If you want to understand how Qatar gets away with it: follow the money - The Jewish Chronicle

There has, quite rightly, been renewed focus this week on Qatar. First, the ‘gift’ to Donald Trump of a new $400 million Air Force One, then the release of Hamas hostage Edan Alexander on Qatar’s instructions.

But here’s the ironic thing about the state which lends support to pretty much every organisation in the Middle East dedicated to suppressing or killing Jews, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hamas: almost all the things that antisemites believe Jews do but which we don’t, the Qataris really do.

Qatari money is pretty much everywhere – from politics to culture to education to finance to construction to plain old lobbying. Qatar, one might well observe, has come up with a brilliantly simply strategy for ensuring that not too many questions are asked, let alone acted on, about its terror-related activities: buy up the West. And that includes the UK.

It’s not even hidden. If you want to understand why Qatar is able to act so duplicitously without any consequences, let me give you chapter and verse – all of it publicly available.

I’ll focus solely on the UK. Globally, this is of course far more extensive.

Let’s start with Canary Wharf, bought in 2015 by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) in partnership with Brookfield Property Partners for £2.6 billion. The QIA is reported to manage £334 billion of investments. Qatar also owns 95 per cent of the Shard and much of the surrounding Shard Quarter, including the News Building, which houses News UK (publishers of The Times and The Sun).

After the 2012 Olympics the Olympic Village was sold to the $35 billion real estate fund Qatari Diar. In 2007 Qatar bought Chelsea Barracks from the Ministry of Defence for over £900 million; it is being redeveloped into luxury homes by Qatari Diar, which also part-owns the £3 billion redevelopment of Elephant and Castle. Qatari Diar is central to the multi-million-pound regeneration of Lewisham town centre. That sits in a Qatari property portfolio alongside the former US Embassy on Grosvenor Square, bought in 2009.

The Shell Building on the South Bank and the nearby Harlequin Building on Southwark Street are both now owned by Qatar, alongside the HQ of media regulator Ofcom, which was bought by Alduwaliya Asset Management for £60 million. QIA bought the InterContinental London Park Lane for £400 million in 2013, and it now sits with The Ritz Hotel and the Qatari royal family’s ownership of the Maybourne Hotel Group, which includes hotels such as The Berkeley, The Connaught and Claridge’s. The QIA bought Harrod’s in 2010 for £1.5 billion.

Qatar’s control is far deeper than property and luxury. It owns the UK’s largest liquefied natural gas terminal, South Hook LNG Terminal in Wales, which holds up to 20 per cent of the country’s daily gas supply. The QIA holds a minority stake in Severn Trent water company and 20 per cent of Heathrow Airport. Qatar owns around 10p per cent of Sainsbury’s, 2.9 per cent of Barclays Bank (the second-largest investor) and it owns a significant stake in the London Stock Exchange. Qatar Airways owns 25.1 per cent of IAG, the parent company of British Airways

And that’s before we even come to Qatar’s funding of British universities. A 2022 Policy Exchange report calculated that UK universities have received at least £25 million from Qatari sources, such as the Oxford Qatar Thatcher Graduate Scholarship, jointly funded by the University of Oxford and the Margaret Thatcher Scholarship Trust. Its web page says “it was created following a generous donation by the Qatar Fund for Development, which supports international education, health and economic development causes.” According to the OECD the Qatar Fund for Development spends some $820 million a year.

UCL Qatar (a campus of University College London in Doha) has received over £11 million in funding for research projects. Other universities receive huge sums for research. King’s College London, a key academic centre for Britain’s military and counterterrorism training, receives substantial funding from Qatar.

This is far from being a comprehensive list. Qatar also spends millions of pounds on less ‘glamorous’ funding, such as Islamic Centres. The point is that there remains too little coverage, let alone critique, of the scale and depth of Qatar’s ownership of much of the West. But if you want to understand how and why a state like Qatar is able to behave as it does…follow the money.

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