(part 2) to think that Camila Batmanghelidgh must be lying when she says she has done nothing wrong in her spending of Kids' Company 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.

Wow. Compelling viewing. I still have no idea why Alan Yentob is sitting next to and defending this crazy woman. The idea that some 'clients' were getting lots of money per week and essentially working for the charity without the charity paying NI and taxes.

It was a jaw-dropping performance. Not very impressive at all. If anything, she's made herself look even more dodgy by being so evasive. Yentob looking very uncomfortable too, as well he might.

Was Alan yentob chair of trustees? If so and he still works for the BBC they should be undertaking a disciplinary investigation, because of the financial matters for one thing.

Even if the £75k for one person's treatment is true, how could they justify such a large expenditure on one individual given all the other thousands of children/ young people/ not so young people on the books?
I can't bring myself to watch the footage of the select committee - I have a very low threshold for listening to people taking bs!

Duckdeamon according to The Guardian the BBC are moving towards 'negotiating the exit' of Alan Yentob. So no disciplinary investigation.

Exactly whatsonyourplate. The way she talks you would think the UK had no such thing as an NHS or a welfare state. 75k on (presumably private) inpatient treatment for one person? That's outrageous in itself.

Given the appallingly underfunded state of nhs mental health care I don't have an issue with that. In fact it is probably a good thing.

My issue is with whether that level of care could have been given to other service users if they had kept proper tracks on how effectively the rest of the money was being spent. And they hadn't been pissing the rest of it up the wall.

They will need to be careful: there has been a lot of public and political scrutiny on their remuneration/severance packages, and now of his role with respect to Kids Company. It would not reflect well on the BBC for him to be paid a lot to leave if he should instead have been disciplined.

My understanding is that most employers would consider disciplinary action for serious failures as a trustee or other responsible/accountable role, especially if there were negative publicity about the employer as well.

Fascinating thread and thank you for all the links.

I was watching the questioning yesterday absolutely agog. She is quite clearly, THE most deluded individual I've ever seen. Can't believe AY is still involved in this. He should have extracted himself a long time ago.

The comments on this Guardian article are hilarious.

Thing is £75k for an inpatient stay (say a 6 month stay) isn't ludicrous. This is what we will all come to learn when hunt gets his way and the NHS is privatised.

But you'd have to be properly, properly unwell to need or indeed benefit from such an admission. And if you were then, the NHS, for all its faults and thresholds would step in. Maybe I'm wrong, I hope I'm not.

That's exactly it, munchkin. How can you justify such a vast sum on one individual when the NHS exists?

The most likely answer, of course, is that Camila is lying and/or embellishing. She always is.

Nice comment in the Grauniad:

"Batmanghelidjh is no scapegoat. She is a consummate charlatan who has used all the best principles of Aristotelian drama to mesmerise potentially gullible socially aware people and politicians looking for nostrums into parting with very large sums of money to feed an outfit that had a genius for making the money collected disappear.

You neglected to say that the SC hearing began with questioning which confirmed with her acknowledgement that Batmanghelidjh has no clinical professional qualifications to practise as a psychotherapist, let alone a child psychotherapist. Plus she has never been a member of any recognised professional accrediting body that could regulate her practice with Codes of Ethics and Codes of Conduct, and sanction her if she failed to observe them. Think about the enormity of that. Let loose on vulnerable and needy children, telling them and the Guardian they were suffering from attachment disorders/psychotic/brain damaged and could be cured by her "relentless love" and so called re-parenting (!!) and "relentless love".

She has absolutely no right to feel aggrieved. She needs to be banned from ever having anything to do with children and vulnerable adults again. And of course the organisations such as the Tavistock and UCL and East London University that knew, or should have known that she did not have the qualifications or professional accreditation to dish out diagnoses and treatment strategies for vulnerable individuals should be sanctioned."

Ijon - thank you for the link to the entertaining comment chain.
Does anyone have any idea why the questioning yesterday didn't get into more specifics (about the payments to CB's chauffeur, rental payments for the beautiful house in north London not used by KC children, etc etc etc)? Please enlighten me!

Yentob: "Has your charity been running for 20 years?"

Chair of PAC: "My charity has been running for 400 years?"

RickRoll , this was one of the best moments of the morning! I thought Jenkin did an excellent job of running the hearing btw. Wondering if there will be a followup.

Nortonhouse - I think probably because technically the committee's remit it to scrutinise the government, not to scrutinise the charity per se. You'll see that the terms of reference for the inquiry state it's about Whitehall's relationship with KC. So, in theory, if the chauffeur etc was not paid using govt money, then (in theory), that's outside the scope of the inquiry. Also, perhaps they didn't feel they had enough evidence to raise those issues. Or perhaps they just ran out of time (I know the hearing went on for hours as it was).

On specifics, they did ask about Joan Woolard, right at the end. Yentob says her claims are untrue. Sadly, no-one asked CB whether she thought it was appropriate for someone working in her field to use allegations about someone's mental health to smear them, as she did with Woolard.

Haven't watched it all, but in the bits I have you can see Yentob repeatedly trying to shut CB up before she says something damaging.

Thanks very much, Wigeon - that's extremely helpful.
Father - I watched from start to finish on ParliamentLive, and you are so right about the dynamic between the committee and Yentob/CB. They soon began addressing most of their questions to Yentob, and when CB tried to pipe up, Yentob quickly shut her down whenever possible.

I found the Joan Woolard bit sad. No matter what she did, she was (as the committee acknowledged) elderly and frail, and of all things didn't deserve her name having a public airing in that forum as a very minor footnote to the whole matter.

I don't think all of the cost was on inpatient stay though. I think some was on rehab and it's likely there were other things that were paid for for that service user. Difficult to know without a breakdown.

When it comes to mental health care the idea that the nhs exists so you shouldn't have to pay for it is laughable. It's been squeezed at nearly every single level over the past 5 years. From cutting inpatient beds to reducing community funding. And it wasn't well off to start with.

Rafa

You may be right. Mental health services on knees, govt giving cash to kids company to inequitably distribute as they see fit. What a mess.

The problem is you can't really talk about the cost of inpatient stays, or whatever else, because in the same sentence we have fantasies about police catching suicides in mid-air, and we know that Kid's Company are full of shit and commission ridiculous reports about having 90% success and other such obvious frauds.

So the general odour of bullshit overrides everything they say.

There are some interesting comments below that Guardian article but, boy, 95+% of the comments are simply witless. Mumsnet comments come off as being splendidly informed in comparison.

And that's what makes me most cross, RickRoll. I suspect she might have some important points to make. But it's all getting lost in the big CB show and the ludicrous figures and stories she and Yentob are putting out.

It will all be dismissed as delusional nonsense which could lead to a lot of families/children not getting the help and support they need. Although not as many as CB is quoting.