Mr George Galloway

24 February 2005

Q320  Sir Philip Mawer: Okay. If I may come to a couple of other points in this same document. There is mention in the document of another gentleman in addition to Mr Zureikat whom it is said, I am quoting from the document "you entered into partnership with"—and no doubt you would dispute that—but the person named is an Iraqi called, according to the document, Burhan Mahmoud Chalabi. Do you know Mr Chalabi?

Mr Galloway: I do.

Q321  Sir Philip Mawer: How do you know him?

Mr Galloway: He is an activist in the campaigns against sanctions and war in Iraq. He is an Iraqi. He is a leading Conservative Party member.

Q322  Sir Philip Mawer: Living in London?

Mr Galloway: Yes, he was reported widely as having financed the political campaigns of Dr Liam Fox and Mr Michael Portillo, covering his bets no doubt, in the last Tory leadership election.

Q323  Sir Philip Mawer: Also mentioned in this connection is Mudhafar al-Amin, the head of the Iraqi Interests Section in London. Do you know him?

Mr Galloway: Yes.

Q324  Sir Philip Mawer: It is suggested from the paragraph in question—and I am looking at the translation of the document[21] that was entered as an exhibit in the libel action and which I understand has not been disputed as a translation of the document. The truth or otherwise of what it purports to say is disputed but the translation is, I believe, not disputed. It suggests that you had entered into partnership with Mr Mahmoud Chalabi to sign for specific oil contracts.

Mr Galloway: Dr Burhan Chalabi. It is quite important because there is another Mahmoud Chalabi who is quite a different person so it is better to stick with Dr Burhan Chalabi.

Q325  Sir Philip Mawer: Forgive me but you had entered into partnership with Dr Burhan Chalabi to sign for specific oil contracts in accordance with your representative Fawaz Zureikat, benefiting from the great experience, it says, in oil trading and his passion for Iraq and financial contributions to campaigns organised in Britain, in addition to his recommendation by Mr al­Amin. Did you have any conversations with Mr Chalabi about his operating on your behalf in terms of dealing in oil on your behalf?

Mr Galloway: Not only did I not, I understand that Dr Chalabi has not been an oil trader. I understand that he has not actually been an oil trader so his great experience in oil that you refer to appears to be phantom. I have had no partnership with him of any kind in any business in relation to Iraq or any other place. It is completely false.

Q326  Sir Philip Mawer: I will come back to that.

Mr Galloway: And, moreover, demonstrably false. Presumably oil contracts have to be signed for. There is no oil contract signed for by me. There is no oil contract so far as he tells me ever been signed by Dr Chalabi. So demonstrably false.

Q327  Sir Philip Mawer: We will come back to that, if we may, in a moment. Another of the documents that came to light through the Daily Telegraph was the memorandum[22] from Tariq Aziz which purports to refer to your work programme. You will be familiar with this one too. What is your own explanation of that document?

Mr Galloway: I think it relates to—and this was fairly exhaustively covered in the libel trial—the Programme for Work Brigades which was a scheme by which we were going to gather young people from around the world who were going to come to Iraq and construct a park and recreational and recuperation camp for sick Iraqi children. In the process these young people were going to improve and politically educate themselves. We had a plan for work in the mornings, recreational sports and so on in the afternoons, and political discussions in evening. We identified a piece of land, we identified the ministries that would have to co-operate if this camp was going to be possible, and we produced material on our web site, I think probably even a leaflet, to seek the volunteers. It came to nothing in the end but I think that that is what is referred to in the memorandum about work programme.

Q328  Sir Philip Mawer: So there was no question of you submitting, as I think the impression was—

Mr Galloway:—that is what they tried to suggest.

Q329  Sir Philip Mawer: given which suggested, when the reports of this originally appeared, that you had submitted a wider programme of work indicating the kind of activity you were going to be engaged in in relation to the sanctions campaign and so on?

Mr Galloway: All the time when we went to Iraq we were talking about our plans and our projects and what we were doing. That could be described as work, a labour of love, unpaid, but it could be described as work, so that if I sat down and told you "this is what we are planning to do in the next six or twelve months, we are planning to lobby Parliament, we are planning a demonstration, we are planning to hold a meeting at which we try to get Scott Ritter to come over and address parliamentarians about the lies on the issue of weapons" and so on, this could conceivably be described as a programme of work. The implication that was drawn from that that this was "I will give you a programme of work; you give me money" is ridiculous. I think myself it refers to the work brigades rather than that.

Q330  Ms Barry: Did you write in December 2000 to the Foreign Minister mentioning an initial plan of activities for 2001?

Mr Galloway: I personally did not, no.

Q331  Ms Barry: Because there is a suggestion, again it is the Telegraph, of a letter[23] from you to the Foreign Minister written on 21 December 2000 on Great Britain-Iraq Society headed paper?

Mr Galloway: Do you have that?

Q332  Ms Barry: I do not, no. That is why I asked you. I was wondering in the context of if you had been in the habit of writing and saying "this is what I am going to do" if this could have been construed as a work programme.

Mr Galloway: I do not think so. As a matter of course I would not have been writing letters to the Iraqi regime, so I doubt that.

Q333  Ms Barry: Thank you.

Q334  Sir Philip Mawer: Subject to any comments by Alda I do not think there are further questions I want to ask you in relation to what is alleged in the documents. I would like to move on, if Alda will just reflect on the question whether there is anything critical there, to your view of the authenticity and veracity of the documents. You have clearly refuted strongly in the libel action and in your public statements and in your letters to me that these documents are in any way genuine. You have used a number of different phrases about them. You have said that they are fakes—

Mr Galloway: "Fakes" is the generic word I use because that covers a number of possibilities. In my letter[24] to you of 17 January I go through what these possibilities are.

Q335  Sir Philip Mawer: Would you like to give me your view?

Mr Galloway: First I want to say something about the provenance because that is going to be important but I am sorry now there is an appeal that I am not able to go into too much detail, as I did indicate in my letter.

Q336  Ms Barry: You said that in your letter.

Mr Galloway: I have information of nuclear importance about the provenance of these documents and in the House on my feet under parliamentary privilege I will deliver it when I can. You will have to forgive me, I am not able to convey it to you now whilst an appeal is pending. When you know what I am going to tell you, when I can, you will understand the provenance casts a different light on what the possibilities are in relation to my use of the word "fakes". All I can say to you is this: I now know the provenance of some of these documents, not the ones you have asked me about so far, to be fair, the ones you have asked me about so far I have no evidence that they were found other than in the way that the Telegraph suggests that they were, although I do not believe it. Like most of the people in the country I just think the inherent implausibility of a Daily Telegraph journalist walking into a bombed, burning building and finding documents which usefully incriminated one of the leading opponents of the war a little far fetched, but I cannot prove that. However, I can prove that others of the documents did not come into the Daily Telegraph's hands in the way that they have said in court under oath and in the media and in many other fora, and I will do so when I am able to do so. The reason I use the word "fakes" is because it covers a multitude of possibilities. They could be either forgeries like the Mail on Sunday documents turned out to be forgeries, like the Christian Science Monitor documents turned out to be forgeries. While we are on the subject, I know that circumstantial evidence has to be accumulative to be important but there is quite a lot of accumulated circumstantial evidence of a fairly substantial plot to forge documents about me, so it is not some ludicrous notion that can have no grounding in real life.

Q337  Sir Philip Mawer: You are referring to the Christian Science Monitor?

Mr Galloway: And the Mail on Sunday documents all of which emerged in the very same week. The Telegraph documents, the Christian Science documents, the Mail on Sunday documents all appeared on the streets in the same week. The Christian Science and Mail on Sunday documents were unmasked by experts as forgeries. I know that that does not mean that therefore the Telegraph documents are forgeries, I know that, although it undoubtedly puts a question mark around the documents. Because it is a photocopy, because it is unsigned, because it is not an addressed to a named person, because I cannot be in Baghdad to find these people, I am not able to say whether the Telegraph document is forged in the same way that the other two sets of documents were forged. What I am able to say to you is that the information in them is false. So they are either forgeries or they are authentic documents that have been doctored in some way so as to incriminate me. I hope we will not insult each other's intelligence by asking why would somebody want to discredit you, Mr Galloway, because we both know why somebody would want to discredit me in relation to the war and we both know that two sets of documents have already been unmasked as trying to do exactly that. Or they have been constructed by somebody else who was using my name to profit themselves. I do not know if you have read my book, I did send it to you but actually you would not have read this chapter because the lawyers chopped it out but I did a chapter about the Telegraph, it is called The Telegraph Line, which told the story of how I received these phone calls from the Telegraph and the sleepless night I had and all the thoughts that went through my mind, and from that first night until now these are the three possibilities that have been in my mind. Either they are forged or they are doctored or they are the product of some conspiracy somewhere within the Iraqi regime to make money using my name. I can think of no other explanations. The one thing they are not is true.

Q338  Sir Philip Mawer: There is a possible further explanation, is there not, that they reflect genuine efforts made by Mr Zureikat and others to assist you, efforts of which you say, on the basis of what you have said so far, you would be unaware, but to help you using your name in that context because of your political activity?

Mr Galloway: No, that cannot be true because they put me in a meeting in which I never sat. If this document said, "Mr Fawaz Zureikat came to see me and he said that he wanted to help Mr Galloway's campaign and he requires this from you, the Iraqi regime, in order to do so," that might have some plausibility but the documents say that I sat in a meeting on Boxing Day and I asked. This is completely false.

Q339  Ms Barry: It is that that renders it implausible, too much detail?

Mr Galloway: That renders it implausible. If it were that fourth possibility that you hypothesise it would have had no need to implicate me in wrong doing in the memorandum. That is why I reject it. That and because I know him and you do not. I think this is an important point. Zureikat is a very successful businessman. He was long before he ever met me. He had the highest credentials and credibility with the Iraqi regime which was not dependent in any way on me, so he had no need to grub around in a conspiracy to use my name to get business for himself, and I do not believe that he did. In other circumstances I would agree it is a possible fourth option but the dishonesty in it seems to me to render that inherently implausible.

22   Volume II, WE 5. Back

23   Volume II, WE 21, Back

24   Volume II, WE 64. Back