(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.

Is there any chance of getting some money back directly from Ms Batmanghelidjh or is that money basically gone forever? What about reposessing any properties she bought with the money, presumably could be done under proceeds of crime if she has commited fraud?

I expect that it's all long gone, sadly - paid out to staff and "clients".

Nearly £5million from individuals

Yes, but quite a lot of that is presumably Chris Martin. I hate the way that actors refer to civilians, but by individuals that's what I mean: I really couldn't give a shit if Chris Martin has been ripped off, because he's rich enough to employ professional advisors and if he doesn't it's his lookout. It's the bakesales that CB was so contemptuous of that I'm more interested in: were there any?

How the hell did they all fall for her "charms"? She comes across as quite thick and a bit out of it most of the time. Apparently she sent the lady who donated £200k a few pages of mostly photos of children when she asked Camila what the money had been spent on? Bit embarrasing for the Government too.

Someone upthread nailed it: AliG. The great and the good were terrified of appearing racist, so the more she hammed up the exoticism (on another thread, some who knew their Derrida from their Barthes analysed her use of brightly coloured clothing as part of her shtick) the more people were frightened that saying no to her would make them look like they were white and scared.

She held out the promise of being able to look like you were part of street culture (hence her constant references to "street level" work) without having to actually go to Streatham; all you had to do was hand over a cheque.

That it's a little hard to imagine that the roughy tuffy hoodlums of South London wanted to go to a place called "Kids Company" (which sounds like a faintly improving Saturday morning BBC TV kids' show of the 1970s, in the manner of Why Don't You...) and that it's even harder to imagine that the aforementioned hoodlums were impressed by her psychedelic grotto is besides the point: the purpose wasn't to help youth, the purpose to allow rich people to salve their consciences by appearing to help youth. It was somewhere between a Potemkin village and Marie Antoinette's farm where she led freshly washed sheep around on ribbons.

I know several people who did races and that sort of thing in aid of KC. I work in this field and have had a low opinion of them for at least 15 years (though the extent of the scandal has shocked me) and I felt quite awkward about not wanting to sponsor people. So yes, ordinary people believed, and gave money.

the purpose wasn't to help youth, the purpose to allow rich people to salve their consciences by appearing to help youth

I've rarely seen it better put

True that. It was also there to add lustre to the reputations of the rich and powerful.

£20M+ a year just so a select group could tell each other how marvellous they each were.

A huge and monstrous vanity project.

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

Is that so?

The NHS and local authorities are chronically underfunded. The NHS and local authorities don't have the luxury of picking and choosing who they want to help, on the basis of on half-baked cod psychology. The NHS may be imperfect but it is internationally recognised as the most efficient in the world. KC received more than £23 million in 2013 - that would buy a year's worth of primary care for 169,000 people.

It's pretty bloody easy to "fill a gap" if you have £23 million to play with and no accountability at all for how it's spent.

I can't begin to see where this mesmerisingness comes in.

I posted this on another thread a few months ago. I've been a CPN in Southwark since 1999. I work in a team for young people who've had a first episode of psychosis.
In January this year, one of my clients took her own life. I saw her just before Christmas. She had no money because her benefits had been stopped. Her benefits had been stopped because she'd been asked to go for a work capability interview and didn't attend. She didn't attend because she didn't open the letter asking her to attend. She didn't open the letter because she thinks letters are contaminated. She couldn't get a crisis loan because the coalition abolished them - these were loans, not handouts which people paid back out of their benefits. She couldn't ask friends or family because she didn't have any friends and her family had disowned her. I gave her £20 and a food bank voucher. I told her about Crisis at Christmas but knew she wouldn't go. I got a phone call from the Police on 5th January to say that they found her hanging in a park. When they broke into her flat, they found that she'd has no gas or electricity for a week. It breaks my heart to think of her sitting hungry in the cold and the dark listening to voices telling her that she's useless and better off dead.
Maybe getting her benefit stopped had nothing to do with het killing herself - I'll never know now but I'm pretty sure it didn't help. She was 21. If I'd been able to get £1,000 from KC's budget, I think I could have saved her. This is not a victimless crime.

Hace Coldplay, or any of the 'celebs' involved, made a comment yet?

MissHoolies I totally agree that this isn't a victimless crime. When I think of the money that has been blown Inam left thinking of the people who have not had the help they need.

I hope they are able to nail her and the board for this. Yentob and KC, along with the other trustees all deserve to be in jail for a very long time for stealing from the most vunerable people in our society.

They have acted in a way that is also going to make many people think twice about donating to charity. DH and I donate a lot of our time and money to charity. We do it because it makes us feel good. We don't donate to many charities in the UK, in part because when we looked at 3 of them their admin costs dwarfed the annual charitable activities. I also refuse to donate to any charity that pays their CEO more than £100k.

shiny I work in the NHS and our team does a brilliant job which we are all dedicated to. We could do a much better job if we had a fraction of the money KC gets. We have to show that what we do actually works which KC seemingly doesn't.
I've read a few more articles about her recently - one of them noticed that she fairly regularly leaves meetings or interviews or arrives late because she needs to talk someone out of killing themselves. Like some kind of one person suicide prevention squad. Also she makes Soutwark and Lambeth sound like a Western ie people just stroll around randomly shooting and stabbing each other in Tescos. I know this area extremely well having lived and worked here for 2 decades. Most of the people I see at home live on council estates. Some of them are pretty grim but they're not the vision of hell CB describes.
There was a brilliant project funded by the LA which worked with young people in gangs or at risk of getting involved in gangs. The team leader was an ex gang member and they really got results which they would me more than happy to produce for scrutiny. The team was axed in the latest round of cuts. This makes me so angry Oh and the Ali G thing is totally spot on.

More revelations in the Mail today.

I'm close to cancelling all my charitable giving. This saga shows the regulation is non-existent and fraudsters, charlatans, liars and idiots can waste donations while the charity commission signs it all of as fine. Why give money to fund £300 shoes for the founders' mates? Better give the money to my own children.

MissHoolies I agree. The bit in my post in italics about the NHS not doing its job is from someone up thread.

It is infuriating that local authorities and the NHS are scrabbling for every penny, in the face of every rising demand and CB, a complete charlatan, gets handed more and more cash without any accountability.

Richardian - please don't think that this is in any way representative of the vast majority of charities.

I work for one charity, volunteer with two others, and am a trustee of two more. I can assure you that at every single one of them, we spend our money as wisely as we can. We keep very careful records of what we do and why, and we are constantly ready to explain what we spent the money on. Our financial controllers are scrupulous, and we have appropriate checks and balances in place (including random spot checks on spending, etc). The KC debacle has been widely discussed, and none of us have ever come across anything like this personally.

So SeaForest, nothing you're doing differs from what KC claimed to be doing. They talked endlessly about "audit" and "accountability" and "trustees". We've seen Yentob's credulous cheerleading, and he was the chair of the trustees.

How do I know, from outside, if a charity is corrupt? Are KC sui generis, or is the whole sector like that? How can we tell? If a charity that the government gives £40m to turns out to be run by knaves and fools, how do I know that all the rest aren't as bad? If KC got away with it, who else is?

There's been something of a silence from the Charity Commission, hasn't there?

Sorry shiney. I totally agree about the repercussions for charities as a whole. I have a friend who is being hounded to within an inch of her life because the DWP made an overpayment of JSA to her which she genuinely didn't realise. Someone who does a cash in hand job for a few hours a week while claiming benefits is regarded as scum and should be put in jail but someone defrauding the taxpayer of tens of millions of pounds and depriving those who could genuinely benefit from that money gets given loads of awards and is regarded as a modern day Saint

Well, thats very true, Ricardian! I do actually spend a lot of time reflecting on this, because it's my responsibility as a trustee to make sure this doesn't happen.

So, one of the things about KC is that CB claims to have had independent reviews of the impact of their work, but (I think I'm right in saying this) there had not in fact been any genuine independent reviews of impact. The charity I work for commissioned a genuine independent review of our work at the end of our last grant funding, in which the reviewers spoke to our user group about their perceptions of our work. They were specialists in the area, and fully in control of who they spoke to, and what they asked them. This review was then given to our funders for them to decide if we should receive more funding. (Note that the didn't review our value for money, or our use - that gets done in a separate financial audit - but they did say what impact we had, and to what extent our work meets what our funders tell us to do / what we said we'd do with the money.)

Our funders ask every 6 months for a financial statement, and for a list of what we did with the money. (And this is detailed - e.g. 62 people attended event X.) We then predict the next 6 months' expenditure, and what we're going to spend the money on. I certainly could defraud the charity, but I'd have to go about it in a specific way to avoid the checks in place, and I don't think I could manage to nick more than about 5% of my budget.

For the charity I'm trustee of, it's really obvious if what's supposed to happen doesn't happen, but our chair formally runs spot checks that it does anyway. All the accounts are checked by a trustee and our auditors.

I think it's clear that the civil servants didn't want to fund KC, because they could see exactly these problems, and that they were overruled, which suggests that actually the problem was the 'heart' of politicians overruling the 'head' of civil servants.

Did anyone else hear the interview with the woman who ran the Bristol branch of Kids Co on PM Thursday night? I don't know whether she's telling the truth when she says she had no idea about the financial side but if she's telling the truth (and my gut feeling was that she is) I feel incredibly sorry for her. CB has barely given her the time of day since they closed and she feel she is tainted by the Kids Co name and can't find another job.

Ricardian does have a point - the Charities Commission is pretty much useless. I worked for a charity that was doing some definitely dodgy things and a whistle was blown (not by me) to the CC and bugger all ever happened about it.

More revelations in the Mail today.

Just read it. That wee section at the end suggests she is either incredibly incompetent or a liar...

I'm inclined to go for the latter. I am utterly determined that this is not just going to quietly forgotten about because it directly affects the very vulnerable clients my team looks after. There are so many lessons to be learned from this fiasco - CB somehow reached this position of being untouchable and beyond criticism even though those who were on the front line had serious misgivings about her for years. In the digital age when it's very easy to google someone and find gaping holes in their story, she should have been rumbled years ago