(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.

I would imagine that the Met's inquiry which began at the end of of July is ongoing and it's to be hoped that its remit will be extended to investigate any allegation(s) of fraudulent practice/accounting: www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/30/met-police-launch-inquiry-into-kids-company-over-child-abuse-claims

I don't think she is 'lying' as such. She seems to have such a slippery relationship with truth that I think she believes what she is saying. I would hate to be the person (or persons) who has to unravel it all.

I think that's quite generous, Larry. I think when it comes to Kids Company, there has been quite a lot of deliberate misappropriation of funds and telling falsehoods about how many children the charity was helping. It seems calculating and cynical to me rather than self-deluding.

I am curious about the stories she's told about her own background, though. She seems to have made much of being precociously talented (reading scholarly journals at 9, winning an art competition for adults at 9, being the "youngest" person admitted to an MA course), while at the same time claiming to have such severe learning difficulties that she can't use a computer or drive a car and couldn't do up her shoelaces till she was 12. These two things contradict each other in such a glaring way you wonder why no-one has picked up on them before.

while at the same time claiming to have such severe learning difficulties

She's rather presciently realised that learning difficulties such as she claims have become unchallengeable, so that people who attempted to get more detail would look cruel and old-fashioned.

For example, on Thursday for someone who can't read easily and can't use a computer, she was very keen to make fine distinctions about different versions of emails.

I managed to catch some of the select committee on BBC Parliament last night. Watched for around an hour and neither of them gave a single straight answer to any question. Everything was shrouded in "context" and "government failures" and flim flam. It was quite astonishing.

But not good to watch jst before you fall asleep, unless you want dreams filled with rage and clashing kaftans...

At one point she talked about 500 volunteers who were training to be social workers and who were all responsible for casework.

500??? And how could unqualified social workers possibly be given that level of responsibility? This wasn't questioned by the committee, lost as it was in the torrent of exaggerations and falsehoods.

Buzzfeed is actually doing some decent journalism on this. Shocking that the Charity Commission and the Home Office were alerted to problems over a decade ago and still nothing was done.

I agree, it's entirely implausible squeaver. Are there 500 trainee social workers in the whole of London?

My dp is a social worker who works with trainees. The students' case work is always supervised by a qualified social worker. Also, I can't imagine them having the time or energy to volunteer for anything like that, given how much work they have to do to complete their academic study and full-time work placements.

I struggle with her disability claims. I'm dyslexic, identified when I was 11 due to me never failing anything but my parents pushing really hard to figure out why my test scores didn't reflect my verbal understanding. Her story doesn't make much of any sense. I read engineering journals (well electrical and mechanical engineering to be precise) as my dad had access to them. I didn't always understand the context and my dad, being a well studied enginner, was able to explain the missing parts. Still I would never count that reading as any preparation for my professional life. I'm an auditor and have had my fair share of M&D clients. While the background knowledge was useful it wasn't built on a base of A'Levels, bachelor and master degree so its quite useless. The accounting articles that I read today, about half are tosh. I only know that because of my experience. At nine she wouldn't know this.

i wonder if the people who carried out all these audits and inspections referenced by Yentob are going to be interviewed.

Yes, aginghippy I know absolutely nothing about social work or the size of the profession but it seems like another example of her throwing a number in to make them look more professional than they were.

The whole Select Committee appearance made me realise how far bullshit and bluster can take you if no one is forensically questioning the detail.

This is a most fascinating thread and Ivan slowly working my way through the Commons Inquiry ; it's a long in depth questioning of both CB and AY. I am in awe of her ability to slip and slide her way out of directly answering a question, how she inserts irrelevant and obscure psychobabble wherever she can, how she subtly again and again distances herself from taking any responsibility for her actions; citing instead the large number of "professionals " who advise her. She had a sticky moment when talking about her 'qualifications', unfortunately the questioner did not challenge her to produce actual certificates to prove she had completed the degrees she listed. Watching her squirm mightily to avoid answering questions about actual numbers of people helped versus the reality of the small number of case notes received by various agencies after KC was wound up, was entertaining. She should have been an MP .

She should have been an MP Batmanghelidgh for PM...

The awards that have been showered on this woman are as fantastical as she is.

Again from Wiki:
In 2009 Batmanghelidjh was named Businesswoman of the Year by the Dods and Scottish Widows Women in Public Life Awards.
She has also received Ernst and Young's Social Entrepreneur of the Year award (2006)
Third Sector magazine's Most Admired Chief Executive (2007)
The Centre for Social Justice's lifetime achievement award in 2009. Batmanghelidjh has been awarded honorary degrees and doctorates by several universities including York St John University, the Open University, Brunel University,[22] London South Bank University[23] and Nottingham Trent University.[24]
In February 2013, she was named one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.
In the same month, she was appointed an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to children and young people.
In September 2014 she became an Honorary Fellow of UCL.

All that's lacking is the Nobel Prize for fiction literature and her elevation to pantomime Dame.

@ squeaver - rage and several clashing kaftans sewn together?

Batmanghelidjh has been awarded honorary degrees and doctorates by several universities including York St John University, the Open University, Brunel University,[22] London South Bank University[23] and Nottingham Trent University.[24]

That's a very interesting list of institutions. Why didn't the university of which she's an alumni (Warwick) and the universities that have allegedly audited/studied/etc KC (LSE, UCL) want to join in the fun?

Ricardian Warwick's alumni says 'Camila Batmanghelidjh (BA Theatre studies and Dramatic Arts 1982-85 and honorary graduate)'.

Fascinating thread. I wonder what a (qualified) psychologist or psychiatrist would conclude - narcissistic personality disorder ? I'm not a qualified psychologist or psychiatrist but I was a sw for 35 years. Yes, she identified unmet need but she isn't the only person who did that. The difference seems to be that managers in camhs, children's services, probation, prison etc etc weren't listened to whereas CB mesmerised politicians and only asked for money not ring fenced for public services, so that's ok then!

Unlike UCL who made CB an Honorary Fellow little more than a year go, it would seem that the LSE has more sense than to reward her for her creative accounting skills, Ricardian.

As I'm under the impression that entrepreneurs and businesswo/men are people who create new businesses in the hope that they will profit financially if their enterprises meet with success it's not clear to me why the CE of a charity, which by definition is a not for profit organisation, should be nominated for, far less awarded, titles which are not appropriate for the more altruistic or philanthropic entrepreneurs among us.

Similarly, I thought that a 'lifetime achievement' award was given towards the end of the achiever's productive/working life, but it would seem that the Empress's garish new clothes required underpinning in 2008 hence her mid-life award from the Centre for Social Justice which I'm unable to locate on CSJ's website, albeit CB was on the judging panel for 2009. www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/awards-2015/previous-awards-2015

However, it's well documented in this by no means exhaustive list of the batty one's CB's extensive achievements:
www.slaterbaker.com/profile/98

www.gold.ac.uk/camila/

www.polishculture.org.uk/print/news/article/defending-childrens-rights-2688.html
www.ntu.ac.uk/apps/news/124151-4/Charity_leader_Camila_Batmanghelidjh_to_receive_honorary_degree.aspx
www.kent.ac.uk/congregations/honorary-grads/archive/2014/batmanghelidjh-camila.html
www.ncl.ac.uk/events/public-lectures/item.php?camila-batmanghelidjh

With further reference to the "specific learning disability" which prevents Ms Batmanghelidjh from using a computer keyboard, the publication of certain of her email correspondence indicates that either she was able to overcome this specific disability or had found other means of tackling the keyboad by July of this year: blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/08/revealed-how-kids-company-is-dealing-with-the-allegations-against-it/

There's a very interesting blog on the BBC news site about the questions Yentob failed to answer last week here

It references a blog on Civil Society - here which is also very interesting, particularly when it comes to discussing reserves and restricted vs unrestricted funding.

If you take the two reports together, the BBC one concludes that one of the reasons for the discrepancies in the number of KC clients is simply that the charity wasn't as big as it says it was. CB claimed that they couldn't build up reserves because they couldn't ever turn a client away, but they had around 5% of the cases they claimed. So where was the money going?

The latest accounts on the Charity Commission website are for 2013, and have a clean audit report. This seems strange from what we are hearing...

The thing about auditors is that they work with the information they are given, and don't have to say whether a company is well run - just that the accounts give a true and fair view.

From what I remember the accounts did show that they didn't have much ready cash.

However, I would like to hear from the auditors given that CM and AY have referred to them so many times when defending their questionable accounting practices and money management skills.

ComposHat thank you for clarifying that.

Someone a while ago compared her to Jimmy Savile. There were howls of outrage about comparing her to a sex offender, but the sex offences aside their MO was very similar. Claim to do good and loudly proclaim yourself to be doing good and you make yourself unassailable (although obvs for CB this didn't last forever.)

I think this is something we need to remember as a society. Claims of doing good shouldn't make you above questions.

The Telegraph had a terrific headline of 'Pile of Aladdin's laundry defends Kids Company' right next to a pic of CB dressed in her usual style.

I'm an auditor. I will say it is extremely hard to identify fraud when you are performing an audit. As an example, just because you spent the money on school fees and you have approvals in place for that then it isn't fraud as far as us auditors are concerned. We don't go in to look for fraud but we report it if we find it.

As an example, looking at the #'s they had a payroll of about GBP15 million with revenue of about GBP23 million. They had about 500 employees which means an average salary of GBP30k which is reasonable based upon average income in the UK being GBP24-26k. What an auditor won't do is say, 'hold on how many 'clients' do they have and is this a reasonable number of employees?' With 2500 children being helped by their charity, it is an absurdly high number of employees! That is basically one member of staff to 5 'clients' who are supposedly kids so should be in school for most of the day five days a week.

Whenever anyone starts relying on an auditor to back up their business practices I get very very wary. We verify the numbers are a true reflection of the operations of the business but thats about it. If you want a assurance of no fraudulent activity thats forensic accounting and and whole different kettle of fish that could be relied upon by management. As management never engaged auditors to perform that type of engagement they should not be pointing to the auditor at all, who by the looks of things did point out in 2013 that their reserves were too low.