The Charity Commission has frozen the accounts of a religious charity over issues including potential links to an extreme right-wing organisation.
The Saint George Educational Trust, based in Hampshire, had already been investigated by the commission over its association with far-right groups.
The commission announced today that it had opened a statutory inquiry over serious regulatory concerns that there is or has been misconduct and/or mismanagement in the administration of the charity.
It said the charity appeared to have engaged in activities that did not further its religious purposes, including political activity or online campaigning.
According to its Facebook page, the trust is an “educational charity concerned primarily with the study and propagation of the moral and social teaching of Christianity and its application in society”.
The charity was investigated by the commission in 1999, after it was revealed that one of its trustees, Roberto Fiore, had been sentenced in absence in Italy for being a member of the political wing of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, a fascist terror group.
The ARN’s armed wing was implicated in the Bologna bombing of 1980, which killed 85 people.
The commission said the trust was also looked into in 1997, then again earlier this year for “failure to submit financial information for two or more years”.
The commission froze the charity’s account after the inquiry was opened and ordered it to remove content that did not further the charity’s purposes from its website and social media pages.
The charity’s website appears to be deactivated at present.