to think Camila Batmanghelidjh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kid's Company Charity Funding?

[LuluJakey1]

She is like Jimmy Saville in that what she has been doing has been under all of all our noses and we have refused to speak up about it or believe it.

It is not just the luvvies who have been up close and personal with her- involved with the charity and CB at a very close level, some even Trustees. It is also the employees and the parents of children, the children themselves, the volunteers. We are not talking about a hidden mis-use of funding. We are talking aout a whole culture of open waste and self-indulgence.

I know it is from The Daily Mail but it is actually an interview with het.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3199527/My-heart-clear-says-Kids-Company-boss-Batmanghelidjh-admits-charity-paid-school-fees-employees-children-denies-wrongdoing.html

£5000 a month rent on an Art Deco House with private swimming pool - which houses a member of staff, and the swimming pool is used by CB but hot by any children- they are 'not allowed' (her words)

£40,000 chauffeur- now a specialist worker (according to CB). also has private school and therapist funding for his 2 children.

Staff( how many?) have their children sent to private schools because the job is stressful and it is part of a 'staff well-being package'

The Chauffeur's sister is also employed - now as a 'brilliant accountant', last summer as 'the woman who does my sewing' (mind you that would be a full-time job in itself, but it does imply the charity pays for those vile outfits much as I suspected)

25 young people given £769,000 a year funding - £31,000 a year each, to do nothing. They are CB's specially selected young people- many of whom have received funding for many years. She describes them as 'like a family, hanging round the house'. She deals with their funding herself.

Yet STILL CB complains staff should not have spoken up about any of this and implies those who have will suffer for it.

In my view this woman and her behaviours are corrupt, dishonest and immoral.

Are my views unreasonable? I feel this could be jus the tip of the iceberg in terms of what is yet to emerge and prosecutions will be very likely.

I think there should be a down- to the -bone, in-depth investigation of every aspect of the work of this charity and of CB. Not simply any concerns that have now been raised but a complete trawl of the spending, the practices and the behaviours of CB herself.

It's in a book written by a RC priest praising her! Book page is linked to in article below

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/25/why-to-many-critics-mother-teresa-is-still-no-saint/

I did not get obsessed about this last week and spend hours googling it

PP said the media coverage has gone quiet, I agree in the main but the BBC has this today...

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34011465

However, the charity has handed over records from its database relating to just 1,692 London clients - both adults and children. Of these, the charity had designated 331 as "high-risk".

It costs, what, about 40 grand per year to put a child through Eton? So ahout £1.3m per year for 331? Now that would be an interesting intervention.

What the fuck were KC spending the money on to cost about an order of magnitude more than sending all their high risk clients to a top-flight boarding school? Ah yes, sending the staff's children to top-flight boarding schools...

Apologies if these articles have already been mentioned, but they are interesting in hindsight. This one from 2007, when CB was threatening to close down KC mentions issues in passing around concerns re personality cult.

And for some reason 2009 Decca Aitkenhead article [[http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/11/right-way-to-raise-children]] has always stuck in my mind, though I didn't know until googling for it just now that Decca's husband worked for KC until his untimely death last year.

1,692 clients!!!!!!!! For a charity pretending to be national. That's appalling waste.

And so it goes on. There will be so much more of this to come. So many lies will emerge. So much money wasted and spent buoying up her ego her myths and her lifestyle.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-34011465
Charlotan is a kind description of this woman. She is actually quite monstrous I think.

How many of those were actual children?

This business of supporting 25 year old university graduates seems very out of step with what many people thought the charity actually did.

I'm guessing PCOS.

DD2 has recently been diagnosed - poor kid has really been through the wringer lately, health wise. She's been on Metformin for a month, and, with diet and exercise, she's lost getting on for a stone already.

I'm guessing dieting is pretty difficult if your head is so far up your own arse, and exercise the same if one refuses to walk on pavements

I was guessing some kind of pituitary or adrenal dysfunction. Addisons would be lifethreatening and you need to take steroids - but everyone I've met with it has been normal size. Cushings would make you overweight but has a very specific appearance which she hasn't got. Panhypopit would also be life threatening, need steroid replacement - but again doesn't inevitably lead you to be the size of a house.

Fucking hell. All that money and just a handful of people being helped. It sounds like nobody is even giving her claims the slightest credence now. If the number of children handed over + the undocumented children claim CB made was true that would mean 2/3 of their clients were undocumented migrants.

What a load of rubbish she talks. This is going to get worse and worse, she is clearly a total fantasist.

Is it not possible to discuss the possible flaws in her management of KC without bringing her weight or her appearance into it or am i expecting too much in todays celebrity obsessed world that focuses on womens appearance.

Of course it's possible, Helena, but she used her appearance as a hook - and used KC money to pay her own personal seamstress to create that look. While I completely understand your point, you're missing that one.

Her weight is mentioned because she claims to have a rare pituitary disorder, one that has claimed the lives of every other person with the condition.
As for the clothes, C B if very fond of telling the world about her choice of attire.

I think her appearance is fair game as she has contrived a theatrical appearance to encourage her identification with the 'brand'. Doubly so if the charity ended up funding her costumes. And if she has invoked her health as a means for garnering public sympathy and further building of the 'brand', that becomes fair game too. By doing these two things she has been complicit in setting the agenda here.

With all the hand wringing going on now within Government, the Charity Commissioners and KC governance, this surely tarnishes the charity sector generally. Social Services exists as a function of the state so why have we farmed out some kids to what seems to be a cowboy maverick operation? Why can't we just fund Social Services properly who are after all trained, monitored and accountable. If this can go on under our noses and with all the warnings that were sounded, what on earth must happen to our overseas aid budget. Sorry for conflating different issues but the more I read about what has been going on, the more disillusioned I feel.

Ah yes, the overseas aid budget. A bigger scandal than this by an order or magnitude or indeed several.

She uses her 'condition', amongst other things, like MH, to shut down any dialogue she doesn't want to continue.

WorriedMutha I believe part of the argument is that there are some people who are very hard to engage with because SS are part of the state and their authority is a threat. Services like KC are there to help and solve problems without the added level of judgement that comes with SS so they were supposed to reach parts SS couldn't.

That was the theory anyway...

The most damming aspect for me are the hints that she's being victimised because she knows about sexual abuse cover ups.

If that is true why hasn't she booked herself and appointment immediately with the head of the Met police? Why didn't she speak up before?

Lazy - that might have been the theory but the practice seems to be 97% of 'clients' were self- referred, some were 25-31yrs old and older if they were parents of the children. Many were handed weekly enveloped with £250+ cash in weekly and no questions asked. Turns out the numbers of clients are probably less than 10% of what CB claimed and yet somehow she has spent 7.2million of government grants since 1st April 2015, never mind the millions from other funding sources.

But she has had the benefit of a personal seamstress, a personal chauffeur, a 'company' car, a swimming pool in an Art Deco rental costing the cahrity £5000 a month- but children not allowed to use the pool, 7 PAs working just for her. And no doubt all the other perks like a paid for mobile phone, Ipad, pension scheme, private health care, etc, etc. Ontop of that there is her £95,000+ salary.

I bet she got a huge pay-off as well for agreeing to resign. I would estimate it will have been at least £50,000 and possibly more than £100,000, plus her salary for 6 months.

It's a fine old life!

I will not be surprised if this ends up as a criminal prosecution.

I agree Lulu. I also noticed that CB. is registered with an agency as an after dinner inspirational speaker so £95,000 is probably the tip of the iceberg as far as her income is concerned.

Her family history, health problems and the way she chooses to present herself are all part of her carefully-crafted legend and are designed to obfuscate (at best).

the pseudo-scientific woo-bollocks is strong with this one

I was always deeply uneasy about her but wondered if I was just being overly cynical. Probably not, as it turns out.

Same here Bore, something didn't sit right: the bizarre accent, clothes, psycho claptrap.

1 kilo at birth? yeah right.

What a pantomime.

Bore, interestingly in this article she says it is a thyroid problem that causes her weight. Thyroid is easily controlled- I have it, my thyroid does not work at all. Once treated you carry weight because you over-eat and don't exercise.
Her comment about her clothes is just ludicrous.

Fantasist.