Charity Commission Claims Victory Over Jolyon After High Court Kids Company Ruling – Guido Fawkes

Charity Commission Claims Victory Over Jolyon After High Court Kids Company Ruling

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In January Guido reported on Jolyon Maugham’s bizarre campaign backing a Judicial Review against the Charity Commission, which had refused to retract the conclusions of its report into the (now defunct) disgraced charity Kids Company. The judgment is out and it’s bad news for Jolyon as the High Court “dismisses” his challenge on all but two minor points…

Those two points relate to:

1. A list of 25 special Kids Company clients who between them were given hundreds of thousands of pounds tax-free by Kids Company in 2014. The High Court has in effect concluded that this was acceptable. An odd decision given reporting at the time showed that some of these 25 supposedly vulnerable and needy Kids Company “clients” were simultaneously Kids Company employees…
2. The second point concerns Kids Company’s cash reserves. The ruling finds “the implication [in the Charity Commission’s report] that if the trustees had not made a decision to operate with a low level of reserves they might have been able to save the charity from insolvency” to be irrational. The judgment concurrently points out that Kids Company failed to hold adequate reserves despite warnings from auditors…

The Charity Commission has put out a punchy statement this afternoon which confirms it is “clear that the overall findings of our report were not ‘irrational.’” It said the “High Court judgment has upheld our finding of mismanagement of the charity’s finances and has confirmed that it was based on “ample evidence.’” It adds “firmly rejected allegations we predetermined the outcome of the inquiry, stating the threshold for this was ‘not met in this case by a wide margin.’“ That won’t stop the fox-beater…

Despite the action being dismissed on all but these two points, Jolyon is still claiming his Good Law Project has “won” its case against the Charity Commission. Things work differently  on Planet Jolyon…