Kids Co ‘gave prisoners cash every month ... including one murderer’
FAILED charity Kids Company paid monthly allowances to prison inmates including at least one murderer, it was claimed last night.
It was also accused of ‘paying off ’ directors who complained about financial mismanagement, handing three staff members £200,000 to buy their silence.
The astonishing claims were made by a former Kids Company employee in a formal submission to the Commons’ public administration committee, which is investigating the charity’s collapse.
The individual – who has not been named – claimed that founder Camila Batmanghelidjh treated the charity ‘as her personal fiefdom’, spending money ‘wantonly and inappropriately’ with ‘no regard whatsoever for the financial implications’.
The former staff member did not disclose the names of the prisoners who were receiving hand-outs but said numerous postal orders were sent to convicted criminals ‘for years’.
In a shocking portrait of the charity, the former employee also claimed that Kids Company spent £200 on a pair of trainers for a 12-year-old and paid for youngsters to go on holidays, including to America, Ibiza and on a luxury spa weekend in Britain.
One young man in his mid-20s allegedly flew first class to New York ‘in order to see his girlfriend’, and went on another trip to America ‘for several months, all expenses paid’, the former employee said.
Kids Company is currently under investigation by police over allegations of sexual abuse on its premises. It is also facing numerous probes amid claims of financial mismanagement.
Last night Kids Company’s former spokesman had yet to comment on the latest claims.
However, submissions by other former staff said that the charity’s reputation had been unfairly tainted by inaccurate media reports.
A separate report on the collapse of Kids Company, published today by the Commons’ public accounts committee, lambasts government officials for handing over millions in public subsidies.
The report accused ‘ gullible’ civil servants of ‘alarming’ failures after they handed Kids Company £42million of tax payers’ money with ‘no idea’ of what they were getting for the cash. And it said the ‘staggering’ lack of scrutiny must ‘ never occur again’.
It claimed that officials treated the London charity as a ‘ special case’, giving it an unfair advantage over other charities – depriving other vulnerable children around the country of funds.
Civil servants relied far too heavily on Kids Company’s reports about its own progress, MPs claimed.
For example in 2013 the charity said it helped more than 30,000 children – more than 22 times the 1,342 target it had agreed that year.
Ministers went against official advice and authorised a final £3million of funding to Kids Company just a week before the charity closed its doors this summer.
The Government had already handed over a £4.3million grant in April, which was intended to last a year. In a controversial move, the money was dished out in one go, instead of in quarterly instalments, not because of any actual restructuring plans but because of the Government’s ‘willingness’ to make it.
The decision by civil servants was ‘ill-judged and gullible’, the committee said in its report.
‘No regard for implications’