Wikileaks is facing questions over its finances as lawyers for its alleged main source, Pte Bradley Manning, said they had not seen a penny of tens of thousands of dollars raised by the site to help pay for his defence and promised to them three months ago.
8:00AM GMT 12 Dec 2010The development comes as a senior WikiLeaks activist told The Sunday Telegraph that she and others had resigned from the organisation because of their deep concern about its treatment of sources and "lack of transparency with relation to large sums of money".
This newspaper has learned that one of WikiLeaks's main funding channels, the Germany-based Wau Holland Foundation, has been issued with two official warnings by charity regulators after failing to file financial records.
It has also emerged that the online payment service PayPal, which last week cut off donations to WikiLeaks, suspended the site's account twice before, once under money laundering regulations.
WikiLeaks, which says its operating costs are about $200,000 (£125,000) a year, claims to have raised more than $1 million (£625,000) in donations in the first eight months of this year alone, before most of its highest-
profile leaks were published.
Since then, according to one person connected with the group, further "serious amounts of money" have come in, mostly in small sums through the WikiLeaks website. However, in its four-year existence, the group and its associated organisations have never produced any accounts.
WikiLeaks promised to publish accounts in August, but did not do so. It now says it will provide them by the end of the year.
The most serious concerns centre on the proceeds of a special appeal by WikiLeaks for Pte Manning, the US soldier arrested in June on suspicion of leaking 250,000 classified diplomatic cables and hundreds of thousands of military logs from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
Jeff Patterson, of the Bradley Manning Support Network, which is handling Pte Manning's legal defence, said: "From July, WikiLeaks publicly solicited donations specifically for Bradley's defence expenses, and I assume people did donate.
They led us to believe they would make a substantial contribution in September. Since then we have had perhaps half a dozen conversations trying to follow up with them but we have not yet received any money."
Mr Patterson told WikiLeaks in July that the defence would cost $100,000 (£65,000). "They said at the time they would split it with us," he said. Last week, he said, WikiLeaks finally promised to pay, but only $20,000 (£12,500.)
"They told us on Thursday that nobody has signed off on it yet, but they expect it to happen soon," he said. "We're definitely going to be able to use $20,000, but it's less than we hoped for."
Mr Patterson said Wikileaks' failure to pay was "unfortunate", but added: "I attribute it to their fiscal disarray as the world closed in on them. I have spent many years defending military personnel. My concern was that an Icelandic-Australian-Swedish website was never going to be able to provide the defence that was needed for Bradley."
Much of Wikileaks's money goes through the Wau Holland Foundation, named after a former computer hacker and based in Kassel, Germany.
Authorities in the German state of Hesse said they had issued it with two warnings after it failed to file the required accounts.
Wau Holland's PayPal account for online donations was closed last week, prompting international hacker retaliation.
However, it was also suspended in 2008 and last year. "We suspended it temporarily in 2009 in accordance with European anti-money-laundering regulations, for reaching certain limits," a PayPal spokesman said. "The account was reinstated when the foundation provided additional information."
Meanwhile, a former senior WikiLeaks activist said she had resigned because of her concern that Julian Assange, the site's controversial founder, was "the sole decision-maker" and a "bottleneck" to the site's development.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP and transparency campaigner, said she and several other senior WikiLeaks activists had serious concerns about the group's structure.
"We were trying to get a meeting arranged so Wiki-Leaks could deal with the issue of transparency, but Julian refused," she said. "You can't run an organisation like this with one person in charge. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the money, but why can't he be transparent about it?"
At the time of WikiLeaks's first big release of information, the Afghan material this summer, the organisation had only "two or three" full-time staff, she said. "There were no direct press contacts and I, as one of the easier-to-reach people involved, felt the full brunt of the media. I was getting hundreds of calls."
The lack of organisation meant the Afghan logs were published with the names of confidential sources, putting lives at risk. At the same time, WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of secret prosecution documents from a Belgian child sex abuse scandal, complete with the names of some victims, and the names of suspects investigated and found to be innocent.
Miss Jonsdottir said she was "simply outraged" at the reaction to Mr Assange's arrest on sexual assault allegations by two women last week.
"There are two sides to the story and these women are on the receiving end of a lot of hate mail. How does anyone who calls for his release and the dropping of the charges know the truth? In this battle for Julian's release, Bradley Manning has been forgotten."
She added: "A lot of my work with WikiLeaks was great. I feel privileged to have been given an opportunity to participate in something historic. But this creating of a martyr and icon [in Mr Assange] has got completely out of control. I look at the website and I see a picture of him and there is nothing behind this façade.
"Julian is incredibly like-able, incredibly enjoyable to be with – if you are agreeing with him. If you criticise him, he is very abusive. He has a very high IQ but very low EQ [emotional intelligence]."
At least four other senior WikiLeaks activists have also left, including the site's former spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who accused Mr Assange of "behaving like some sort of emperor", adding: "Our raison d'être was transparency, but we were not transparent ourselves."
Mr Domscheit-Berg and other ex-WikiLeaks staff will tomorrow launch a rival site, OpenLeaks, which promises to be "democratically governed by its members, rather than one group or individual."
WikiLeaks was unavailable for comment. But Gavin MacFadyen, visiting professor of journalism at London's City University and a friend and supporter of Mr Assange, said that the critics constituted "four or five people out of around 500" who have worked with WikiLeaks.
"The site has a record of huge achievement," he said. "They take immense care to protect their sources. They deal with more whistle-blowers than you or I have dealt with in a lifetime, and there has never been a single complaint."
He said the site's workforce was spread around the world and was unaffected by Mr Assange's detention. "They are working 17 hours a day and having a hard time dealing with the attention. But they are functioning 100 per cent and processing enormous quantities of material."
profile leaks were published.
Since then, according to one person connected with the group, further "serious amounts of money" have come in, mostly in small sums through the WikiLeaks website. However, in its four-year existence, the group and its associated organisations have never produced any accounts.
WikiLeaks promised to publish accounts in August, but did not do so. It now says it will provide them by the end of the year.
The most serious concerns centre on the proceeds of a special appeal by WikiLeaks for Pte Manning, the US soldier arrested in June on suspicion of leaking 250,000 classified diplomatic cables and hundreds of thousands of military logs from the Iraq and Afghan wars.
Jeff Patterson, of the Bradley Manning Support Network, which is handling Pte Manning's legal defence, said: "From July, WikiLeaks publicly solicited donations specifically for Bradley's defence expenses, and I assume people did donate.
They led us to believe they would make a substantial contribution in September. Since then we have had perhaps half a dozen conversations trying to follow up with them but we have not yet received any money."
Mr Patterson told WikiLeaks in July that the defence would cost $100,000 (£65,000). "They said at the time they would split it with us," he said. Last week, he said, WikiLeaks finally promised to pay, but only $20,000 (£12,500.)
"They told us on Thursday that nobody has signed off on it yet, but they expect it to happen soon," he said. "We're definitely going to be able to use $20,000, but it's less than we hoped for."
Mr Patterson said Wikileaks' failure to pay was "unfortunate", but added: "I attribute it to their fiscal disarray as the world closed in on them. I have spent many years defending military personnel. My concern was that an Icelandic-Australian-Swedish website was never going to be able to provide the defence that was needed for Bradley."
Much of Wikileaks's money goes through the Wau Holland Foundation, named after a former computer hacker and based in Kassel, Germany.
Authorities in the German state of Hesse said they had issued it with two warnings after it failed to file the required accounts.
Wau Holland's PayPal account for online donations was closed last week, prompting international hacker retaliation.
However, it was also suspended in 2008 and last year. "We suspended it temporarily in 2009 in accordance with European anti-money-laundering regulations, for reaching certain limits," a PayPal spokesman said. "The account was reinstated when the foundation provided additional information."
Meanwhile, a former senior WikiLeaks activist said she had resigned because of her concern that Julian Assange, the site's controversial founder, was "the sole decision-maker" and a "bottleneck" to the site's development.
Birgitta Jonsdottir, an Icelandic MP and transparency campaigner, said she and several other senior WikiLeaks activists had serious concerns about the group's structure.
"We were trying to get a meeting arranged so Wiki-Leaks could deal with the issue of transparency, but Julian refused," she said. "You can't run an organisation like this with one person in charge. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the money, but why can't he be transparent about it?"
At the time of WikiLeaks's first big release of information, the Afghan material this summer, the organisation had only "two or three" full-time staff, she said. "There were no direct press contacts and I, as one of the easier-to-reach people involved, felt the full brunt of the media. I was getting hundreds of calls."
The lack of organisation meant the Afghan logs were published with the names of confidential sources, putting lives at risk. At the same time, WikiLeaks released thousands of pages of secret prosecution documents from a Belgian child sex abuse scandal, complete with the names of some victims, and the names of suspects investigated and found to be innocent.
Miss Jonsdottir said she was "simply outraged" at the reaction to Mr Assange's arrest on sexual assault allegations by two women last week.
"There are two sides to the story and these women are on the receiving end of a lot of hate mail. How does anyone who calls for his release and the dropping of the charges know the truth? In this battle for Julian's release, Bradley Manning has been forgotten."
She added: "A lot of my work with WikiLeaks was great. I feel privileged to have been given an opportunity to participate in something historic. But this creating of a martyr and icon [in Mr Assange] has got completely out of control. I look at the website and I see a picture of him and there is nothing behind this façade.
"Julian is incredibly like-able, incredibly enjoyable to be with – if you are agreeing with him. If you criticise him, he is very abusive. He has a very high IQ but very low EQ [emotional intelligence]."
At least four other senior WikiLeaks activists have also left, including the site's former spokesman, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who accused Mr Assange of "behaving like some sort of emperor", adding: "Our raison d'être was transparency, but we were not transparent ourselves."
Mr Domscheit-Berg and other ex-WikiLeaks staff will tomorrow launch a rival site, OpenLeaks, which promises to be "democratically governed by its members, rather than one group or individual."
WikiLeaks was unavailable for comment. But Gavin MacFadyen, visiting professor of journalism at London's City University and a friend and supporter of Mr Assange, said that the critics constituted "four or five people out of around 500" who have worked with WikiLeaks.
"The site has a record of huge achievement," he said. "They take immense care to protect their sources. They deal with more whistle-blowers than you or I have dealt with in a lifetime, and there has never been a single complaint."
He said the site's workforce was spread around the world and was unaffected by Mr Assange's detention. "They are working 17 hours a day and having a hard time dealing with the attention. But they are functioning 100 per cent and processing enormous quantities of material."
