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.

I painted two pictures which won adult awards when I was just a child so I had to leave Iran for my education"

Well it sounds more dramatic than 'my dad was richer than Croesus so he packed me off to a posh and expensive boarding school in Britain just like he had been.'

Happy to have been on service to the Daily Fail, but a shame they didn't manage to pin down the exact number of children being helped ... That for me is the $64000 question (and probably the annual per capita spend ;.) Come on, media, probe probe probe her figures.

She talks utter shite.

I agree, the key thing now is for an investigative journalist to get their teeth into the figures and claims made by Kids Company. That Camila is a fantasist of the first order who cannot be relied on for anything near the truth, whether it be her refugee status, her paintings, her experiences in the crack dens of South London or her various strange ailments. Almost none of it is true. But really what matters is the bigger picture of who has been supported and at what cost.

According to DH's friend who works on one of the broadsheets, there are a few of them onto her- well-regarded Investigative Journalists- they all have lots of stuff, it has not been hard to find but they think there is much bigger stuff and are just keeping digging. He would not tell us any details but said all of the papers are onto her and holding onto stuff at the moment waiting to see how rigorous the official investigations are or if they try to cover for things the government have done.

'But really what matters is the bigger picture of who has been supported and at what cost.'

The answer to that is now coming out. Camila, her favourites and their families have all been supported. And supported very well indeed.

1. Has any of the money ended up offshore?
2. Has the charity paid all the tax and national insurance it should have done?
3. What else has been going on connected to Sherborne?
4. Who has lost out as a consequence of questioning her or objecting to her?

Those are all good questions, BoffinMum.

Fascinating to read the DM article this morning. Obviously some of it at least was sourced from this thread, but I don't really have any objection to that.

What I find interesting now is that it's taken so long to spot obvious discrepancies. So she has terrible learning difficulties that mean she finds it very hard to read and write. But at the same time, she was reading a scholarly journal at the age of nine.

Or her dad swam between two countries that are not separated by sea.

Or she got her MA in a college that didn't even exist at the time she claimed to be there.

Why has no-one spotted these before? The claims are either easily checkable or self-evidently nonsense.

The educational institutions concerned are quick enough to claim her as an alumna ...

she sounds like one of those people who if you have been to Tenerife, she has been to Elevenerife!

Some of the apparently untrue things she has said seem pointless. Why pretend to be the youngest ever MA student at Regent's University, for example? Even if it was true, it wouldn't be hugely impressive at the age of 21. And most people, I guess, wouldn't even have heard of Regent's University, so we're not all going to go, "Wow, that's amazing."

I know it didn't pay all the tax and national insurance because they were let off a large outstanding national insurance bill because they were spending the money on far more important things.

Being the youngest ever something does make you sound more impressive, though, at least to the impressionable.

God knows what goes on in CB's head, but there are obviously some people who are compulsive embellishers of their own history, even when the stories they make up seem too trivial or unbelievable to be worth the risk of lying. Jeffrey Archer is the most obvious example - and like CB's, his stories were often about educational achievements or early successes. If you read Michael Crick's biography of him you keep asking yourself why the hell someone would bother to make some of the claims he did.

I knew someone like this once who made up the most ridiculous stories about how the CIA wanted to hire them for $1million and how they were dying of cancer (they weren't) and dating an Armani model and had written a PhD (they hadn't). Appropriately enough, they ended up with a job providing opinion pieces for a very well known right-wing American news channel - it seemed like a natural fit for someone with such a relaxed attitude to the truth.

Yes I think some people are just compulsive self-mythologisers. It may not be that she thinks it's helping her cause, as such.

Now you mention Mr Archer there do seem to be parallels in the sheer brazenness of the hyperbole.

It also reads a bit like Dame Rachel's account of her precocious childhood as well. Another slightly odd set of experiences that don't quite tally (eg her claim that she was brilliant but didn't have access to the Eastern European literature she wanted to read where she lived, whereas in actual fact Scunthorpe public library quite happily ordered anything nerdy you liked in for free if you were a child - they certainly did for me. It was an exceptionally progressive library like that). As I say, always slightly off.

It actually is as though they assume nobody lived where they lived or did what they did, and that we will never call them on anything. To be fair I never called Rachel on anything publicly - then again my experience is that you get utterly flamed if you even get close, which is how they defend their narratives, clearly.

Who's Dame Rachel?

I think I'm showing my age here, because I wasn't particularly aware in the 80s and 90s and have grown up with the Internet as a constant presence.

Does anyone else feel that these embellishments or mythologising stories are probably symptomatic of a society that revolutionised to make celebrities and public figures out of ever increasing nobodies, while also making celebrity more and more of an everyman's aspiration? When the Internet came along and we were able to fact check at the touch of a button, the seeds had already been sown in these people's minds and they failed to adapt?

I'm not saying that lying about identity doesn't exist for young people (it does - catfish), but I do think that this type of manifestation is generationally specific and probably far more widespread in certain circles than we will ever know.

If a 'myth' existed before it was published online, I doubt that the true information would ever become as widely promulgated, if it even makes it online at all. Once the myth has been repeated enough online, it becomes truth.

It's an interesting thought, Carries, and I don't really know. I do remember that when I was a child my mum had a friend who used to make up all sorts of stuff about her past that was simply unbelievable. It would have been impossible to check it on the internet, obviously, yet at the same time it was quite clearly made up, often relating to escapades during the war, for example. I sometimes wonder if this type of fantasist deliberately makes up stuff that is more and more outrageous almost in the hope or expectation that they will get found out.

Interesting theory Carrie (or should that be Bucket?) but I don't think I agree. In my experience people who make stuff up about themselves just don't expect to get caught, and people don't think about how much information about them is out there. I can think of students I've taught who would have been born in the 80s or 90s who've been caught out lying about their degrees (having them when they'd failed) online in places like linkedin.

Who is Dame Rachel?

Oh, is it Rachel DaSouza? She is from Scunthorpe and has been accused of being economcal with truth and honesty.

but I do think that this type of manifestation is generationally specific and probably far more widespread in certain circles than we will ever know.

No, it's been going on forever. You'll find many episodes of self mythologising coming from the Roman period, as well as earlier and later. The interesting thing is that with the incredible information resources available these days the truth is staring people in the face but doesn't get revealed until it's unavoidable.

With regard to her father and his escape from Iran to Turkey, his obituary in thre Washington Times says he escaped over the mountains: www.legacy.com/obituaries/washingtontimes/obituary.aspx?n=fereydoon-batmanghelidj&pid=2828537

You have to remember in those days the mountains were terribly sea-ridden. Things have improved now though. This is probably because of climate change.