(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.

The thing about the private mental health care struck me as rather odd. Because Camila has never been backwards in coming forwards trumpeting the work they do. And this is especially the case when KC has done something which had made up the shortfall from inadequate state services.

Yet she's never mentioned it before. Paying for private healthcare has never been mentioned before. It all seems a bit...convenient.

And she has up to this point proven to have a hugely flexible relationship with the truth. I don't think anything she says can be taken at face value.

It is worth pointing up these comments in the Guardian article:

"Batmanghelidgh identified a genuine problem, of children being effectively abandoned by the traditional structures of society: family, schools and the local authority. She moved into the gap vacated by those institutions and has been celebrated as a result.

She argued that some of the children she was working with were “suicidally uncaring”. The abuse they had suffered was such that they had become used to pain and inflicting pain. Batmanghelidgh was on to something, a genuine problem, of children being effectively abandoned by the traditional structures of society: family, schools and the local authority. She moved into the gap vacated by those institutions and has been celebrated as a result."

And he is right. People who actually worked with KC know that it was filling a gap which the so-called welfare state wasn't touching. It employed a large number of extremely dedicated people who worked well beyond the call of duty to help very vulnerable people. The reality is that local authorities and the NHS simply are not doing their job, and there are plenty of lawyers working in the field who have attested to the fact that they regularly worked with KC to help people access their statutory entitlement. I hold no brief for CB and I am appalled at the lack of proper scrutiny of what was being done with public money; but what irritates me about these threads is that people are so determined to demonise CB that they refuse to acknowledge that the charity helped anyone, when that is demonstrably not the case.

but what irritates me about these threads is that people are so determined to demonise CB that they refuse to acknowledge that the charity helped anyone, when that is demonstrably not the case.

If it's demonstrably not the case, it shouldn't be hard to demonstrate that it is the case. It's the proof that it helped anyone, other than some nice girls on their way to our better universities, that seems to thin on the ground. If it's been helping 36 000 a year for the past ten years, that's going to be (allowing for some continuity) getting on for a quarter of a million people. That's about 30% of the population of Lambeth (320 000) and Southwark (250 000), so it should have left some pretty solid evidence of its work. Where are they? Where are the adults saying "yes, I was helped by Kids Company?"

Camila Batmanghelidjh – the former CEO of Kids Company – stiffened. This time, Bernard Jenkin had gone too far.
“On what basis,” she inquired haughtily, “have you decided that this was a ‘failing’ charity?”
^The Conservative MP for Harwich & N Essex met her glare equably.
“It’s gone bust,” he said.^

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/11934290/Alan-Yentobs-day-of-embarrassment-over-Kids-Company...-from-150-shoes-to-abusive-limericks.html

There is a very angry mother on the news now who is angry that Yentob brought up her son's murder during that grilling yesterday. She said he never asked her permission to talk about it, he has never spoken to her and she felt he was using her son's murder to serve his own ends. She says she feels angry that things that have been happening in their community are being used as 'scapegoats' to distract from the things that KC did wrong.

but what irritates me about these threads is that people are so determined to demonise CB that they refuse to acknowledge that the charity helped anyone, when that is demonstrably not the case.

They probably helped some people. A fairly small number for a very high amount of money. And the fact that you've helped some people doesn't absolve you of responsibility for the rest of your actions. It's seeming more and more likely that help was given by KC on the basis of CBs whims and patronage rather than on need. It's also seeming like some of this 'help' might have been destructive and have paved the way to drug problems and involvement with crime rather than preventing them.

The fact that a few people might have been helped doesn't detract from the fact that CB was absorbing huge amounts of money to do not very much or do it mainly for the wrong people and often do the wrong thing entirely. She diverted money which could have been used to help far more children more effectively elsewhere.

ITV news clip... Weirdly the same report isn't on the BBC!

She diverted money which could have been used to help far more children more effectively elsewhere.

And the reputational damage to the sector is a lot more serious, long erm.

Kids Company themselves don't even care about what good they did. It's about Batshitcrazy covering for herself. It's self-serving.

Ricardian, I think there are a lot of questions generally being asked of the charity sector at the moment. Particularly fundraising methods, executive salaries and political/lobbying influence.

I think a lot of this has to come down to the fact that the Charities Commission is completed useless. They were being warned for years about KC and did fuck all. What else are they missing? I think that organisation needs serious reform to restore faith in the sector.

To cover for yourself you need some sort of concept of having done something wrong. To a large extent I think she might believe the hype about herself. Don't know if she really understood the whole concept of the hearing and what it was trying to answer which didn't really help. The whole look at me, I'm saint Camilla routine's been working for her for years, why wouldn't it work now?

"He looked like a pudding waiter sitting next to a bowl of fruit salad". Quentin Letts writing in the Fail: www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3275138/He-looked-like-pudding-waiter-sitting-bowl-fruit-salad-QUENTIN-LETTS-sees-charity-chiefs-face-MPs.html

The Statesman adds meat to the bones: www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2015/10/verbal-ectoplasm-what-happened-camila-batmanghelidjh-and-alan-yentob-s-kids

I'm still chortling over "poverty intervention payments" being dispensed every Friday from "street level centres".

"Comin' down de Rec, mon?"
"After I'se got de pip from de Batty one, bro".

£150,000,000 that's known of has gone through a fradulent fantasist's hands while Yentob beamed his approval. Read the figures and weep.

I posted on this thread a while back under a different name (think I was AndyWarholsOrange). I said that my friend who's a psychologist in CAHMS doubted CB's professional credentials and she's been proved right. I can't believe that so little is being made of the fact that she lied about being a psychotherapist. It beggars belief that serious investigative journalists have been taken in by this con artist for years while a bunch of women on the internet have managed to uncover so many of her lies.
She should go to prison for fraud. I work with young people with psychosis and our team are totally dedicated to what we do and we do an amazing job on an ever tighter budget. It makes me sick to think what a difference we could make with a fraction of the money that's been chucked at this clown.
To those people saying that we're ignoring the good that KC did, it would pretty much statistically impossible to have had that much money and not helped anyone. No doubt some people were helped but the amount of money KC got through was staggering- in the right hands, that amount of cash really could transform thousands of lives without causing harm.
I really think we need to find a way to ensure this doesn't just get quietly forgotten about because it's fucking scandalous.

As I recall, there were a couple of minutes towards the start of the hearing where, under questioning, CB more or less admitted her lack of professional credentials and said something like "we've been working on" getting her some kind of accreditation. It knocked me backward, and I was surprised that not more was made of this.

I assume that CB's repeated references to "street level centres" is code for "you can't possibly understand how difficult it is to operate in Lambeth, which might as well be Lagos during a riot, and how difficult it is to get staff you can read and write, so we operated by different rules to your conception of how a charity should be, because it was street level. Oh, an' t'ing, as we said at my private school".

I watched most of the questioning. If she mentioned 'street level' once, she mentioned it 30 times. Ridiculous. Agree with all you have said MissHoolie.

I think Alan Yentob is equally as despicable as BatJelly. The most he would give in the questioning is that maybe just maybe he should've stood down a few years ago. Hell, yeah. And why the hell are the BBC still employing him? To hear that he stood behind the interviewer who was questioning BatJelly on Newsnight is beyond a joke. He tried to say it was just coincidence and him interested in the interview. Does he think everyone is stupid? No, he stood there as a boss of the BBC to make sure no very awkward questions were asked of BatJelly. He may be clever with words but I find him as abhorrent as her.

And as for only managing to hand over about 1,700 case files of the so say 36,000 they professed to help, pathetic.

Those running KC were clearly, at the very least, grossly incompetent. The vast sums of money the charity received was not used in the most effective manner and clearly there was no proper oversight of the cash-flow.

CB may have identified a need, a group in society who were being failed. She seems to have helped a very small number of them through this charity. Her intentions may have initially been good, but it seems to have descended into a vanity project for CB. She then abused this position to shout down anyone who questioned her, including using someone's mental health problems as a means to smear her (ironic, given her position on all things mental health related). Utterly disgusting behaviour.

I believe CB and KC have done untold damage to the sector. She may in the end do more damage to those she wanted to help.

However the most gobsmacking, appalling thing was the acknowledgement that Batmanghelidjh has no clinical professional qualifications to practise as a psychotherapist. That is a massive issue- I say it again She HAD NO PROFESSIONAL PSYCHOTHERAPy QUALIFICATIONS. None, let alone in child psychotherapy. But that's ok, apparently, as they were "working on it".

Furthermore, as she has no professional qualifications she would not have been a member of any recognised professional accrediting body. So there has been no professional oversight, no professional body that could regulate her practice with Codes of Ethics and Codes of Conduct. That is an enormous issue- this women has been let loose on vulnerable, often damaged children with no qualifications, no training (only her own thoughts and "research") and no oversight. This women has been diagnosing children with all sorts of psychiatric conditions and prescribing treatment/support. I understand she has told individuals they were suffering from attachment disorders/psychotic/brain damaged and could be cured by her "relentless love" methods.

Can we please take a minute to think about that- if someone set themselves up as a doctor or nurse or physiotherapist and practiced in this role without the relevant qualifications they would be liable for prosecution.

Of course Yentob thinks he should have stepped down a few years ago - then he wouldn't be being grilled in front of a select committee, it would be some other schmuck.

LOL at goddess and "After I'se got de pip from de Batty one, bro".

She really is priceless, isn't she? Now we know that she lied about the psychotherapy qualification, do we know if she was also lying about her Warwick University qualification? I'm assuming that even she wouldn't be that brazen.

I agree with MissHooliesCardigan that she should be tried for fraud. I'm just astonished that this hasn't happened yet. I hope the police are working on it. Using donations from the public to fund a chauffeur and boarding school fees for employees' children is not appropriate.

Using donations from the public to fund a chauffeur and boarding school fees for employees' children is not appropriate.

And rather undermines the claim that they ran out of money because there were too many needy clients who they couldn't turn away.

The chauffeur describes himself as the charity's 'Operations Manager', apparently. And, despite him being paid more than £40,000 p.a., his children were registered as 'clients' of the charity, so that's all right then.

Also, £750,000 for private healthcare for family members of her favourite staff was put through the books as 'clinical staffing costs'

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3277486/Kids-Company-boss-blew-thousands-pounds-private-Harley-Street-doctor-relative-driver.html

psychobabble, bizarre behaviour, name-dropping, etc are all on full display in numerous interviews - such as this one - from before the collapse of Kids Company:
www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/im-the-fat-beggar-kids-companys-camila-batmanghelidjh-reveals-why-the-fight-for-funds-for-vulnerable-9171790.html

Thanks for this thread, very interesting and enlightening

Is there any chance, (crosses fingers), that she might go to prison for all her fraud?

Yentob was painful to watch