Kids Co boss ‘blew thousands on private doctor for relative of her driver’
SCANDAL-HIT charity Kids Company is alleged to have paid a Harley Street doctor thousands of pounds to treat a relative of Camila Batmanghelidjh’s chauffeur.
The Mail on Sunday has been told that the individual, a close relative of driver Jeton ‘Tony’ Cavolli, was among a small group who accepted a total of £750,000 of private healthcare courtesy of Kids Company last year.
The charity logged the expenditure in its internal accounts as ‘clinical staffing costs’ even though Mr Cavolli’s relative was not an employee.
It is understood the relative, whose identity The Mail on Sunday has decided not to reveal, was a patient of the private doctor for a period of several months. When colleagues found out, Ms Batmanghelidjh tried to justify the expenditure by saying Mr Cavolli’s relative had ‘complicated’ health problems.
On Thursday, Ms Batmanghelidjh and Alan Yentob, the chairman of the charity’s trustees, were questioned for three hours by a committee of MPs trying to establish how Kids Company went bust in August with the loss of 600 jobs.
The organisation, which claimed to help underprivileged children, received at least £43million of Government funding between 2005 and 2015 but closed amid financial chaos and allegations of sexual abuse.
Last week, The Mail on Sunday reported that Kids Company was facing new questions after giving hundreds of thousands of pounds tax-free to employees. And in August, we revealed that Mr Cavolli’s son and daughter were both registered as ‘clients’ of the charity.
According to its rules, this meant the pair would have referred themselves for help because of severe problems in their private lives. Through their ‘client’ status, both children received financial assistance with private school fees. Cavolli’s daughter attended Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire on a full academic bursary and left last year having completed her A-Levels. Kids Company is also understood to have spent about £50,000 enabling Mr Cavolli’s son to attend Fairley House School for dyslexic children in London. The charity said it did not directly pay his fees, but for the services of a speech and language therapist.
When The Mail on Sunday approached Mr Cavolli on Friday, he denied being Ms Batmanghelidjh’s driver, insisting he was the charity’s ‘operations manager’. But former members of staff said he had been her driver for ‘years’.
Last night a source said: ‘ We couldn’t believe Camila was allowing funds donated to a children’s charity to be spent on an adult’s private healthcare. Camila didn’t see the problem with it.’
Mr Cavolli, 46, is originally from Albania and has worked for Ms Batmanghelidjh for about 20 years. He is understood to have been paid at least £40,000 per year. Ms Batmanghelidjh’s 2006 book Shattered Lives included a warm tribute to his ‘tenacity and wisdom’.
Kids Company is being investigated by the Charity Commission, the National Audit Office and the police.
A source said the Charity Commission was aware of claims concerning Mr Cavolli and his family.
WOULD you pay £880 for a pair of sneakers? At the Frieze art fair in London last week, column i nches were abuzz with the fact that many art lovers were wearing trainers by Chanel, in tweed and calfskin, for £705, and Celine’s lambskin sneakers, £700. To cater for this trend there is even a ‘Sneaker Concept’ floor at Harvey Nichols, where £880 plimsolls, by Buscemi, have sold out.
Of course they have, given it’s now acceptable to wear sneakers on the red carpet, and even if you’re getting married. I went to a wedding not long ago where the fashion stylist bride wore McQueen high tops, £560 from Net-a-Porter: the best man’s speech made reference to the fact their vows should have read: ‘For richer, for Net-a-Poorer.’
So, what happened to jeans (Victoria Beckham flares: £310) and tracksuit bottoms (Moncler: £175) has infected the formerly humble, smelly sports shoe (I refuse to call them trainers: what is Tracey Emin, who wore Asics at Frieze, in training for?).
Even the disbanded Kids Company charity fell prey, with Camila Batmanghelidjh said to have spent £150 on sneakers for a troubled youth.
I admit I once bought a very expensive pair of plimsolls from Hermès. The year was 1998, I was a magazine editor, and I had just sat in the front row at the Hermès catwalk show. My head had been turned. I believed if I bought something from that brand I would look more like the models on the catwalk. But I wore the blasted things only once, as inside the nylon stitching was exposed and bit into my flesh.
It was well over £400 ill spent, given I got more use and enjoyment out of the orange box.
It was a clear illustration that expensive doesn’t mean wellmade, or comfortable. But still we buy. The question is: why?
While hip-hop break dancers in New York in the mid-1970s believed they were the first to appropriate sportswear and make it fashionable, in fact the trend was started by Coco Chanel. A lover of tennis, she felt liberated by the game’s drop-waist dresses and widelegged slacks, using the shapes as a template for her designs.
During the Depression, sportswear was adopted as a sign people were well off enough to have time for leisure; like sporting a tan, it meant you weren’t toiling away indoors in a sweatshop, which is ironic, given our current mania for plimsolls means children in the developing world are employed doing just that.
IN THE 1970s, Lycra went mainstream. I remember bulk buying from the Pineapple store in Covent Garden: leggings, bra tops, even mini skirts made of the brightly coloured stretchy stuff. Seemingly overnight, sportswear technology made us all comfy. My Levi’s 501s from the early 1970s now feel tortuous: rigid, too high in the waist, restricting.
At a sportswear exhibition at the V&A years ago, I marvelled that in the 1930s, Jaeger was the first brand with ‘healthy, active, breathable’ clothing for skiing, which makes me doubt we have progressed at all, given that today young women on the minimum wage covet Moncler down ski jackets, at up to £1,470, to wear on Loughton High Street. No matter they are not waterproof, given it doesn’t often rain in the Alps. A literal example of style over substance.
This is why fashion will never be art and why Alexander McQueen didn’t deserve those slavering reviews for his retrospective at the V&A: fashion has no ideas, only price tags. Fans don’t buy stuff because they love it, they buy it because they’ve been brainwashed, the opposite of art’s expansion of our minds.
When a fashion writer, I used to peddle the idea it’s our right to spend what we like, that men, after all, buy cars and golfing holidays, and no one raises an eyebrow. Now I’m out of that corrosive world, I’ve changed my mind.
I used to peddle the phrase ‘investment dressing’ – two words that featured heavily in my magazine, dependent as it was on advertising revenue.
I believed cheap Primark cashmere meant someone was being screwed, somewhere. Buy less, buy better! Now, I don’t even care that fashion is our biggest employer of women, our second biggest industry. I simply want to sleep at night.