The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into the Ghulam Mustafa Trust after a video emerged showing a charity trustee accusing Jews of “using secret microchips in Samsung smartphones to track users’ photographs”.

The Commission announced the investigation into the charity last month, following an article which appeared in the Daily Mail in November last year which questioned whether the regulator had taken strong enough action against the charity trustee shown making racist comments in the online video.

At the time, the Commission responded by saying that its “powers to remove trustees from charities are currently limited”, and that that is why it has asked for new powers – as currently being debated before Parliament in the Charities (Protection and Social Investment) Bill.

Announcing the statutory inquiry, the Commission said it “is aware of some inaccurate reporting of the Commission’s actions in relation to this charity. It can clarify that it acted quickly when it was made aware of concerns about the content of a post on the charity’s Facebook page in late June.”

It said that it reviewed the post at the time and “concluded that material was completely inappropriate and raised serious regulatory concerns about the management and administration of the charity”. It said that once the Commission had reported the matter to the police, it contacted the charity’s trustees to request that they remove the post.

After the post was removed the Commission conducted a compliance visit to the charity on 22 July. It said that this inspection revealed governance failings, prompting it to issue the charity’s trustees with a report and action plan on 2 September.

This action plan required trustees to complete certain actions within certain timeframes, and trustees failed to comply with the action plan to the Commission’s satisfaction. The regulator said trustees failed to comply with one of the actions, and did not comply with the requirement to report completed actions to the Commission within specified timeframes.

The inquiry into the Ghulam Mustafa Trust, whose objects include the prevention or relief of poverty or financial hardship in Pakistan by providing or assisting in the provision of education, training and healthcare, opened on 18 November.

The investigation will examine the charity’s administration, governance and management of the charity by trustees, the financial controls and management of the charity, the conduct of trustees, and whether or not the trustees had complied with and fulfilled their duties and responsibilities as trustees under charity law.

The charity has been approached for comment.

Charity Commission appoints joint interim managers to charity

Elsewhere the Charity Commission has appointed joint interim managers to the Rhema Church London charity to review and report back to the regulator on the ongoing governance of the organisation.

The Commission, which announced the appointments on 22 December 2015, said that the joint interim managers will have “all the powers and duties of the trustees” and that their appointments come at the “exclusion of the trustees”.

The charity regulator appointed Helen Briant and Keith Mills from law firm DWF on 30 November 2015, having first opened an inquiry into the charity in August 2015. The inquiry stemmed from an earlier operational compliance case into the late filing of accounts and insufficient audit evidence in regards to the organisation’s expenditure for the year ending September 2013.

Briant and Mills have been tasked by the regulator with taking over the administration of the charity on a temporary basis as well as taking control and protecting the charity’s assets. The managers will be looking into the charity’s internal financial controls and policies, its arrangements with personnel working on its behalf, its overseas activities and ensuring that overdue accounts for the financial year ending 30 September 2014 are submitted.

The Charity Commission is also examining whether “there has been (and if so to what extent) any breach of duty and/or trust by the charity trustees in relation to the operation of the charity”.

According to the regulator’s statement, the religious activities of the church in the UK will not be affected by the appointment of the interim managers.

According to the charity register, Rhema Church London’s last set of accounts is currently 158 days overdue. Its accounts for the financial year ending 30 September 2013 were received by the Commission on 12 January 2015, 166 days late. According to its last set of published accounts, the organisation had an annual income of £977,408 and spending of £823,652.

The charity has been approached for comment.

Additional reporting by Hugh Radojev