Having left behind her comfortable married life in Britain to set up Care4Calais in northern France, it wasn’t long before Clare Moseley was making a name for herself.
Among those who popped across the Channel to see the wealthy former accountant at work with refugees were Labour MP Diane Abbott and singer will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas. The Guardian newspaper even named her as one of ‘six women who made 2015’.
Alas, seven and a half years after founding her beloved charity, which provides food, shelter, healthcare and legal support to Channel migrants in camps, Mrs Moseley, 52, has dramatically quit amid deeply troubling reports about her behaviour. Among a slew of complaints are allegations that she threatened to drag a volunteer ‘out by your f***ing hair’ and used pepper spray on a refugee in Belgium.
More in a moment of those unsavoury incidents — which Mrs Moseley doesn’t deny — for her departure from the charity (often known as C4C) comes on the back of several scandals that have dogged her leadership.
None is more jaw-dropping than her turbulent affair with a ‘Syrian refugee’ nearly 20 years her junior, who was hired as her bodyguard and translator and turned out to be a Tunisian market stall holder who was already married to another British woman.
Almost eight years on from setting up Care4Calais, Clare Moseley dramatically quit amid deeply troubling reports about her behaviour
Mrs Moseley’s (pictured third from right) romance with Mohamed Bajar (pictured second from right) sparked outrage given that she had implemented a strict ‘no sex with migrants’ policy at the charity
Mrs Moseley’s romance with Mohamed Bajar sparked outrage given that she had implemented a strict ‘no sex with migrants’ policy at the charity on the advice of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Their relationship ended acrimoniously in 2017 amid claims that Bajar, 34, tried to con Mrs Moseley out of thousands of pounds.
Now, with the fallout of her sudden departure, the Mail has uncovered a troubling footnote to the whole sorry saga.
For Bajar, who was jailed in France for attempted arson in 2017 after attempting to set fire to the C4C warehouse in northern France, is now happily living in the UK.
Having settled in Bolton, Greater Manchester, Bajar married a 35-year-old Romanian receptionist at Manchester Register Office in October 2021. She gave birth to their son just over a year ago.
How Mrs Moseley’s former lover finally reached the UK is not clear but, given his criminal record, it is worrying. His presence will certainly raise fears about the ease with which economic migrants can cross borders by posing as refugees at a time when the Prime Minister has vowed to cut illegal immigration figures.
No one is more surprised by this latest twist in the drama than the British woman who previously married Bajar at his family home in Sousse, Tunisia, in 2014.
Having settled in Bolton, Greater Manchester, Bajar married a 35-year-old Romanian receptionist at Manchester Register Office in October 2021. She gave birth to their son just over a year ago. Pictured: The family together
‘I didn’t realise we were divorced,’ 59-year-old mother-of-two Carol Hutchings told me this week from her home in Manchester.
‘Our wedding was in Tunisia and he had all the paperwork so maybe he was able to divorce me there without me knowing, but I haven’t heard anything about it.’
She said she was aware that Bajar had travelled to the UK after getting out of prison in France but couldn’t understand how he had been allowed to stay here, let alone get married.
Bajar told me via text this week that he was ‘legally in the country’ and ‘I have the right to work and travel and everything’, but did not explain how.
But before he travelled he sent messages to a friend via social media, expressing difficulties in getting to the UK.
In one sent in January 2019 — and seen by the Mail — he wrote that, having travelled to Belgium, he had returned to France. ‘I was trying to cross again from zeebrouge [sic] and then there was so much police and anyone they catch they take to detention centre.’
In October 2019, he sent a photograph of himself standing next to an inflatable dinghy with a French gendarme behind him — suggesting a failed Channel crossing. In January 2020, he messaged again to say: ‘I’m leaving Belgium next week.’
How Mrs Moseley’s (pictured) former lover finally reached the UK is not clear but, given his criminal record, it is worrying
He announced his arrival in London on April 2, 2020, less than a week after lockdown measures legally came into force.
While texting the friend to ask if he could come to stay, he said that Covid was not a problem because he was ‘clean’ and had been ‘checked by the police’.
‘If I had anything the police or home ofice [sic] would have never let go of me!!!!’ he wrote, adding: ‘I really need a place to stay or they will deport me.’
Why Bajar was not deported is a mystery. Certainly, he was no vulnerable refugee. His middle-class family owns a souk in Sousse, a resort popular with holidaymakers.
Carol Hutchings first met him on holiday in June 2009. They stayed in touch and she visited him twice a year. He proposed six months after they met and they married in March 2014 at a ceremony held in French, English and Arabic at his spacious family home.
Carol returned to the UK and, after he pestered her for money, their relationship cooled, although Bajar continued to send her messages, sometimes asking for help in getting to the UK, other times heaping abuse on her.
He left Tunisia in September 2014. A previous investigation by the Mail revealed that his parents gave him 3,000 euros to travel in a fishing boat from Tunis to Palermo in Sicily.
From there he travelled to Hamburg in Germany, where he claimed asylum seeker’s allowance while flitting back and forth to Poland, where he worked at a Coca-Cola factory. He was forced to leave in July 2015 after the German authorities took his fingerprints and discovered he was Tunisian.
He arrived in Calais just days after then prime minister David Cameron was condemned for describing migrants as ‘a swarm of people coming across the Mediterranean, seeking a better life’. He even spoke to a Channel 5 news team about his determination to get to the UK.
According to former volunteers, Mrs Moseley and Bajar’s affair soon became common knowledge. (file image)
‘I’m not giving up,’ he said. ‘Every day I’m trying and keep trying, keep trying, until I get through.’
Just a few months later, Mrs Moseley arrived at the refugee camp and their paths crossed. A photo she posted in November 2015 showed them sitting side by side in the camp. According to former volunteers, their affair soon became common knowledge.
But their relationship finished acrimoniously at the end of 2016 amid claims he was trying to con Mrs Moseley out of thousands of pounds — although nothing ever came of the allegations. The following June, Bajar was arrested after pouring petrol around the C4C warehouse in Calais and threatening to kill her.
Prosecuting sources involved in Bajar’s case in France told the Mail this week that he was sentenced to two years in prison with a year suspended. He ‘got out in around six months’ towards the end of 2017 because of good behaviour in prison and because the French authorities had the option to expel him from France on release.
‘I’m not sure if this happened,’ the French source said. ‘Dealing with immigrants convicted of crimes becomes very complicated and orders are often challenged. It may be that Bajar agreed to leave France so an official expulsion order was not required by judges.’
Mrs Moseley, who has a home in Heswall, Merseyside, said this week she wasn’t aware that Bajar was in the UK, adding: ‘I have had no contact with him for many years.’
She has also defended herself against the leaked complaints against her and said her decision to step down from C4C was prompted, separately, by a difference of opinion among the leadership of the charity about her future role.
C4C, which had an income of £1.6 million in the financial year ending 2021, according to the Charities Commission, announced her departure two days after Third Sector, a news outlet that covers the charitable sector, contacted it with the leaked dossier of eight complaints made between 2017 and 2020.
In May 2020, C4C received a formal complaint from a volunteer who said Mrs Moseley had threatened her ‘with physical violence’. During a row about journalists photographing refugees, Mrs Moseley shouted at the volunteer: ‘I will drag you out by your f***ing hair.’
Mrs Moseley told Mail Online the incident followed ‘a period of issues with this volunteer. I acknowledge that the comment, made in the heat of the moment, was entirely inappropriate and I have apologised’.
Earlier in 2020, the charity also investigated accounts from two people about an incident in Brussels when Mrs Moseley used pepper spray while distributing goods to refugees. According to documents shown to Third Sector, she said she used the spray in self-defence after threatening behaviour from someone else at a C4C distribution site.
Mrs Moseley added: ‘With regard to the pepper spray incident, this was in self-defence, as other witnesses have acknowledged, and at the time I was unaware of the different legal position [on pepper spray] in Belgium as compared to France. On becoming aware of it, I of course ceased to carry it in Belgium.’
C4C told the Charity Commission in January 2021 that Mrs Moseley still carried pepper spray in France, ‘where it is legal’, but no longer in Belgium. She also responded to accusations of bullying in C4C, saying: ‘I can only say that, in a position of leadership of a young and fast-growing organisation, I have been placed in many positions where I had to make difficult and high-pressured decisions.
‘If I made mistakes or upset any of our volunteers, I am sorry for that.’
Her leadership of C4C had been dogged by controversy. In January 2016, she was forced to apologise for likening the treatment of asylum seekers by the French authorities to the plight of Jews under the Nazis.
She apologised again in October that year when, after a series of attacks by migrants on lorry drivers, she said it was ‘not the end of the world’ if the drivers were forced to find other jobs.
A charity worker who has spent time with several aid organisations in the Calais area told the Mail this week: ‘Clare is very well known by everybody in the sector because she has a very forceful personality and has been around a very long time.
In January 2016, Mrs Moseley (pictured) was forced to apologise for likening the treatment of asylum seekers by the French authorities to the plight of Jews under the Nazis
‘She always likes to lead, pushing herself forward as the person in charge at all times, and this often causes annoyance.’
C4C has denied there is a ‘culture of bullying’ at the organisation.
Aside from the latest complaints, as well as concerns from whistleblowers, an inquiry launched by the Charity Commission nearly three years ago into regulatory matters at C4C has yet to be concluded.
The inquiry is considering safeguarding and financial controls at C4C and whether there has been any mismanagement or misconduct in the administration of the charity.
In its most recent financial report, covering the year to September 2021, the charity’s trustees cited ‘a key person risk in respect of the charity’s founder and CEO’ in a section on ‘principal risks and uncertainties faced by the charity at the time of writing’.
A spokesman for the commission said it was unable to comment on its ongoing investigation.
Conservative MP Craig Mackinlay told the Mail this week: ‘I have chased both the Charity Commission and responsible ministers as to why the Charity Commissioners’ inquiry, which commenced in August 2020, has yet to conclude.
‘It seems bizarre that the investigation of a charity with just £1.6 million of income, patently uncomplicated, has taken so long.’
Last November, several months before Mrs Moseley’s departure, the charity advertised for a new CEO, offering a salary of £60,000-£70,000 a year.
Last month, the position was taken up by Colonel Steve Smith MBE, a former military officer and former CEO of the International Refugee Trust. Mrs Moseley, meanwhile, was briefly the charity’s chairman before quitting this month.
She remains a director of the campaign group Love Music Hate Racism and, in a statement released by C4C last week, said she was leaving to ‘focus on campaigning for safe routes for refugees’.
Stopping small boats from crossing the Channel is a priority for Rishi Sunak.
Speaking at a Council of Europe meeting in Iceland this week, he said ‘the world’s most vulnerable are paying the price’ for illegal migration.
And yesterday, while attending the G7 summit in Hiroshima in Japan, he said that while he was ‘proud’ of the way the UK welcomed Ukrainian refugees, he was committed to bringing down levels of migration and ‘relentlessly focused on stopping the boats’.
Additional reporting by Ross Slater
