Supermodel Naomi Campbell has been banned from serving as a charity trustee for the next five years. In the UK, a trustee is a volunteer who serves on a charity’s governing board, taking legal responsibility for the organization’s management, strategic direction, and financial oversight. An investigation by the Charity Commission found that Campbell’s charity, Fashion for Relief, was being financially mismanaged.
Fashion for Relief was founded in 2005 to address poverty and various humanitarian causes. The Charity Commission found, or rather, didn’t find, proper documentation about the charity’s finances and noted that many of its claims of donor reimbursements were unsubstantiated. According to the commission’s report, between 2016 and 2021, Fashion for Relief raised £4.8 million from a series of fundraising events but allocated only 8.5 percent, around £389,000, to actual charitable grants.
So, what was the rest of that money spent on? The usual: personal security, spa treatments, luxury accommodations. The commission found, for example, that during a 2018 event in Cannes, France, the charity covered a €3000-a-night stay and over €8000 in personal expenses for Campbell.
But Campbell wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Her fellow trustee, Bianka Hellmich, will not be able to work for a charity for nine years after receiving £290,000 in unauthorized consultancy fees. Another trustee, Veronica Chou, faces a four-year ban.
Campbell says she was not in control of the charity’s operations and entrusted all that complicated stuff to a team of legal representatives.
For the Charity Commission’s part, it appointed interim managers to recover around £344,000 in misallocated funds, which they then distributed to organizations like Save the Children and the Mayor’s Fund for London. Some of those recovered funds have also been used to cover some of Fashion for Relief’s liabilities.
While Fashion for Relief has been around since 2005, it wasn’t officially registered until 2015. The charity has been dissolved and removed from London’s register of charities in March 2024.
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The post Supermodel Naomi Campbell Booted from Charity for Money Mismanagement appeared first on VICE.
