SapphireSteel;8158734 [COLOR="Black" said:
Lets have a closer look at the activities of the "find Madeline Fund"...some compelling questions that I for one, would like answered.[/COLOR]
Your questions do not appear to be based on fact (in fact they appear to be based on the MMRG "facts", and these have not been able to be proved in court despite being given the chance)
Only 13% of the McCanns’ Find Madeleine Fund has been spent on searching for Madeleine. The Fund is a private company, not a charity. Much of it has been used on the McCanns’ legal expenses.
the 13% claim.Do you have any evidence for this, can you provide a source or link?
I have found this to be incorrect.
In the detailed accounts of 2007-08, there is an entry called “Search fees including private detectives” and the sum is a round £250,000. The only figure this comes close to being 13% of is the “Total Income” figure which is £1,879,602. The McCanns' total expenditure for that year was less than one third of their total income.
Assuming that the claim of 13% HAS been calculated from the £250,000 as a percentage of the Fund's "Total Income", then the 13% claim disregards the £118,975 which funded the website, posters and adverts. It also disregards a further £39,982 which was spent on producing and distributing Find Madeleine merchandise.
If you take the £250,000 + £118,975 + £39,682 in combination (£408,957) and as a percentage of the total expenditure for the year (rather than total income), then it constitutes 50.17%, not 13% . The remainder of the expenditure comprising 49.82% was used to cover unavoidable expenses such as professional fees for the campaign, overheads, bank fees, insurance and THE FUNDS legal fees .It costs to set up a new company as well as the necessity for legal advice and auditing - all of which the Fund had to pay.
You can find their accounts
at http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/fef24cde73bbd345f786ec77e6409f92/compdetails
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1131284/Where-2m-gave-Madeleine-McCann-gone.html
That it is not a charity.
In the Uk it is illegal for a fund set up to help just one specific person to be a charity there must be a public benefit. The fund is a not for profit company, this was its only legal option other than putting the money straight into the mccanns bank and name which was a legal option since the fund was created after they received hundreds of thousands in donations.
Rules for the public benefit test can be found in the charity act 2006, and the charity commission
http://www.charitycommission.gov.uk...harity_essentials/Public_benefit/default.aspx
That much of it has been used to pay the legal costs for the mccanns
I do not believe this to be true, do you have any evidence for this - can you provide a link or source for this claim?
The detailed accounts specifically point out that these were NOT the McCanns’ legal expenses but rather for the FUND’s legal expenses. (see links above).
All primary sources and newspaper articles say the fund and donations were used to search for madeleine, and not used to pay the mccanns legal costs
Clarence Mitchell spinning for the McCanns & Jane Tanner - YouTube (interview with clarence mitchell)
http://www.madeleinefoundation.org.uk/PDFs/Carter Ruck Aug 3 2010.pdf letter from carter ruck to tony bennett stating that they have not been paid by the fund
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/mar/26/mccanns-cameron-media-libel-legal-aid talks about various libel victims and no win no fee. also contains link to open letter which was signed by various people including the mccanns.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6997429.stm story on richard branson donating to the mccanns legal costs (not the fund), and talks about how the mccanns stated they would not use the fund for their costs.
The first detectives the McCanns employed were the highly controversial Spanish group Metodo 3. Just before Christmas 2007, their boss, Francisco Marco, boasted his men were ‘closing in on Madeleine’s kidnappers’, promising ‘Madeleine will be home by Christmas’. These were lies.
I do not believe this to be true. can you provide any links or sources that show the M3 was considered controversial at the time, and that thier boss stated madeleine would be home by christmas.
he actually is quoted as saying:
"God willing, I hope she'll be back with her parents before Christmas." [/COLOR]
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-501671/McCanns-private-detectives-We-know-took-Madeleine--shell-home-Christmas.html#ixzz1JthZmFzz (headline is a misquote, the actual quote is further down the article)
The boss of the Spanish detective agency hired by the McCanns hasbizarrely boasted Maddie could be "home by Christmas".
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/madeleine/580454/Metodo-3-chief-Francisco-Marco-Find-Madeleine-Fund-Maddiehome-by-Christmas.html#ixzz1NefkHEjE (again ignore headline, and read further for actual quote)
"Método 3 assures that, contrary to what was published in the British press, nobody ever said that Maddie would be home by Christmas, but only expressed "the mere Christian desire" that "Hopefully she will be home by Christmas".
(original spanish: Método 3 asegura que, en contra de lo que publicó la prensa anglosajona, nadie dijo nunca que Maddie estaría de vuelta por Navidad, sino que sólo se expresó "un mero deseo cristiano" al afirmar: "Ojalá volviese en Navidad".)
http://www.abc.es/20080808/internac...s-espanoles-mccann-estudian-200808082039.html
As the findings of M3 were passed to New Scotland Yard, and not the public, no-one can say it is false or true that they were not close. However, by the same note it is incorrect to state as a fact that they were not close.
Even if M3 had lied, why is that the McCanns fault?
Next, the McCanns turned to a private investigator called Kevin Halligen, who has various aliases. He set up a one-man company called Oakley International, formed after Madeleine disappeared. Yet the McCanns’ spokesman claimed Oakley were ‘the big boys’ in international private detection. The McCanns are said to have paid Halligen £500,000, which he squandered on high living and hard drinking, achieving nothing. At present (January 2011), he has been in Belmarsh High Security Prison over a year, awaiting extradition to the U.S., where he is required to answer $2 fraud charges.
The McCanns describe these dealings with Oakley International as a "bad experience". They terminated their contract with him only to discover he had not been paying sub-contractors who had worked on Madeleine's case with him. In her book, Kate describes the termination of this contract as "acrimonious. They hired him in good faith, and did not renew his contract. His alleged crimes have no relevance to the hunt for madeleine or the mccanns.
It is worth noting that the PJ put a man who was under suspicion of a crime in charge of the Madeleine investigation. Amaral has since received a criminal conviction for fabricating evidence, two courts have ruled a mother of a missing child whose disappearence he was investigating was tortured by the police, and he is awaiting a criminal trial for assault, and is being chased by the tax man due to financial irregularities. A colleague and former co-accused is now awaiting trial for blackmail. This is also not the mccanns fault.
All the main ‘private investigation’ agencies used by the McCanns had expertise in such areas as money-laundering, fraud, state security and intelligence - not in finding missing children.
lets go through them one by one
M3: Kate describes M3 as their "first" investigators - i.e. the first group of private detectives whose remit was to search for their daughter. As private investigations are illegal in Portugal during an ongoing police investigation, this Spanish firm were selected for their knowledge of "local systems, culture and geography" and because they had links to the Spanish Police who likewise had "good connections with the Portuguese Police".
Halligan: This firm was run by Kevin Halligen and came highly recommended to the McCanns. In her book however, Kate McCann describes the association as a "bad experience".
David Edgar and Arthur Crowley: The current team which consists of a former police detective, and various specialists.
Private Investigtors acquire experience in a wide range of areas and given that missing children are a relatively rare occurence, it is natural that there will be few companies who would specialise only in this field. If there are no private detectives who specialize in stranger abductions, then who should they hire? It is worth noting that at the same time the mccanns were pushing for a british police review and this is now happening, so they were not just relying on private detectives. I am fairly certain scotland yard has experience in missing children.
The McCanns have produced 16 different artists’ impressions of suspects, ‘persons of interest’ and ‘persons we wish to eliminate from our enquiries’. Yet despite their spending millions of pounds, we, the public, know nothing whatsoever about who is supposed to have abducted Madeleine.
Firstly, so what if the public does not know, the people who matter are the police, and the mccanns -all five of them. We have no idea how close NSY actually are, so we cannot claim they are no closer.
However, can you provide a source that demonstrates all sixteen efits came from the mccanns as i do not believe this is true?
The released police files refer to jane Tanner and six other individuels unknown to the mccanns provide descriptions which became e-fits. there are certainly not sixteen efits on the find madeleine site, and the book has maybe five or six efits, which were not all produced by the fund.
The mccanns are not reported to have ever made an efit themselves as they did not witness anything. The only one in their group to make an efit is jane Tanner.
Source: findmadeleine.com, the PJ files, madeleine by Kate McCann.
The McCanns took legal action to ban Mr Amaral’s book on the case: ‘The Truth About A Lie’. They succeeded in September 2009. But in October 2010 the Portuguese Appeal Court lifted that ban. The McCanns are carrying on with their libel action against Mr Amaral, using their Fund to do so.
First of all there are no sources that have substasiated who is paying the legal costs, at no point has anyone ever shown that the lawyers involved in this have received payment from the fund. Do you have any evidence that does prove they were paid by the fund?
The court did not rule on the factuality of the book, it ruled that freedom of expression was aright. the libel trial is completely difference. If Amaral is able to prove his claims, or they are rulesd not defamatory then he has no problem. It is also worth noting that because the original trial could not rule on the factuality of the book it could not take any potentail libel into account. It is possible that if a court rules the book libelous, a court can revoke the earlier decision using the libel ruling as new evidence. But obviously at the time the court could not take into account whether it was libelous or not.
- this hearing is NOTHING to do with defamation or libel - which is the Principal Action to be heard at some date in the future. It limited itself to deciding which of two sets of fundamental rights in Portuguese Law should hold sway in the specific circumstance presented, which circumstance was that each rendition of the proposition of a dead child and the hiding of her body impeded the search for a live child, and this impediment caused additional suffering to the parents who are behind the conduct of that search.
Source lisbon court documents McCann vs amaral.
The McCanns said late 2010 that their Fund was running low and that the Fund ‘might run out of money soon’. Yet at the very same time, they were negotiating a multi-million pound book deal.
Why is this an issue. All it means is that at the time the fund was running low the Mccanns were trying to raise more funds through a book deal. The fund running low at the time of these negotiations is not any sort of contradiction.
So....a lot of goings on with the "fund', lots and lots of public money spent, lots and lots of legal actions taken to hush various detractors, YET STILL NO ANSWERS.
The only legal actions have been taken against those who have libeled or harressed them, and no-one has shown that any legal costs were paid by the fund. In the UK if you can prove your claims you have no worries about being found guilty of libel, you just go to court and show your evidence. The fund has not reveived public money, it has received private donations from members of the public, money from a book, and money from compensation. the mccanns were under no obligation to put the book money or the compensation money into the fund. The only public money has been spent by the police and it is not the mccanns fault if they have not made progress. However NSY have not released their findings so we have no idea how close they are to finding out what happened.[/QUOTE]
I am sorry but regurgitating PR from McCann supporters (some of whom are very well-meaning) and employees is proof of nothing except the success of the sheer PR and legal avalanche Team McCann has chosen to unleash.
Anyone who still thinks along the same lines you do needs to read a bit more widely and more importantly, deeply. Go to the source documents and read for yourself exactly how much money, and how much clarity is involved. Remember, this is supposedly a search for a little girl. See how many legal actions, how many actions there are designed essentially to hush and shut down the flow of information, any piece of which may be relevant to finding their daughter. If NO ONE KNOWS what happened to Madeleine, WHY are they trying to close ANY lines of enquiry?
An excellent examination of some of the financial questions here, by Enid O'Dowd, Forensic Chartered Accountant.
http://www.mccannfiles.com/id405.html