Kids Company - Camila Batmanghelidjh

Charity Kids Company, which received £3m from ministers a week ago, has told the government that it will close its services on Wednesday evening.
The youth work charity received the money against the advice of officials, who had raised concerns about how it would be spent.
Local authorities have been making plans to support young people who would need help if the charity closes.
The charity said such speculation was "dangerous and irresponsible".
Staff payment
The news that the charity might have to close comes as the result of a joint investigation by BBC Newsnight and BuzzFeed News.
Last month, their investigations revealed that the £3m grant from the Cabinet Office would only be paid on the condition that Camila Batmanghelidjh, its high-profile chief executive, agreed to step down as part of a reorganisation. The government finally released the money last week after she said she would do so.
The Cabinet Office's £3m grant had been intended for a "transformation and downsizing plan" that would support the charity as it reformed itself.
That department is currently making plans to recover the grant because the Cabinet Office believes that the conditions attached to the use of the money were not met.
According to an email cache passed anonymously to Newsnight and BuzzFeed News over the weekend, the charity appears to have used some of the cash to pay staff - a day-to-day cost for which officials say it was not intended.
Ms Batmanghelidjh wrote to staff last Tuesday saying: "I am so sorry you have not been paid yet. We are waiting for exchanges between the government and the philanthropists and trustees to be completed."
On Wednesday, she wrote: "Everything has been agreed, we are going ahead with payroll. It will be done tomorrow as soon as the money hits our account.
"Thank you for your patience. You have been amazing and I am so sorry that the machinery of Whitehall was slower than we would have liked."
On Thursday, when the Cabinet Office grant had been cleared into the charity's bank account, she wrote: "I just want to let you know that we have just received our funding from the government and are processing payroll right now."
The charity said: "Kids Company's July payroll was two days later than usual whilst we waited for a grant from the Cabinet Office to arrive." According to one official familiar with the matter, £800,000 was paid out immediately to staff. Officials are now working out how much of the grant they will be able to recover.
Kids Company said it was "grateful for the ongoing support of the Cabinet Office that recognises the need for our work supporting some of society's most vulnerable children and young people". It is not clear what conditions the charity understood were attached to the grant.
On Tuesday afternoon government officials, charities and local authorities were briefed on the likely impact of of the charity closing its services.

Very fishy !

Civil service scepticism

The decision to make the £3m grant was controversial. The Cabinet Office's lead official, Richard Heaton, wrote to ministers on 26 June asking for a "ministerial direction" before making the payment. The permanent secretary logged his view that he thought the grant would be poor value for money. He sought written confirmation that they wanted him to go ahead with a grant regardless.
Mr Heaton said: "It is... my judgement that the proposed additional £3m grant does not represent value for money, in terms of delivering the outcomes for which the department is funded by parliament." Ministerial directions are relatively rare; only three were requested in the past parliament across government.
In their reply, Matthew Hancock and Oliver Letwin, Cabinet Office ministers, said he should press ahead and that they took confidence "from the changes that Kids Company has undertaken to make in terms of its leadership, management and governance, which we judge do give it a realistic prospect of long-term viability so it can continue to deliver for vulnerable young people".
This is not the first occasion on which Mr Letwin had intervened to secure funding for the charity.
During the last parliament, he and Steve Hilton, the prime minister's one-time adviser, supported the charity's call for funds within Whitehall in 2011.
Officials in the Department for Education report that Downing Street was in favour of funding the charity. Michael Gove, then education secretary, and Tim Loughton, then children's minister, opposed giving grants to the charity.
Last week, the police opened an investigation into serious allegations of incidents involving young people who use the charity that were not passed on to the police. The charity says it always meets its obligations to report crimes.

She must have been pishing herself larfing 3 million One Born every minute ,Did the charity offices have a large window  she Deffo seen Dave coming

transformation and downsizing plan

wtf does this mean for a npo, and why does it cost £3million to 'downsize'

Will somebody purrlease think of the children

The only charity I give to is my own grandkids.

it's worth a read.

the highlight being batwoman insinuating that a woman who sold her house and gave the proceeds to the kids company, was probably mentally unwell because she asked for transparency about how her money was spent.

she spent the money on her name

apparently she's going to apply for new jobs under her pseudonym Camila Brucewayneghelidjh

She seems quite sound.

Charity needs £2m per week to keep running......they were getting donations from rich benefactors but 1 pulled out when he heard about the sexual abuse allegations, which Batman says are baseless.

what % of the money goes in wages and admin to charities??.........say something like oxfam

they are giving her plenty of air time still

Most charities rely on volunteers to do the donkey work,but there'll be plenty of managers taking a good salary.My first wife used to raise a lot of money for the NSPCC organising functions in her spare time,she had an area manager who rarely attended & generally didnt seem to do a lot,he told me he was on £40k pa & that was 20 years ago.

Her father was quite a famous Iranian doctor who fled to the west. He seems to have been a bit of a charlatan.

Her father is listed on the QUACKWATCH website and was well known for pseudo-science and sort of New Age gobbledegook.

"Some Notes on Dr. Batmanghelidj's Silly "Water Cure" by
Stephen Barrett, M.D."

PM was "Mesmerised" ..."colourful character"..."personality cult"..."charismatic leader".....invoking all of this stuff, the name Rasputin suddenly comes to mind...there must be thousands of people in these types of jobs who are feckless but know all the right buzzwords, phrases and political stances to take....I see that she talked about "moving forward" and a dangerous "narrative" being constructed and all the usual PC Post-Modern horseh1t.

Very tasteful, low key threads she wears, too...kinda merges in with the crowd...

BTW - how many times did she appear on Question Time...?

kenny man?

Kenny's far too sensible and noble to get on Question Time...