Children of Kids Co trustee on its payroll

Daughter worked as £32,500 ‘music co-ordinator’

KiDS Company is facing a fresh storm after it emerged that two of the vice- chairman’s children were on the charity’s payroll before its collapse. Sasha and Jamie Handover were both handed coveted jobs at the organisation where their father Richard, a former boss of WH Smith, has been a trustee since 2005.

The siblings were paid around £50,000 a year between them by the taxpayer-subsidised charity until it imploded last week amid allegations of financial mismanagement and sexual abuse on its premises.

Miss Handover, 34, who real name is Alexandra, is thought to have been the better paid of the pair, earning £32,500 a year as a music co-ordinator and events organiser despite having little previous charity experience. Before joining Kids Company she worked in the press and PR department at radio station Classic FM, and was director of sports fashion firm Top Dorris.

Writing on the Kids Company website, the Portsmouth university graduate said she headed the music department, overseeing music at Kids Company centres that provide it as a form of therapy and providing artist development for the ‘talented young people’ it helps.

She helped to organise events for the charity with Coldplay, Tinie Tempah and Emeli Sande. She also organised a 150- strong choir of Kids Company children for a BBC Prom at the Royal Albert Hall.

in between she has gone on a series of expensive fundraising trips. in 2010, she participated in an Arctic biathlon which raised nearly £17,000 for the organisation. According to her Facebook page, the trip was so gruelling she immediately jetted off to the sunshine afterwards.

‘Can’t believe i survived -30 in the Arctic to come home to bloody snow… i’m off to the beach!!!!’ she wrote. Two years later the privately- educated charity worker went with five friends to Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. They raised more than £26,000 for Kids Company.

it is not known when Jamie, 31, joined the charity, but a spokesman confirmed he also raised funds and was involved in sports training for children at its London ‘Treehouse’ centre.

Kids Company’s 2013 accounts, the last available, confirm that one child of an unnamed trustee was earning a salary of just over £32,500, while another child of an unnamed trustee saw their pay double in a year to £ 17,124. The l atter is thought to be Jamie Handover.

Last night, a spokesman for the charity confirmed it had hired Richard Handover’s children but insisted that there was nothing wrong with the appointments.

‘Sasha has worked damn hard,’ the spokesman said. ‘i don’t understand the difficulty with that. it was not a secret and it was not nepotism.

‘She has done a proper day’s work and contributed a great deal. They applied for jobs and they were given jobs.’

Richard Handover CBE, 68, was chief executive of WH Smith until 2003. He lives in a £1.5million home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, with his wife Veronica, 67, and has a third child, Felicity ‘Fizzy’ Handover, 36.

‘I don’t understand

the difficulty’