- BNP leader Nick Griffin's parents do the accounts
- Students from Africa and far east at London college
CL English Language, a college in west London that teaches hundreds of foreign students each year, is controlled by Roberto Fiore, leader of Forza Nuova, an extreme right-wing party. Fiore, who once said he was happy to be described as a neo-fascist and who is an old friend and mentor of Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, was appointed as a director of the college more than two years ago and became sole director in August last year. [Fiore had control of the College of that name based at 170 Westminister Bridge Road. In fact the building was used at least a couple of times as the venue for Fiore's International Fascist gatherings.]
Many of the students, who pay up to £30 an hour for tuition, are Italian, while others are from Africa, the far east and eastern Europe. None of those interviewed outside the college last week were aware of Fiore's involvement. Staff at the college have said there are usually more than 100 students there at any one time. Despite its size, however, its latest accounts show that it recorded a profit of just £2,214 during 2006, and £1,821 the year before.
The accountants for the college are Edgar and Jean Griffin, Nick Griffin's parents, who live in Welshpool, Powys. Edgar Griffin confirmed that the language school was a "substantial business", but declined to say why its reported profits were so small. "You must know that an accountant can't talk about his client's affairs to anyone, leave alone a newspaper," he said.
The BNP's spokesman and deputy leader, Simon Darby, denied the party received funds from the school. Asked about the party's relationship with Fiore he said: "If I did know I wouldn't tell you. I know that he knows Nick [Griffin]. I have never met the man." Fiore and his lawyer have repeatedly declined to answer questions about CL English, or about his relationship with Griffin and his parents. The college principal declined to comment on the college finances, but said: "There is nothing illegal going on."
Fiore arrived in Britain in October 1980 as a 21-year-old fugitive from the Italian police, who wanted to question him about the Bologna train station bombing two months earlier in which 85 people were killed and more than 200 injured.
He was reputed to be a member of the extreme right-wing organisation the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, several of whose members were subsequently convicted of mass murder. After being arrested by Scotland Yard officers the following year, Fiore was brought before Bow Street court, but the authorities in Rome failed to secure his extradition.
Fiore settled in London and became friendly with Griffin; the two are reported to have shared a flat and are also said to have run a travel agency together.
In Rome, meanwhile, he was cleared of involvement in the bombing, but was convicted of subversive association and jailed for nine years, reduced to five-and-a-half on appeal. The jail term was eventually "timed out" under Italy's statute of limitation laws, and Fiore was able to return to his homeland in April 1999.
He had already founded Forza Nuova, an anti-immigration party committed to revoking laws that ban the recreation of the fascist party. A year after his return he was quoted as saying: "If you call me a neo-fascist I won't kick up a fuss."
Guardian
25 comments:
Edgar and Jean Griffin are the school's accountants and the profits are kept pitifully low for what should be a lucrative business? How much does this remind you of the BNP and Great White Records?
I would say 'I'm surprised this has received so little coverage' but somehow I'm not all that surprised any more. Nick Griffin and those around him seem to lead 'mysteriously' charmed lives.
100 x £30= £3,000
Now do you believe that the Griffins are state? These people are protected. Edgar Griffin, is the real book keeper of the BNP, and Nick Griffin, is always in, London.
"100 x £30= £3,000"
That's per hour of tuition. And they managed just £2000 or so profit over the whole year. Bollocks.
And yet again we see that a venture involving Nick Griffin - however peripherally - is in financial difficulty. A quick search of Companies House reveals that the accounts for
CL ENGLISH LANGUAGE SCHOOL LTD
170 WESTMINSTER BRIDGE ROAD
LONDON
SE1 7RW
Company No. 03873471
are overdue by about eighteen months.
Sharon Ebanks seems quite annoyed by this. This is a comment made on her forum
"What conclusion do you need? Supposed nationalists happy to take the money off African immigrants, and EASTERN EUROPEANS THAT THEY BLEAT ABOUT IN, V of F, teach them to speak English, and live in BRITAIN.
If the F*CKING idiots in the BNP cannot see what GRIFFIN REALLY , IS.
F*ck every last one of em.
GRIFFIN DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT FOR ANYTHING, BUT MONEY, IT'S THE WAY IT'S ALWAYS BEEN, AND THE DUMB F*CKS LOOKING IN AND CRITICISING DESERVE EVERYTHING THEY GET."
I notice Stormfront is carefully avoiding mentioning this report...
According to the price list on their website, they go up over a thousand for the year course.
http://www.clenglish.com/
sharon ebanks is doing cooking coures under the name of rustee lee this is all funded by birmingham council !
check this one out i hear griffin has been sent £50,000 from a lottery winner ?
"check this one out i hear griffin has been sent £50,000 from a lottery winner ?"
Rubbish. If the BNP had a fifty grand donation it'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
I hope Tricky Dicky Barnbrook has not been let near the art students.
You know what it's like, an A level in art becomes a hard core porn movie.
It's a tricky business.
From "Old Sailor"
Tilda - dont you mean it's a "Dicky Business"
I think over all it's just Tricky being Dicky.
Yet another tax-cheating, moneymaking scheme by Griffo and yet, the spineless rebels are still happy to deliver leaflets for Bumbrook. They are all pussies the rebels, every last one of them.
Bumbrook's marriage is a sham. He's picking up men in his local boozer every weekend with his wife's approval.
And I thought the BNP disapproved of being gay.
"Yet another tax-cheating, moneymaking scheme by Griffo and yet, the spineless rebels are still happy to deliver leaflets for Bumbrook. They are all pussies the rebels, every last one of them."
Aint that the truth.
Gosh I read the Guardian piece and was looking for something new and revealing about the Fiore/Griffin connection but alas nothing.
Searchlight started writing about Roberto Fiore in 1981 when he turned up in London on the run from justice in Italy. He was part of a fascist gang of rich political brats all very young who had taken to Terrorism forming a group N.A.R.
Its members bombed, murdered, rob banks and eventually had a hand in the mass murder at Bologna Railway Station.
Fiore was wanted for organising the group and his side kick Morsello was wanted for stealing weapons.
Both guys turned up here and fell in with Nick Griffin same age, same education and same well to do family as each other.
Fiore , Griffin and a small band of elite fascists shared a flat in Pimlico. Griffin and Fiore went into the tourist business together and Nick's Dad started to do Fiore's accounting.
Fiore was clearly Griffins Political mentor and over the next few years helped him both politically and financially take over a large chunk of the old National Front and creating the Cadre style group The Political Soldiers.
Over the last 27 years Searchlight has run dozens of articles about Fiore and his associates, made a TV documentary that exposed him and in return was threatened with death.
Nearly a decade ago Nick Fielding and I wrote a series of exposes on Fiore's business empire that is international but has a huge part of it based in the UK.
The Language school story dates that far back, its HQ then was at 170 Westminster Bridge Road London not only a school but the venue for at least two high powered international fascist gatherings.
Fiore was a mass landlord letting out rooms to unsuspecting in the main young people from Italy, Spain, Germany and Poland who were attracted by his false promises of buying a air ticket from his travel agencys, to come to London to learn English, get somewhere to live and get a job.
The reality was very little language training if any, a room in filthy run down fire trap buildings and a job in one of his many cafes, bars and other businesses in London or worse still working for Gang Masters in the fields and food processing plants of East Anglia.
This meant living in the Company Store system where you ended up owing more that you earned for the privilege of living in vermin infested old army huts, getting hardly a square meal, being in danger of sexual attack if you were a woman and earning less than the basic wage. I know I have seen the pay slips with all the deductions listed and have statements from witnesses.
Griffin has never been free of Fiore and in recent years they have enjoyed trips together to high level international fascist and nazi gatherings in Europe often organised by the German nazi NPD.
Fiore is a successful business man on a international scale and with a political organisation that stretches from Italy across Wester and Eastern Europe and beyond. The European National Front is his brain child.
Often his London properties have been guarded by Italian and Polish criminals to keep the tenants in check.
I went on two trips to Italy whilst working with Nick Fielding on our joint exposes, I had a very good relationship with officers from the Italian version of the Anti-Terrorist Squad. We realised that many of Fiore's London businesses were run by his orginal violent fascist chums from NAR and many had engaged in serious actions.
Now they aspired to being "respectable" businessmen and women.
When the Political Soldiers vanished from the political scene in this country and were replaced by the International Third Position and Third Way, Fiore kept his own outfit going here and built new ones in Italy.
In more recent years old Political Soldiers have turned up in the BNP or its front organisations. People such as Patrick Harrington, Graham Williamson and several others being given positions of influence. Still Griffin's dad continues to keep Fiores books.
I just wish Guardian journalists would take a look at Searchlight from time to time or our archives, it just might stop them re-inventing some very old stories.
If the Guardian wanted to reveal something that was really new they might start by looking at the possible links between Senior BNP officials in London and the Language School business
"Searchlight started writing about Roberto Fiore in 1981 when he turned up in London on the run from justice in Italy. He was part of a fascist gang of rich political brats all very young who had taken to Terrorism forming a group N.A.R.
Its members bombed, murdered, rob banks and eventually had a hand in the mass murder at Bologna Railway Station."
And this is the guy who is a close friend and business partner of Nick Griffin? Why am I not surprised.
I never knew anything about all this. I knew there was a long-standing connection with Roberto Fiore but I didn't know the Griffins were involved so deeply with him over the years. If I was planning to join the BNP this alone would keep me out, but I guess most BNP members don't care about their partys links with hardcore terrorists or the constant dodgy business ventures.
Just imagine for a moment if Griffin actually swept the country and took over as prime minister. How long do you think the country would last before it went bankrupt?
If Bumbrook does win seats on the GLA, how much state income will go to the "Lube For London" campaign, and how much will end up in Griffin's greedy pockets?
"Just imagine for a moment if Griffin actually swept the country and took over as prime minister. How long do you think the country would last before it went bankrupt?"
It will never happen.
"check this one out i hear griffin has been sent £50,000 from a lottery winner ?"
-------------------------------------
Rubbish. If the BNP had a fifty grand donation it'd be shouting it from the rooftops.
-------------------------------------
Who said anything about the BNP? If someone sent him £50k do you think he'd hand it over?
http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=92
Portrait of a bomber
A bomb that destroyed the offices of an Italian left-wing daily paper last December was planted by a member of Roberto Fiore’s fascist third positionist group, Forza Nuova. The Italian police anti-terrorist section, DIGOS, is now calling for the FN to be banned and its bank accounts in Rome and London to be seized.
Since the bomb that shattered Bologna railway station in August 1980, taking the lives of 85 people including two young Britons and injuring over 200 more, Searchlight has dedicated itself to tracking down the organisations and individuals who have tried to destabilise Italy in the postwar years. With the protection of MI6, Fiore and a core group of activists of his Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (NAR) arrived in London in the early 1980s and were allowed to build up a multimillion pound business empire as a cover and financial source for their ongoing political work.
Their agenda in Britain included the collapse of the once powerful National Front, the dispatch of key NF activists to Libya, the formation of the International Third Position and possibly the murder of one of the ITP’s financial benefactors a year ago in order to get their hand on the rest of the assets. Despite constant exposures in Searchlight, the national media and a television documentary, and numerous attempts by MPs to demand and end to their protection by MI6, they remain free to carry on their terrorist activities.
Despite Andreas Insabato’s long history of terrorist activities, the only person he managed to injure with his bomb at the offices of Il Manifesto was himself. Insabato, 42, has been an active and violent terrorist since the mid 1970s, when a number of young middle-class men and women were moving from the major postwar fascist party in Italy, the MSI, into groups which had their ideological roots in Latin America. The son of a liberal magistrate, he shared the same social background as many of his contemporaries on the 1970s Italian fascist scene.
Insabato became a footsoldier in the war against democracy in postwar Italy, being conducted by senior members of the Christian Democrats, which for many years ruled Italy, along with elements of the Secret Service, Mafia bosses, reactionaries in the Vatican, the CIA and Nato, all of which came together in the secret P2 lodge of Freemasons. Insabato was guided towards terrorism first against the left and trade unions and later the public at large.
The Communist Party headquarters in Rome was one of his targets in the mid-1970s, when Insabato and his comrades drove past the building firing shots. At that time one of his closest comrades was Francesco Storace, then a thug, now the Member of Parliament for the Lazio Region around Rome. His days as an MP for Gianfranco Fini’s fascist Alleanza Nazionale have been no less violent, with assaults on the floor of Parliament.
Storace and other AN MPs have leapt to Fiore’s defence and were instrumental in obtaining permission for Fiore’s political and business partner, Massimo Morsello, to return home from Britain on the grounds that he was terminally ill, although his conviction for terrorism was not spent. Morsello’s illness has not prevented him being active on the streets.
Morsello is one of the organisers of the thuggish Hammerskins, which is financed by Fiore’s London businesses. Morsello also runs the FN music scene, which comprises bands and two record companies, Rupa Tarpea and Londinium SPQR. Both are registered in Rome but Londinium’s manager, Francesco Pallitino, lives in London.
By 1977 Insabato was facing trial charged with an attempt to reconstitute the Italian Fascist movement, which was constitutionally banned after 1943. Three years later he was back in court on charges of possessing a weapon. By this time he was firmly in contact with Fiore and others who had created the Third Position in Italy with the NAR as its activist wing.
In the period immediately after the Bologna bombing he fled, only to be caught and held for three years in preventive detention. He was acquitted in 1985 in one of several trials that took place over a number of years following the Bologna bombing. In 1990 he paid two visits to London apparently plugged into the Fiore/Morsello business empire. He returned to Rome to set up an English language video store, which went bankrupt after a year.
In 1992 Insabato received an 18-month suspended prison sentence for his anti-Jewish actions on football terraces. Lazio FC, whose Ultras fan club is presided over by Storace, must have made him feel at home.
Insabato returned to London for six months in 1996, working for Fiore as a “doorman”. He was almost certainly here when Fiore and Morsello staged a jazz concert at a West End hotel, starring Mussolini’s son, at which their thugs beat up anti-fascist protesters. According to bank documents seized by the police Insabato was paid £250 a week.
Returning to Italy he was running back and forth to the Balkans. When war broke out he concealed himself inside the peace movement opposing the war.
Documentary evidence shows that Fiore paid Insabato a retainer of £100 a month, but as most of Fiore’s workers were paid cash in hand this is not a reliable indicator of his true earnings. Interviewed after the Il Manifesto bomb, Fiore denied all knowledge of Insabato. However it is clear from the cheque payments that they are close and the Italian police now say that Insabato is a fully registered member of the FN.
The present rise of far-right terrorism started when Fiore returned to Italy from London in 1999. Late that year an academic, who was advising the centre-left government, was assassinated in a style reminiscent of the NAR killings of the 1970s and 1980s. Around the same time, a number of bombings were followed by calls purporting to come from anarchists or the left, but which the police laid firmly at the door of the FN.
Last year a bomb went off in Rome at the Museum dedicated to the Resistance to Mussolini fascism. A second bomb was placed at a cinema showing a documentary on Eichmann, at which the Israeli ambassador was the guest of honour. The bomb was discovered by the police and disarmed. After investigation the police arrested Giuliano Castellino, a man closely linked to the FN. As a result the police extended their existing investigation into the Hammerskins and its wide international links and started looking at the newly formed FN.
DIGOS received good cooperation not only from Searchlight but from Special Branch in London. At that time Special Branch was trying to boot out a number of fascist criminals sheltering here, who had been convicted abroad of crimes ranging from bank robberies to the killing of police officers. Some of these fascist criminals were linked with Fiore and the other long-term fascist exiles. Some were deported to Italy; others walked away scot free because their convictions were too long ago.
On 16 December last year a bomb placed on the roof of Milan Cathedral failed to explode. DIGOS stepped up its efforts, discounting the phoned claim that the bomb had been planted by anarchists.
Concern was also being raised over the FN’s association with Horst Mahler, a former Baader-Meinhof terrorist, and Udo Voigt, of the German National Democratic Party, which faces a possible ban because of its own close associations with bombers. Both Germans have attended meetings alongside Fiore and other FN leaders in Italy and Germany.
Two weeks before the Il Manifesto bombing, Ricardo Baggio, the FN chief in Padova, was held with three other FN members after police raided a bomb factory. They found guns and ammunition, pipe bombs and enough explosive to destroy the block had it gone off.
Insabato was already on the DIGOS watch list after he appeared late in 1999 on a platform with Fiore at an anti-abortion rally and again at a similar rally last spring.
During the visit of Jörg Haider, the Austrian fascist leader, to the Vatican last December, Insabato was photographed carrying two flags. On the same day he had been recorded on television giving out FN leaflets. The FN was expressing noisy public support for Haider and attacking the government and the Jewish community.
In the early morning of 22 December, a police telephone tap picked up a call between Fiore and Insabato. It is also believed that Insabato was captured on video near the Il Manifesto offices in the company of a leading Rome FN official. Security cameras record him arriving on a scooter, later recovered near the bombed building, with a pillion rider. After the explosion, which left Insabato with his legs shattered, there was speculation that as many as three people were seen running away.
Insabato’s life was probably saved by the first aid given to him by those he had come to kill. Despite Fiore’s denial of all knowledge of Insabato, within hours, Stephano Fiore, Roberto’s lawyer brother, had taken Insabato’s case free of charge.
Calling for an immediate ban on the FN, UCIGOS, a section of DIGOS, showed the Italian Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism evidence gathered in Italy, London and elsewhere on Fiore’s political, financial and criminal operations. Calls for the seizure of Fiore’s bank accounts will come as an embarrassment to the Charity Commissioners in England, who recently unfroze the accounts of Fiore’s British charities, despite recognising that there was a political link between them and the ITP.
UCIGOS officers revealed that several terrorists have benefited from Fiore’s largesse. Possibly the most notorious is Franco Freda, who bombed the Piazza Fontana in the late 1960s. He has appeared in court several times in connection with the bombing, the latest occasion being in 1995. At that time he received £3,000 towards his costs by means of a cheque drawn on Meeting Point, one of Fiore’s and Morsello’s London businesses.
Meeting Point also made payments to Fabrizio Croce and Duilio Canu, two fascist criminals running the Hammerskins. Canu is now the FN’s Milan organiser. Others put in funds included Davide Sante Petrini, Rosario Lasdica and Francesco Bianchi. Bianchi severely beat up a reporter from La Stampa who dared to try and ask Fiore a question after the Il Manifesto bombing.
The Italian police have warned that Fiore and his chums may try to destabilise the investigation into them by giving journalists false trails to follow.
One story circulating is that they were paid by MI6. While Searchlight has always maintained that they were protected as a reward for services rendered, no money was handed over because Fiore had enough from illicit sources and from his growing business empire. Another story doing the rounds is that Fiore stole the funds of the Third Position in Italy, when he fled around the time of the Bologna bombing.
UCIGOS has countered these rumours by alleging it has evidence that Fiore has received help from the Molinari drinks empire, producers of Sambuca, and from sources close to known Mafia figures or operations.
UCIGOS also believes preparations were under way for a private army of fascists to go onto the streets to attack prostitutes, abortionists and refugees. It describes the FN as existing on two level: one which it cynically describes as the “unarmed parliamentary wing”; the other a full-blown terrorist outfit.
Fiore is now likely to return to London. He probably thinks that any extradition proceedings would be long and drawn out. But the fact that he has signed cheques in favour of a series of terrorists, drawn on bank accounts held in Britain, would provide grounds to send him packing, in the view of some lawyers.
In the meantime one must hope the Italian authorities can keep Insabato alive, as in the past the shadowy people behind Italian terrorism have been known to shut the mouths of vital witnesses.
1997 Daily Telegraph article exposing the BNP’s favourite Italian nazi:
High street charity shops 'fund neo-fascist village'
By Ciaran Byrne and Matthew Kalman
A GROUP of Right-wing activists is being investigated by the Charity Commission after opening a chain of charity shops which raise money for the building of a village for "nationalists".
Former members of the National Front and an Italian fascist, convicted of a criminal offence in his own country, are involved in two charities, which claim links to the Roman Catholic Church.
An investigation by The Telegraph has uncovered evidence that the charities are linked to a neo-fascist organisation advocating the destruction of Israel and the repatriation of ethnic minorities. Last night, in response to inquiries by The Telegraph, the commission moved to freeze the assets of the Trust of St Michael the Archangel, a "Catholic" charity which has raised more than £50,000 through four shops. Stewart Crookshank, director of operations for the commission, said: "The public will be extremely concerned about this."
The commission has suspended Roberto Fiore, convicted in Italy of belonging to an illegal organisation, from acting as a trustee to the St George Educational Trust, a sister charity set up to promote the teachings of the Catholic Church.
Last week the shops looked like typical church properties selling second-hand clothes and books. In one west London shop, a leaflet appealed for help to redevelop a deserted Spanish village as a retreat for Catholic families.
However, the Charity Commission is concerned that funds raised are being channelled to a village project in Spain set up by a neo-fascist group called the International Third Position (ITP), whose leading members are known to Special Branch.
The ITP has advertised the "Spanish Village Project" in an internal newsletter as a haven where "nationalists" from all over Europe can live as part of "a new order".
An advertisement in the newsletter says: "Europe is falling apart . . . In the inner cities a whole generation of our youth are being influenced into talking, walking and acting like blacks. Something has to be done now. The movement has taken on a deserted village that we are reconstructing, repopulating and turning into a beacon of hope . . . Comrades should donate or raise funds for the project."
Roberto Fiore is linked to the group as one of the founders of the St George Trust, which obtained charitable status last year. It publishes books on far-Right ideology, including a range of anti-Jewish literature which it sells to ITP members.
The Voice of St George, the ITP's internal newspaper, contains details of numerous political and anti-Semitic texts published by Fiore's charity. The books can be obtained by writing to an ITP address. Last week the material was on sale in the St Michael charity shops.
Fiore, who runs a west London accommodation agency, avoided extradition to Italy despite being found guilty in 1985, in his absence, of membership of the political wing of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, a group implicated in the 1980 Bologna station bombing which killed 85 people.
Bow Street magistrates ruled that the Italian government had failed to make a prima facie case for his extradition. Fiore, 38, was originally sentenced to 10 years, but the term was later reduced to three. There was no response last night at his west London home.
This weekend, the Charity Commission confirmed that Fiore had been suspended as a trustee of St George's. A restraining order against the Trust of St Michael has also been issued, preventing the charity from spending its funds or moving money out of Britain.
The commission is also investigating the role of other figures, including Colin Todd, a former National Front regional organiser. He is also listed as a trustee of the St George Education Trust and is understood to be a key member of the ITP.
Mr Crookshank, a Charity Commissioner, said: "We have suspended Roberto Fiore, of the St George Educational Trust, on the grounds that we are concerned about the actions of the charity and would like to clarify its position. We would also like to clarify the position of the Trust of St Michael. Until we are satisfied, the orders will remain in place."
A spokesman for the Catholic Church said: "We have no connection with these people. We'd be very uneasy about anything which calls itself Catholic without some sort of link to the authorities of the Catholic Church."
John Murray, editor of Open Eye, a magazine that investigates far-Right groups, said: "This is symptomatic of attempts by fascists to build their power without attracting attention. They have concentrated on building secret organisations based round businesses and charities, including the Spanish village."
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