “excessive” salaries, and potential tax evasion, among other malfeasance.
While claiming this wasn’t intentional, he took full and sole responsibility, and warned against further investigation into Mayday’s financial affairs, fearing that continued probing could expose yet more “mistakes and internal failures.”
In the wake of his apparent suicide, Volkskrant reports that donor countries – who’d collectively committedin excess of $100 millionto Le Mesurier’s cause – convened acrisis meetingat the Dutch consulate in Istanbul, at which diplomats concluded theNetherlands was “extra vulnerable”,given all the funding it had provided to Mayday, and the organization having ostensibly been based on its soil, meaning millions in international payments had been processed through Dutch accounts.
Funding from Amsterdam had nonetheless ceased in September 2018, after a Ministry of Foreign Affairs report outlined serious concerns about Mayday’s financial practices, including a virtually total lack of oversight over, and even awareness of, how its money entered Syria, and preciselywhere it eventually ended up.
… Over the final months of 2020, a concerted campaign was waged to tie up the assorted loose ends…
First, in October, a fawning 6,000 word Guardian hagiography acquitted Le Mesurier on charges of fraud, being an agent of British intelligence, using the Helmets as a Trojan Horse for regime change in Syria, and affiliation with extremist groups.
more at sauce – https://www.rt.com/op-ed/523413-dutch-government-fraud-white-helmets/