An individual has been disqualified from acting as a trustee after he abused his position to spread offensive social media messages, the regulator has said.
The Charity Commission has today published the findings of its statutory inquiry into the Ghulam Mustafa Trust .
The regulator found that there was a lack of suitable governance and management as well as insufficient financial controls at the Ghulam Mustafa Trust, which was dissolved in February.
The Commission intervened in June 2015, following complaints about a trustee, Ghulam Mustafa, posting a video on social media accusing Jews of using secret microchips in Samsung phones to track users' photographs.
The regulator issued an action plan in September 2015, telling trustees to remove offensive social media posts and to improve financial controls.
At the time, the Daily Mail criticised the regulator’s actions, to which the Commission responded that its powers to remove trustees from charities were “limited”.
After finding that the trustees had not removed all social media posts, the Commission became concerned about the “willingness and competence of the trustees to comply with the actions”, and opened a statutory inquiry in November 2015.
There were three trustees when the Commission opened its inquiry.
During the inquiry, Mustafa was disqualified from trusteeship and senior management for three years.
The two other trustees resigned during the inquiry. New trustees were appointed and they then decided to close the charity.
Findings
It found that the charity had “failed to maintain accounting records”. It also found that £10,000 funds has been used in Pakistan, in ways that were “not clear” in upholding their charitable mission. And it found that a payment of £100 had been made solely to benefit Mustafa.
“It was clear that the charity had no written financial controls,” the report said.
It also found that governance was unduly weighted to Mustafa, who was responsible for most of the accounting. The report said the charity was “poorly managed and had little to no governance infrastructure”.
Michelle Russell, director of investigations, monitoring and enforcement said: “Our inquiry found that one of the trustees abused his position at the charity in order to spread offensive messages on social media. It’s right that we took robust action to end this practice and the harm it could cause.
“The charity was also involved in couriering cash overseas, which is against Commission guidance. This practice is high risk and puts valuable charitable funds in jeopardy. In this instance, the trustees were unable to account for the charity’s expenditure.
“Through their misconduct and mismanagement the trustees jeopardised the trust that donors placed in those responsible for the charity through their use of social media and their poor financial oversight. The trustee responsible for creating and posting offensive material on the charity’s social media is now disqualified from acting as a trustee,” Russell added.
The Trust was founded in 2014 to alleviate poverty in Pakistan. It was based in Birmingham, and had an annual income of £20,900.
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