A CHARITY set up by the Prince of Wales will not be returning a donation from a billionaire businessman whom the United States Supreme Court last week placed at the centre of a £1 billion fraud.

Cem Uzan, 44, who has given £400,000 to the Prince’s Foundation, which promotes Charles’s architectural ideas, was found by the court to have conned Motorola, the telephone multinational, in an elaborate loan scam.

Uzan, a Turkish-based billionaire, is also wanted in Britain; City of London police last week announced that they had a warrant for his arrest.

The Prince’s Foundation said this weekend it had no intention of returning Uzan’s gift. “The donation was received by the foundation in good faith and spent on a programme of work that benefited students of traditional and building crafts,” said a spokesman.

“Because the funds were received and spent in this way, the foundation does not consider it necessary to return them.”

There is no suggestion the foundation is under any legal obligation to return the money.Nonetheless the Uzan row is embarrassing for the charity. The money, given over two years, represents a sizeable proportion of its income. In its most recent accounts it declares annual donations and sponsorship of £1.7m.

Uzan’s assets in Britain, which include a £6m mansion in Belgravia and a Rolls-Royce, are frozen. He owns television stations, a newspaper, a telecoms empire and electricity stations in Turkey and is believed to have made the gift to the prince’s charity to try to ease his passage into the upper echelons of British society.

The payments began at the suggestion of Bell Pottinger, then his public relations advisers, after he and his wife Alara were guests at a dinner in June 2000 hosted by Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall.

During the candlelit banquet, at which the guests included Donatella Versace, the fashion designer, Sir Richard Branson, the entrepreneur, and Elle Macpherson, the model, Alara Uzan sat at the right hand of the prince.

The style of the dinner, held at the Tramshed in Shoreditch, east London, would not normally be associated with Charles’s traditionalist design views. The tables were draped in black rubber and decorated with cacti wrapped in barbed wire.

The Uzans dined with Charles and Camilla again a year later at Buckingham Palace, and at Highgrove, the prince’s Gloucestershire home.

Uzan paid an initial £100,000 in two instalments, beginning in October 2000, and a further £300,000 through two of his companies in 2000 and 2001.

Among items paid for by Uzan was a craft scholarship scheme involving the renovation of Woodchester Mansion, a grade I listed 19th-century house in the Cotswolds.

The scheme included a week-long course introducing children to traditional building skills.

Other money was spent on a public exhibition of work by alumni.

Just months after his final payment to the charity, Uzan and members of his family were accused by Motorola of a $2.1 billion fraud. Since then the company has been pursuing a civil case against the Uzans through the US courts.

The prince’s charities have suffered a fall in donations recently, possibly as a result of rows involving the prince and royal staff such as Paul Burrell, butler to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and Michael Fawcett, a St James’s Palace aide.

The New York southern district court decided Uzan had conned Motorola into making massive loans to Telsim, a family firm and the second largest telecoms company in Turkey.

The Uzans appear to have stolen the collateral given to secure the loan, siphoned off at least $1 billion from Telsim for their own use, and even tried to shift the blame on to Motorola executives by filing false criminal charges against them.

Two attempts by Uzan to overturn the New York judgment have failed and he has run out of options to appeal.

In Britain he was sentenced to 15 months for contempt of court by a High Court judge and his assets were frozen after he failed to attend a court hearing where he was to be questioned by Motorola lawyers.

After Uzan’s role in the fraud was revealed, the prince ordered aides to tighten vetting procedures. Sir Michael Peat, his private secretary, was said to be examining the circumstances surrounding the donations.

Uzan’s British lawyers did not return calls.

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