A Black Lives Matter activist fraudster will only have to pay back £1 of the tens of thousands she stole from a charity intended to help disadvantaged black children after pleading poverty at the Bristol Crown Court.
Xahra Saleem, 23, previously known as Yvonne Maina, was sentenced to two and half years in prison last year after being found guilty of using GoFundmen donations intended to send local black children on a trip to Africa on herself, using the stolen £70,000 to on hair and beauty treatments, taxis, takeaways, Amazon purchases, and a new iPhone and Mac laptop.
However, the fraudster will — at least for now — only have to pay back £1 to the charity she had defrauded. It was revealed that Saleem’s prison sentence was more lenient than normal, with Judge Michael Longma saying that he took into account her immaturity and age when sentencing her, the Daily Mail reports.
“There is remorse. I have no doubt you have remorse now looking back at that period of time,” the judge said.
Following the hearing, Jay Daley and Deneisha Royal, representing the youth group Changing Your Mindset, said that they did not feel as if justice was done, saying: “It feels like we are being punished,” adding that they believed it was unlikely that they would ever receive the money stolen by Saleem.
“If we were to get the money back we would go on the trip and members of the group would reestablish the group and make changes to the community and use time on the trip to plan for this,” they said.
People invovled with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) charity leave Bristol Crown Court after Xahra Saleem was jailed for two-and-a-half years for fraud. Ms Saleem admitted a £30,000 fraud over an online fundraising page related to the Black Lives Matter demonstration that took place in Bristol in 2020 and ended with the toppling with the statue of Edward Colston into the city’s harbour. Picture date: Tuesday October 31, 2023. (Photo by Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images)
While Saleem will avoid financial penalties for her crimes for now, the police have obtained a Confiscation Order under the Proceeds of Crime Act against her, meaning that the £1 payment could be increased at a later date if she earns enough money in the future to begin paying back the stolen funds.
A founding member of the BLM-offshoot ‘All Black Lives Bristol’ group, Saleem was an organiser of the infamous Bristol protest in 2020 which saw the statue of 17th-century merchant and parliamentarian Sir Edward Colston toppled, defaced, and pushed into the local harbour by leftist activists over his ties to the slave trade.
Judge Longman said that “as an organiser of the Black Lives Matter march in Bristol, you gave yourself a high public profile which you used to raise money to help young people in St Pauls – an immensely worthwhile cause.”
“That money you then used for your benefit not theirs – funding a lifestyle which you could not normally afford,” the judge added.
Like Saleem, the four far-left activists who were charged with destroying the Colston statue did not face the full force of the law. Although they admitted being involved in the destruction of the statue, they were acquitted in 2022 after successfully arguing that their actions were nonetheless on the “right side of history“.
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