UAE philanthropy questioned

HIGHLY DUBIOUS: Holmes (pictured) has questioned whether the UAE donates 3.6% of GNP to humanitarian causes. (UN)

The UN's humanitarian chief has questioned the UAE's philanthropic claims that it donates 3.6% of its gross national product (GNP) to charity, labelling them "highly dubious".

UAE Minister of State Maitha Al Shamsi last month told the UN General Assembly that the UAE donated 3.6% of its GNP to developing countries.

Speaking upon his return to New York following a tour of the Gulf, Sir John Holmes said "there is nothing like that coming through the humanitarian system", UAE daily The National reported on Wednesday.

The UAE's GNP was estimated at around $163 billion in 2006, media reports say, putting the amount the Gulf state donates to humanitarian causes at $5.87 billion, according to ArabianBusiness.com calculations.

GNP is value of all goods and services produced in a country in one year, plus income earned by its citizens abroad, minus income earned by foreigners in the country.

Holmes said such a huge sum of money would eclipse anything being donated by countries in the West.

He said that, to his knowledge, just $500 million had come from the entire Gulf region, which "doesn’t get you even close to the kind of figures".

“Those figures seem to me highly dubious - 3.6% of GNP would be an enormous sum, vastly outweighing anything that’s coming from Western countries,” he said.

“It would be a vast sum of money, but there doesn’t seem to be those vast sums of money flowing that I have seen. Certainly there is nothing like that coming through the humanitarian system.”

Holmes pointed to a lack of transparency as contributing to the discrepancy.

“There are all kinds of funds. Most of the rulers have their own funds, but what happens to these funds is not very transparent," he said.

"I don’t mean that it’s going to the wrong places; we simply don’t know where it is going. It’s just that it is not visible, transparent or accountable."

The UAE has stood by its claims, with its ambassador to the UN, Ahmed Al Jarman, stating that the Gulf state was "one of the most generous countries in the world" and gave "five times more" than Western donors.

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