Perth Islamic schools raided in fraud probe

31st January 2007 from WA News:

With thanks to Gramfan: This is a watered down version of an article from WA news. The Australian ran the story also with a bit more of a punch, but it has been taken off the net. But I have the paper and I post it below this article:

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Police from the major fraud squad have raided Perth’s three Australian Islamic College schools and the office of the schools’ founder as part of an investigation into allegations of fraud involving government funding.

The simultaneous raids took place at 9am yesterday when officers converged on the Dianella, Thornlie and Kewdale campuses, while a separate group raided the college’s Booragoon head office.

They seized boxes of documents from the head office, while officers at the schools took computers and hundreds of boxes of documents, including enrolment details.

Staff from the Federal Education Department investigations unit also took part in the raids.

No charges have been laid.

Police said they were investigating allegations that the State and Federal governments’ student subsidized funding programs had been defrauded. It is understood the allegations relate to the inflation of the schools’ enrollment figures.

The annual funding is based on the number of students at each school and is believed to be worth several thousand dollars per student. It is understood the colleges’ three campuses claim to have about 2700 students, from 30 nationalities, and more than 260 teachers.

In 2004-05, the State provided the college with $4.3 million in the form of per capita grants, which all private schools are entitled to.

The school’s founder Abdallah Magar, of Attadale, could not be contacted for comment yesterday as police swarmed over the office of his company, Magar Enterprises, which shares its offices with the college.

Mr Magar, a former industrial chemist who came to Australia from Egypt in 1966, founded the college in 1986 after teaching weekend Islamic classes at the Perth Mosque for years. In 1990, he opened the Thornlie school, while Dianella was opened in 1996 and Kewdale in 2000.

Last year, Mr Magar joined the public debate on the future of controversial Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilaly after the mufti made comments about Australian women.

Mr Magar told The West Australian at the time that the issue had been blown out of proportion and that the media were to blame for creating the controversy. But he has also previously said that equipping young Muslims to resist the lure of radicals and extremists was an important part of the college’s work.

SEAN COWAN

Could it be that Magar is in fact a ‘radical’ himself?

Okay, here’s an excerpt from The Australian by Paige Taylor & Elizabeth Gosch which is much more revealing:

The federal government gave the college 13.3 million in funding in 2006. It is possible for schools to make fraudulent subsidy claims by ‘double-counting’ students, ‘ghosting’ students or inflating rent payments.

‘You can do all kinds of things hypothetically to rort the subsidy system’- detective Inspector Arno Albrecht, from the commercial crime division, told the Australian.

It goes on to say that Mr. Magar is a supporter of the cat-meat sheik Hilali who is known for anti-Australian, misogynistic speeches and who wants to ‘clean up the white house’…
Australia supports Islamic schools, (centers of hate and subversion) with 110 million dollars p.a.

Tens of millions of additional funds are wasted for Islamic ‘community centers’ – there are no figures available as to how much Australian taxpayers pay to support the demographic jihad, the conquest by overbreeding and outbreeding the local population…