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.

If this all says one thing, it is that the term psychotherapist needs to become a protected title.

This article about place2be from 2012 says Camila was is involved 'for the first few months'. It also sounds like they treat their donors a lot better.
www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2085653/Benita-Refson-YOU-Clarins-award-winner-Every-child-deserves-future.html

*Taken to court by her building society, she was only saved from having her flat repossessed by a sympathetic judge

Since when did repossession actions end up in front of judges?*

If it is defended there will be a proof ( in lay terms a trial) In Scotland it would be before a Sheriff. In England I assume before a County court judge.

You can lodge defences no matter how spurious and you will get your day in court, even if all that happens is the defences are dismissed. Her account of what happened in court is fantasy.

Boffin, still not getting the all souls group ref? Sorry to be stupid.

Not exactly secret, all sorts of people invited along yo speak to it. Doesn't deny its existence. Lots of aged ex civil servants and academics. And I'd guess less of a power in the land than it might have bern say in the late 80s. Even then not convinced.

Finding this fascinating.....

Re: the mortgage - it's also a load is bollocks in that presumably the hearing was in Engkand (CB living in London). My understanding is that she said she didn't find out about the action for repossession until the day before (the hearing I assume?). But I'm confused as to why there was a hearing as - there would be a time limit for her to lodge a defence. If she didn't, the action would proceed as undefended and there would be no need for a hearing

Also - the judge had no basis in law for acting as he or she allegedly did. So if I was acting for the lender, I'd have just lodged an appeal. Plus considered a complaint about the judge as the alleged decision was so totally random and - it seems - without a legal basis

This is perhaps a clearer narrative on CB's role in the early days of Place2Be (though it persists in presenting it as a single person endeavour)

Apologies, I'm not sure if this article has been linked to already. But I am struggling to understand how an unqualified second year arts and theatre student manages to build up and maintain "a full practice". And another repeat of the "CB set up Place2Be in a broom cupboard in a school" (not "was employed as a part time project worker for the local council in a post funded by Children In Need and saw that more needed to be done").

And I'm getting really bored of the laying the blame for everything at women's doors - what about the fathers' involvement (or not) in these children's lives? Why is it about maternal attachment and poor parenting?

Another interesting thing in that blog piece you linked to, Christine is the claim that "Age eleven Camila was sent to one of the UK’s top private schools for girls, Sherborne. Not long after arriving there, the news that her father had been imprisoned in the Iranian revolution turned her life upside down." CB was apparently born in 1963, so would have been 11 in 1974. The Iranian Revolution happened 5 years later, in early 1979 (or at least, that was when it was completed, so when the new regime would have been in a position to start locking up wealthy allies of the Shah in Tehran). So CB would have been 15 or 16 when this happened, not a newly-arrived 11 year old, which is the obvious implication of the claim that it happened 'not long after arriving' at Sherborne as an 11 year-old. Yet another inaccuracy that seems designed to maximise sympathy and mark CB out as special and vulnerable.

I know it's only wikipedia and should not be totally relied upon but it backs up the idea that Camila's father was only imprisoned in 1979, making Camila 16.

I'm wondering why she never mentions doing A levels at Sherborne or elsewhere?

I think there is a grain of truth in a lot of what she claims. For instance ,working with the disturbed children of the very wealthy andbuilding up a full time private practice in London by the age of 19 (while attending university 100 miles away) translates to doing a bit of babysitting.

Wikipedia also states that CM is Iranian-born British.

In the Mail article already linked to www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3214710/Why-does-Kids-Company-Camila-tell-tall-stories-life-troubling-investigation-reveals-colourful-acount-past-doesn-t-quite-add-up.html it says that her mother attended a girls' school in Solihull.

I think she's told so many tall tales over years and years that she probably believes the version she tells now. Watching back old youtube videos, she's so self-absorbed and obsessed about her own back story, but we didn't see it back then. People can be so deluded and take others along with them by their personality. I knew someone who was a pathological liar, one thing he used to say was that he was going to cure cancer because his mum died of cancer, so he had personal experience. It was just bizarre but he seemed to believe his lies too and made you question yourself, before you then realised all the things he said were lies.

This thread has been absolutely fascinating, have been following it with interest. I've got a copy of her most recent book (the tube line one) which rehashes the same old tales about her background, along with plenty of woo pseudoscience about developing brains. About the claims that she blames the mothers for the neglect, I note in the book (p66) that she does say: 'By ‘mother’, I am referring to anyone who functions as the primary carer; this could be a father or a non-related care-giver.' Then why not just say 'care-ver' instead of banging on for pages about maternal neglect? Fathers very rarely get a mention.

I also see that in this book (p16) she claims that 4,000 children turn up for lunch on Christmas Day - really? 4,000 kids in Camberwell come to you for xmas dinner? And again she seems to have read those psychology papers with little apparent effort (p5): 'My mother bemusedly agreed to provide me with a subscription to a psychological magazine about childhood development, which would arrive every Wednesday. I would hug it and climb into bed with it, determined to read every article from beginning to end.'

If this all says one thing, it is that the term psychotherapist needs to become a protected title.

Indeed. I've actually been wondering how many of the abused children only came to realise they had been abused after undergoing CB's brand of psychotherapy?

I tend to agree Grief - and I'm not even sure that CB has deliberately set out to mislead so much as started to believe her own take on what happened.

Re the numbers of meals being produced by KC. That was one of the concerns the woman who sold her house and donated the proceeds - £200,000 - to KC.

When she asked questions and refused to be bamboozled KC accused her of having mental health problems.
www.spectator.co.uk/features/9437932/the-trouble-with-kids-company/

If that were the case then surely any ethical organisation would refund the money at once, rather than be seen as taking advantage of a vulnerable person.

I doubt that Grief - in my experience the very wealthy don't need babysitters (they have staff for that kind of thing) and the children of the very wealthy don't babysit. Maybe she sat next to a couple of unhappy children at a family party once.

I assume, by the way, that she wasn't yet a British citizen when she went to university, so would have been paying overseas fees. So, she was rich enough to have a trust fund that covered Sherborne and 3 years of overseas fees plus accomodation at Warwick.

Sorry if someone has already raised this, but if she had this life-long vocation for helping vulnerable children, always knew it was her mission in life, what was she doing pissing about with a drama degree for three years?

In the end, I think she is deluded and misguided but I think she meant to do well. Who really went wrong were the trustees - they should be held legally accountable for failing to protect this charity's finances. The 'heart' of a charity needs trustees to be the 'head' to make sure they look after employees and tow the line legally.

I agree to a point MrsJ (and completely agree that the trustees need hauling over the coals for what happened financially - I hope that the Charity commission inquiry is sufficiently thorough). However the more I read the more alarm bells start to ring: back in the 1990s people were avoiding working with CB due to doubts about the ethics of her approach, and yet no-one seems to have kept her in check - quite the opposite in fact, she has been encouraged and given more money and power to wield.

Honestly, I don't think it matters if she meant to do well or not MrsJ. Almost everyone means to do well - not many people think of themselves as bad people who mean to do harm. This was always the Tony Blair defence for starting an illegal war in Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people and causing a whole region to be destabilised, leading to even more death and misery: I thought I was doing the right thing, I had the best intentions. Really, so what?

If you assume responsibility for other people's lives in some way - if you want to run a country, or if you want to make a name for yourself as an 'angel', a saviour of poor children from 'savagery' - then what matters is not what you tell yourself and others that you meant to do and how good your intentions are, it's outcomes (whether you make people's lives better or worse). If you cause tens of millions of pounds to be diverted from existing charities and public sector projects in order to hire a chauffeur and a dressmaker; put your servants' children through private school; rent a £5K per month house for another member of staff with a swimming pool for your own use; hire 7 PAs at once; hand out wads of cash to adult 'clients'; and only actually provide any kind of service to a small handful of children (while apparently failing to protect those children and young adults from various forms of predation, including sexual assault on your premises), then whether you mean to do well is irrelevant.

I must say that I understand the mental health comment.

I was intrigued by the woman who sold her house (Joan Woolard) and she does seem a rather peculiar character following a Google search.

Not that that excuses the actions of the charity.

Let's unpick the '4000 children for Christmas dinner' claim. Now as it was Christmas day, there would have been no transport, so children would have had to live within walking distance.

There are something like 27,000 people living in Camberwell Green and South Camberwell wards (there may be other Camberwell wards, I am not sure).

Roughly 25% of the UK population is under 18, so let's say there are something like 6,000-7,000 children in those wards, aged 0-18.

CB is basically claiming two out of three children from these electoral wards came to Christmas dinner.

Where was the Daily Fail when this veritable stampede of children appeared, I would like to know?

You would also need to prepare:

400-500 turkeys
400-500 pounds of potatoes
300 pounds of Brussel sprouts
6000 stuffing balls
6000 chipolatas
130 pounds carrots
130 pounds of parsnips
240 pints of gravy
430 jars of cranberry sauce

All that in a kids' club and a school kitchen.

So not only was the Daily Fail conspicuously absent, but also Heston Blumenthal.

(I wanted to CGI what that mountain of food would look like but sadly I do not have the skills!)

(Perhaps someone who does not currently have essays to mark can calculate the approximate volume of it all, as a kind of Oxbridge interview tribute)