Oxfam has been left £41m after a businessman who died in a plane crash updated his will to include the charity a year before his death, the Sun has reported.
Oxfam said in a statement that it “was extremely grateful for this bequest”, which it said it has only just been made aware of and would not confirm the amount it expects to receive.
Earlier this year that the charity said it would have to make up to 100 UK staff redundant because of funding shortages in the aftermath of the safeguarding scandal.
If accurate, the figure would be over double the total amount the charity received from legacies according to its last annual accounts.
Richard Cousins, who was chief executive of catering firm Compass Group, was killed in a plane crash alongside his family in Sydney on New Year’s Eve.
He died alongside his two sons, his fiancée and her daughter. Australian pilot Gareth Morgan was also killed.
The Sun reported that Cousins had made a change to his will a year before his death, inserting a “common tragedy clause”. This outlined that in the event he and his sons were killed together, Oxfam would become the main beneficiary to his estate.
The paper said that all but £3m of his fortune will go to the charity, with his brothers Simon and Andrew both getting £1m.
In May, Oxfam said it would have to make 100 UK staff redundant because donors are withholding funding in the wake of the safeguarding scandal.
It said it needed to reorganise its work in order to ensure it lives within its means, while doing all it can to protect the support it gives, and that due to some donors having paused new funding “pending reassurances”, it will have to lose some of its staff working in its international programmes and in the UK.
According to its last available accounts, for the year ending March 2017, Oxfam received £19.8m in legacies. It had a total income of £408m last year.
In a statement, Oxfam said: “We are extremely grateful for this bequest of which we have only recently been notified. We are working with the family and our board of trustees to identify how the money will be used.”
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