£6m estate and a plush HQ
MARTIN SIME heads the growing charity empire that is the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), the umbrella body for voluntary organisations north of the Border.
It received £10.25million of taxpayers’ money last financial year – three-quarters of its entire budget.
Most of it was handed out as grants to other charities.
It received donations of only £517 and its spin-off company Workwithus.org was dissolved after making three years of losses.
Yet it was able to increase its workforce from 99 to 102, with four executives now on more than £60,000 a year.
SCVO has a portfolio of four business properties across the country worth £ .12million, plus land worth £1.87million. It has just jointly splashed out, together with another charity, on new offices in Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street at a cost of £2.3million.
SCVO made a surplus of £216,000 last year and has paid upfront five years of rent on its plush headquarters in Edinburgh’s New Town.
An SCVO spokesman said the ‘vast majority of public funding which SCVO receives is passed on to individual charities to support their work’.
The body said it has ‘bank loans to the value of over £ million relating to three of our properties’ adding that ‘these buildings provide accommodation for SCVO and the staff of other charities’.
SCVO salaries are the ‘subject of external benchmarking comparing us with similar organisations in the public and third sectors and are agreed by our elected and unremunerated Board of Trustees’.