Almost £200,000 has been transferred from a removed charity to a new organisation, according to the Official Custodian for Charities accounts for the year ended 31 March 2024.
They show more than £199,000 held from Chabad UK (which was removed from the register on 30 August 2023) was remitted to Alte Feiga Trust.
The Charity Commission had previously conducted a statutory inquiry into Chabad UK and seven other charities, which found that they had received “significant income” through their bank accounts for which the trustees had failed to properly account.
Civil Society has contacted Alte Feiga Trust, which recorded an income of £398,000 and expenditure of £452,000 in 2022, for comment.
Commission Chabad UK inquiry
Bank records indicate that over £9m had passed through the charities’ bank accounts between January 2012 and May 2014.
However, these sums had not all been accurately disclosed to the Commission in the charities’ annual returns for the relevant periods.
The inquiry established that the regulator had been provided with false or misleading information about the charities’ annual returns.
In 2016, two trustees (who at some stage had been trustees for each of the eight charities) were removed as trustees of Chabad UK.
They were disqualified from acting as charity trustees or in roles involving senior management functions in the future.
The inquiry was placed on hold from 27 April 2016, pending the outcome of a police investigation.
On 21 June 2019, the manager of the charities (who was also connected to a former trustee) was convicted of an offence for providing false or misleading information to the Commission, two charges of money laundering, theft (of approximately £165,000) and fraud, for which he received a total prison sentence of nine years and nine months.
On the closure of its inquiry, the Commission said it would ensure that, where possible, any charitable donations recovered were transferred to another charity to be spent in accordance with the charitable objects to which they were initially given.
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