Madeleine McCann fund ‘still supported by public’

Nov 5 2007 by Caroline Innes, Liverpool Daily Post

THE fund set up to help find Madeleine McCann is still receiving wide-spread public support six months after her disappearance, one of the Merseyside-based trustees said last night.

Esther McVey, a former television presenter and Conservative candidate for West Wirral, said controversy surrounding donations being used to pay the McCanns’ mortgage had not damaged the Fund’s reputation – nor affected the trustee’s unwavering goal to track down the missing four-year-old.

Ms McVey, a college friend of Madeleine’s Liverpool-born mother, Kate McCann, spoke last night following a service in Liverpool to mark the six-month anniversary of when Madeleine disappeared from the family’s holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

Madeleine’s grandparents, Brian and Susan Healy, of Mossley Hill, attended the service at Our Lady of the Annunciation, Bishop Eton, on Saturday.

They said they had again been buoyed and moved by public support and sympathy at the ceremony and, like Ms McVey, said the Madeleine Fund was going from “strength to strength”.

Ms McVey added: “The fund is very focused on finding Madeleine.

“We have taken a lot of advice on how to maximise our resources and have drawn up very strategic and focused goals.

“We are paying for additional advertising campaigns in Spain, the Iberian Peninsula, Morocco and of course in Portugal and are seeing very positive steps forward.

“None of this would have been possible without the public support, which has never faltered.

“Kate and Gerry did have two mortgage payments made by the fund, but this stopped when they were made formal suspects.

“I really want to stress that they have never asked for one penny from the fund – despite taking un-paid leave to try and find their daughter.

“Seriously, even when they were in Portugal, they never asked for one penny.

“The trustees are all meeting this week to discuss our next steps and have already seen that the systems we have set up are now starting to work.”

Last night, Gerry McCann revealed he plans to resume full-time work in January.

Mr McCann, 39, returned to his job as a consultant cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital, Leicester, last Thursday.

A family spokesman said Dr McCann would work part-time until the New Year. Senior hospital officials say Dr McCann will have “limited” contact with patients for the next few weeks.

In his latest internet blog, Mr McCann wrote of the pain of reaching the six-month milestone still without word of what has happened to his elder daughter.

He wrote: “It is an incredibly long time for us but must be even longer for Madeleine.

“It is so painful for us simply being separated, but all the more distressing when we have to speculate about the situation Madeleine finds herself.

“We have no idea whether she is suffering, but we have to hope and pray that she is being treated like a princess, as she deserves.”

GERRY McCANN urged anyone with information to call a hotline manned by private detectives in Spain on 0034 902 300 213 or contact investi-gation@findmadeleine.com

carolineinnes