The Mayday Rescue website states that its purpose is to "partner with communities that are entering, enduring, or emerging from conflict or natural disasters by providing training and equipment, advocacy and outreach, and organisational capacity building for grassroots emergency response groups at the local, regional and national levels." Since it was established, the Mayday Rescue Foundation's primary role has been as an implementing partner for international support to Syria Civil Defence, for whom it has provided training, equipment and mentorship funded by countries including the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany; the other implementing partner delivering aid to SCD is Chemonics, which delivers a comparable amount of support to the White Helmets on behalf of USAID. Mayday Rescue reports that between 2014 and 2018 it received funding of $127 million, $19 million of which came from non-government sources. Mayday Rescue is a separate organisation from both SCD and The Syria Campaign, a UK-based human rights organisation which advocates for protection of civilians in the Syrian conflict. The Syria Campaign maintains an independent fundraising website, www.whitehelmets.org, which raises money to support SCD. However Mayday Rescue and SCD headquarters shared the same building, on the same floor until about 2017, and share meetings. Donors say it is difficult to distinguish the headquarters operation of the two organisations. As of 2019, Mayday Rescue was assessing possibilities for Civil Defence-based stabilisation programmes in countries other than Syria, such as Iraq and Yemen.
Fraud allegation
Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported that three days before James Le Mesurier's suicide on 11 November 2019, he had reported a fraud at the Mayday Rescue Foundation to its donor countries, offering to resign from the foundation. This followed a Dutch accountant's visit to the Mayday Rescue office in Istanbul, which uncovered false receipts after an employee admitted she and a colleague had written the wrongly dated receipts on the instructions of Le Mesurier. A forensic inquiry of Mayday Rescue’s accounts by Grant Thornton subsequently took place instigated by donor countries, as most of its financial records were missing; a summary report of which de Volkskrant's journalists had seen. Le Mesurier had borrowed a large amount from the foundation to pay for his wedding in 2018, and cash intended for other purposes had been used to pay bonuses to senior staff including himself and his wife. The new administrator, Cor Vrieswijk, called salaries of senior staff "excessive", in some cases €26,000 per month, although these had been consented to by donor countries. The original matter reported by Le Mesurier, a payment of $50,000 to himself, was found to be the result of a "misunderstanding" and not fraud. Other criticism included that here was no supervisory board, so directors could decide their own salaries, and that the non-profit organisation had commercial branches in Turkey and Dubai. The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs had ended its support to Mayday Rescue in 2018 over financial management concerns. Mayday Rescue’s new administrator stated in early 2020 that the foundation would be closed down within a few months. Germany is re-claiming almost €50,000, and the Netherlands is holding back a final grant of over €57,000. In a legal action brought by the new administrator against the suspended financial director, it was disclosed that in 2018 27% and in 2019 33% of donations were spent on foundation costs.
