The Charity Commission has opened a statutory inquiry into a charity that a trustee says was taken over by Egyptian Ministry officials.
The British School of Alexandria had previously been the subject of a class inquiry for ‘double defaulters’, meaning it had failed to meet their statutory reporting requirements for two or more years of the last five years.
The regulator says trustees have failed to comply with an order the Commission issued in September 2021 to provide the accounts for the financial years ending 2019 and 2020.
But Eleanore Hargreaves, a trustee at the charity, said it “has ceased to exist after the school's assets were taken over by Egyptian Ministry officials who have since been sacked for financial irregularities”.
She added the trustees have not had access to the charity's finances since 2019 and have been disbanded since 2020.
She said: “If the Commission would like further evidence of the illegal sequence of events, in addition to all the documents we have already sent, it may be worth sending someone to the site in Egypt. We are also more than happy to provide any further information that could be useful.”
The Commission did not comment on the claim that the charity’s assets were taken over by Egyptian Ministry officials.
The inquiry will examine the extent to which the trustees have and are complying with their legal duties and the extent to which any failing or weaknesses in the administration, governance and management of the charity identified during the inquiry were the result of mismanagement by the trustees.
Data for the financial year ending 31 July 2018, on the Commission’s website, shows that charity’s total income was more than £3m.
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