A prominent British apologist for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas is spearheading a new U.S. lobbying effort to rally Congress in opposition to two Gulf powers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
London-based political activist Thomas Charles is leading a new group, the New York Center for Foreign Policy Affairs, that recently held a briefing on Capitol Hill “to bring congressional attention to money laundering in particular the UAE,” according to NYCFPA’s website. The group said the event was sponsored by Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA). It also featured David Murray, a former Treasury Department official who is now an executive at the Financial Integrity Network, a financial advisory firm that has worked closely with the government of Qatar, a chief regional rival to the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
Perry’s office did not respond to requests for comment. Murray also did not respond to inquiries about his involvement.
NYCFPA’s Hill briefing, and its frequent public criticism of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, make it a new addition to the legions of interest groups, many with murky ties to foreign powers, attempting to affect U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf. And the relative obscurity of those involved with the group, and some of Charles’ highly controversial associations in Europe, make the roster of influential Washingtonians it recruited for its congressional briefing all the more noteworthy.
NYCFPA confirmed that Charles is its director in an email to PAY DIRT. The group would not comment on his other associations beyond the bare-bones bio on its website. But the website included a photo that led PAY DIRT to Charles’ LinkedIn page, which details his past work with other controversial organizations.
According to that LinkedIn page and U.K. corporate records, Charles also runs the London-based Tactics Institute for Security & Counter Terrorism, which has taken a similar line on money laundering in Dubai, the same Emirati city that was the focus of NYCFPA’s briefing in July. The Tactics Institute has also raised eyebrows in Britain’s parliament of late over its advocacy against new sanctions on Iran.
Charles previously worked for the Council for European Palestinian Relations, a group that has been barred from entering Israel, which considers it to be a European arm of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip and a longtime Qatar ally. In 2011, Charles helped organize a Labour party delegation to Lebanon, where officials including Jeremy Corbyn met with Palestinian political factions including Hamas. Charles has since complained about Hamas’ “image problem” in the West.
At NYCFPA, Charles has assembled a motley crew of employees, advisers, and directors. In June, it brought on the Van Auker Group, a lobbying firm run by Robert Lewis, a former lobbyist for the American Council of Life Insurers. Lewis did not respond to questions about his work for NYCFPA, but lobbying disclosure forms indicate he is working on international banking and money-laundering legislation.
Another adviser to the group, Illinois public-relations executive Jim Grandone, told PAY DIRT that he was connected to NYCFPA by Countess Elena Felice de Bacci, a Russian-Italian socialite who also appears to have participated in a recent Tactics Institute event in London. NYCFPA said De Bacci “is not connected or employed by the organization but has given advice by recommending a few names.”
De Bacci serves as a spokesperson for a group called FIFA Ethics and Regulations Watch, a group that has criticized preparations for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar over the use of slave labor and allegations of corrupt dealings with FIFA, the international soccer body. Despite that criticism, De Bacci recently organized a workshop in London on the upcoming World Cup, where the event’s main speaker declared that “the UAE and Saudi Arabia have been leading efforts to strip Qatar of its right to host the World Cup,” and that “it is in the interest of the region and in the interest of football… to support Qatar.”
Grandone declined to elaborate on his relationship with De Bacci or her involvement with NYCFPA, but said her letter inviting him to advise the group was the last he’d heard from anyone involved with the organization. Asked more detailed questions about the group, Grandone said he’d been given very little information. “I would like to know, too,” he said. “I’m curious.”
Francisco de Rojas is listed as the director of NYCFPA’s New York office on the group’s website, but he too said he was largely unfamiliar with its structure and workings. “If you want to do a little more digging, that would be great,” he told PAY DIRT in an interview.
De Rojas says he is a former Department of Homeland Security investigator and a friend of Marla Maples, President Donald Trump’s ex-wife. He signed on with NYCFPA, he said, because he hoped to use the position to help the president. “My interest is to find out their intentions, that’s why I agreed to help them out,” he said. “Basically I want to keep an eye on them for the Trump administration.”
Some of the group’s work has indeed praised Trump, even as the Tactics Institute, Charles’ other group, denounces him. One post on NYCFPA’s website last month, for instance, declared that the president “has achieved many foreign-policy successes through unorthodox methods.” But in rattling them off, the post went on to lift entire sentences, nearly verbatim and without citation, from columns by writers at CNN and The Atlantic.
Indeed, it appears that every one of the recent “press statements” on NYCFPA’s website is plagiarized from a publicly available news article. “This is not plagiarism,” a spokesperson insisted, “and I think you are taking our work out of context. Our press release style is clear. We cite, quote, and make comments and statements on a variety of topics.”
In fact, dozens of those press releases reviewed by PAY DIRT did not actually cite the articles from which they lifted nearly all of their text.
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