Entrepreneur Dick Smith gave $50,000 to help fund the legal battle to bring confessed terror supporter David Hicks home.

But Mr Smith said “not a cent” went directly to Hicks and some cash had been returned after Hicks was brought back to Australia.

Details of Mr Smith’s financial assistance and other support for Hicks has been outlined in an interview with Readers Digest magazine.

“I sent money to a trust account to David’s solicitor David McLeod in Adelaide,” Mr Smith told the magazine.

“I think it must have got up to about $50,000.

“It was to support family members to visit David and for other purposes.

“The money also funded Geoffrey Robertson, the top international human rights lawyer, to travel to Washington.

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Mr Smith said his sense from talking to Hicks was if he had gone before a jury, he would never have been convicted.

“When I read the initial claims about David they just didn’t ring true, that a simple country bloke who had a decent family should become a supporter of terrorism,” he said

Yeah. I cannot imagine how an anti-Semitic country bloke who converted to Islam could become a terrorist or terror supporter.