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.

This may explain the Sherborne school link - a charity set up by alumni supported Kids Company sherborneinthecommunity.weebly.com/

idgeofreason.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/mumsnet-kids-company-and-online-politics/

www.civilsociety.co.uk/finance/news/content/20263/almost_80_per_cent_of_kids_companys_income_over_the_last_decade_was_unrestricted#.VeQjoUQ1jqA more about the financial mismanagement. Feel sick about the use of public funds to prop this up, and the good that could have been done with it instead.

Thanks for that link - is it possible to find out who the writer is?

She is right though, think of the coming together of different experts we've had on this thread, debating and learning from each other and valueing different experiences to create a consensus - and compare that to the childish tribal politics you see on Newsnight/Today/most of the press whether right or left.

And then expand that to most topics - we know the coverage of children's issues and education is superficial and shit. What if it was like that for everything? health coverage it definitely is Including all the facts we are told about the economy? Yes, that's the world we live in.

Wolpertinger - I think her name is Lisa Muggeridge.

Thanks MrsJamin

Interestingly, on the Civil Society page, there's a link to a story about massive mismanagement of funds and a dodgy CEO at the Halo Trust - another popular celeb cause which whether massive overnight after Princess Diana got involved.

Massive salary for the founding CEO (dwarfing Camila's, the size of which I had no problem with for an organization of that size), his wife in a lucrative consultancy role, the charity paying for their kids to go to boarding school And when he's suspended they pay the trustees £120,000 to investigate

I went to a tea at KC last year & CB said KC didn't have a PR budget

Depends whatyou mean by PR, I guess - they had £40K to give the LSE in exchange for for a pseudo-academic report saying how great they were. I'd class that as PR, of a particularly misleading kind.

Another thing that p*s me off about CB and the way she has been portrayed by the media is the glossing over of her racism.

She is on record (to a select committee, so much more reliable than a news article) being downright racist and discriminatory to black mothers. She singles them out as the cause of young black men's behaviour.

If a white British person said that they'd be set upon by the media but what, because she's a wealthy, upper middle class, middle eastern woman it's ok for her to preach racist twaddle like that??

I wonder who is paying her bill to this PR company she has hired to improve her image? That will be a pretty penny I imagine. That kind of work does not come cheap. One of her luvvie 'friends'? The only two I have seen soeaking up are Yentob and Chris Martin and nothing for the last couple of weeks.

Just to say, also, when I started this thread I had no idea it would provoke the kind of in-depth, extended informed debate it has. I expected to be flamed to be honest for daring to cricticise some of CBs behaviours and views. I have asked MNet to put it in classics because the debate should not be lost. Don't know if they will.

I do think the reason she has got away with all the lies and claptrap is the image she has created of herself. Most of us would find something in her list we could relate to or sympathise with:
She is a refugee - she fled a war zone
Her grandfather was one of the richest men in Iran, her father built magnificent buildings for the people
She is rich and educated
She is poor - it was lost in the revolution
She has a learning disability - severe dyslexia
She can't read, write or use a keyboard
She overcame it, she can read and write
She is black, white, persian
She dresses in some bizarre mix of oddments that suggest African, persian hill tribes (according to her) but absolutely NOT white. middle- class
She suffers an extremely rare condition- the only one on her hospital ward to survive it, everyone else died. Noone knows what it is. It 'causes' her weight problems.
She has suffered sibling loss from illness and suicide.
She is the daughter of a world-reknowned Dr - although some might say a charlotan
She was a premature baby - abandoned by the medical profession and she fought through to live
She is single - has devoted herself to 'parenting' the most vulnerable
She believes she 'has a gift' and recognised that at the age of 9

In addition to manipulate us:
She has drawn a comparison between herself and Mother Theresa- by repeating a story that others have described her as such to her face
She has academic qualifications - in spite of her terrible learning disabilities
She spouts clap-trap that has some basis in unsound research but says it with absolute certainty, often, until it becomes an accepted truth that the 'luvvies' latch onto and repeat
She loves the limelight and to regale with stories of her with the rich and famous. 'Helen Mirren said to me' 'Prince Charles was crying and told me to get in the back of his car with him', 'Chris Martin rang me' and so it goes on.
She uses rhetoric that contains emotive language such as 'suicide, child-abuse, homelessmess, violence, vulnerable, unloved, let-down by society ad the state'.
She focussed in on a group that are politically red-hot - young, mainly black, London-based and involved in gangs, violence, drugs and street crime. Events of the last 15 years like the Tottenham riots, the death of Damilola Taylor, Stephen Lawrence, immigration etc. make the government super-sensitive to any criticism of it's handling of these groups.
She has created a narrative about them - based on her pseudo-science- that by repeating and repeating and repeating she has managed to get people to believe is fact.

Her manipulation of all of this- with herself at the centre- has gone unquestioned until now. It has been the facade behind which she has got away with everything she has. She has been untouchable because noone wanted to touch her. The luvvies wanted the association and acclaim- it fed their egos and sense of 'doing good'. It fed their need to believe that that their shallow existences and way of life makes a difference in a good way rather than just feeding their bank accounts. they all want to belong to the 'in' cause. The government wanted to be associated with something that gave them credibility a street level without wanting to take any responsibility. The donors wanted genuinely to help- they believed her.

Whether her intentions were ever good, they became lost in her fascination with herself and with creating the monstroys myth of CB which I actually think she believes herself now.

All IMHO, of course.

I would love, love, love to hear from one of those PAs (the ones she summoned with a "curious, high pitched noise", according to that Independent article...)

Wow, this isn't the first time there's been criticism of CB/KC on mumsnet, see this thread from 2006, 9 years ago!

Batty Manghelidjh ?

www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/lookalikes/big/batman_chimp.jpg

Can't use a computer but can read over 500 medical / scientific papers

Trapdoor in her office??

“a very angry young man once walked into my office and asked if I wanted him to f* me, but I just told him I was like his mother now!” –

That article linked by ChristineDePisan says CB worked for the NSPCC. Doesn't surprise me. In fact it might explain a lot.

Another one of her myth creation exercises. That initiative sank as well.

Never saw a child except through the car window when she was little - except of course when looking after scores of nursery children as a nine year old...

Well spotted Christine....

Don't even get me started about the NSPCC and their scaremongering and moral panic statements.

WRT to that blog post, I am bang in the middle of all this, professionally speaking. I am regularly sat on by both the left and the right in my public capacity and basically I routinely get put into a position where I am devoiced, cut off in debate, or not invited to speak at things where you would think I'd be welcome given I am one of the top experts in the field. I have even had published papers effectively blocked by my professional association because they are not considered to be sufficiently on message. I find certain influential people pretend they do not know me and/or have never heard of me when they know me full well, rendering me invisible in certain situations - this happens most when they know I have rumbled them. If I am not careful, people start threatening me via work. Attacks can end up being much more personal than the worst excesses of this thread, and deeply Machiavellian - the kind of thing that could end a career.

It is very, very nasty out there for anyone who challenges this cosy dinner party cabal of public debate, believe me. I am currently in something of a safe zone where people have my back to a certain extent, and I theirs, but I do wonder what the future holds.

She doesn't say 'never saw' does she, she does say she was friends with the children of the chief of police? Just she saw children who had different lives to her