Xahra Saleem, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist who helped organize a protest that toppled the statue of Edward Colston, an English merchant, Member of Parliament, and slave trader, then stole around £70,000 from donors, has been sentenced for her fraud and theft of charity donations. Last year she was jailed for two and a half years, but now she was fined just a nominal £1 sum.
As background, Saleem used her position as a BLM activist in Great Britain to organize fundraisers in the wake of the death of George Floyd and resulting BLM protests from around the world. At the time, she was known as Yvonne Maina. She rose to fame principally on the back of helping organize the June of 2020 BLM march in Bristol, which resulted in the toppling of Colston’s statue.
She then received tens of thousands of pounds of donations, with police now believing she managed to bring in at least £70,000. Instead of spending those donations on activism or other, related causes, Saleem frittered it away on personal expenses in less than a year, blowing the money on Uber rides, beauty treatments, expensive clothes, take out food and food deliveries, and phones.
The bill eventually came due for Saleem, as in 2023 she was jailed for two and a half years after pleading guilty to a count of fraud. Then, the full extent of her theft of charity donations was not widely known, as her plea came when it was reported that £32,000 in charity donations went missing from the first fundraiser she set up. Now, however, the true number, more than double that, as she set up a second charity fundraiser and stole that money as well, is known.
However, instead of her jail time doubling, Saleem was hit with a nominal £1 fine. However, while small now, the order allows the fund to increase over time as Saleem has more access to money. As the funds she stole were frittered away on the aforementioned personal expenses, there was no cash for the investigators to recover.
Anthony Davis, the Detective Constable who investigated her, explained the reason for the nominal fine and said, “Xahra Saleem admitted to defrauding a charity of a significant sum of money and received a custodial sentence for it last year. She made the conscious decision to take the money for herself, when it should have gone to young people in east Bristol.”
He continued, “Blameless individuals who supported the charity were left to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of this serious fraud. They were put in an incredibly difficult position of trying to answer questions about Saleem’s offending when they had done nothing wrong and were left devastated by what occurred. In total it has been calculated Saleem benefited to the value of approximately £70,000. Nobody should profit from criminality and that’s why we have taken proactive action under the Proceeds of Crime Act.”
Watch the Colston statue get toppled during the Bristol March Saleem helped organize here:
Featured image credit: By Caitlin Hobbs – https://twitter.com/Chobbs7/status/1269682491465576448/photo/1, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91059525
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