LONDON: The personal representative office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was given over £100,000 ($136,000) in grants as part of Britain’s COVID-19 job-retention scheme, company accounts show.
The UK’s registry of company financial information, Companies House, showed last month that the Islamic Centre of England received £109,476 in funding.
The London-based center serves as an office for Khamenei’s representative in the UK, and also operates as a mosque and community center.
It qualified for British taxpayer money because it operates as a company under UK law, and many of its activities — such as worship — were forced to stop during the pandemic lockdowns.
It is not clear how many employees benefited from the government funds, the provision of which is likely to prove controversial given the strained relationship between the UK and Iran. The center’s own website declares Britain a hostile power, dubbing it “the little Satan.”
During lockdown, the center — which is also registered as a charity — was criticized by the UK’s charity watchdog for hosting a vigil in memory of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.
Killed in a US airstrike in January 2020, Soleimani was widely considered a terrorist in the West and across most of the Middle East, but hailed as a hero in Iran for his central role in orchestrating the country’s regional proxy wars.
One Iran-aligned speaker at the event said: “We work hard to make sure there will be many, many more Qassem Soleimanis. We aspire to become like him.”
The commission said of the vigil: “The event risked associating the charity with a speaker who may have committed an offence under the Terrorism Acts, as the speaker was filmed during the event appearing to praise and call for support for Soleimani.
“The trustees failed to intervene or provide a counter narrative. The following day the trustees organised a further event for Soleimani and published statements on the charity’s website offering condolence and praise for him.”
London and Tehran are currently embroiled in a bitter dispute over the fate of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian woman who has been detained in Iran for over five years.
Her husband Richard Ratcliffe is currently on hunger strike in an attempt to pressure the UK government to do more to bring her home.
