It's been a tumultuous week for the League Against Cruel Sports, after a front page story in The Times alleged it had misspent funds. The charity's campaigns director, Tom Quinn, gives his take on the week's events.

Waking up on Tuesday to a front page headline in The Times screaming that the League Against Cruel Sports had "squandered a fortune" was not a pleasant experience.

As a charity that relies on donations from supporters, being accused of wasting their money is a very serious allegation. The story implied that we had squandered a £3.5m legacy, and gone on a "spending spree". This was a major story – front page, page two, a double page spread and even a Times opinion piece berating us for our actions in wasting this money. They really went after us.

But the story wasn’t true.

And they even admitted it – right at the bottom of the page two story, they included one key response from us: that we haven’t actually spent any of the legacy.

So what was going on?

The story included a whole range of claims, accusations and insinuations. Some of them involved our apparent "spending spree" (such as employee trips to Boston and Malta), and a "backdated payrise". We can, and have, justified this spending as perfectly reasonable as part of our campaigning remit – you can see a full rebuttal of the claims here if you wish. Even if this spending had come out of the legacy, it wouldn’t have added up to more than 5 per cent of the total we received. But again – we haven’t used the legacy money for any of this.

The flaws in the story keep coming. We "wasted" money on a "disastrous" prosecution of the Lamerton Hunt, that was taken for "grandstanding" reasons. As we’ve stated several times already, independent high level legal professionals said we were justified in taking the case, and the police have apologised for not taking it on themselves. Our supporters have been nothing but supportive in our attempt to bring this hunt to justice.

The wording throughout the story is inflammatory and biased: "financial incompetence", "numerous failings", "it matters when a charity fails its donors", "ran off the rails because of a sudden windfall".

All of this built on a shameful and deliberate untruth – that we "wasted" a legacy, when the truth is, again, that we haven’t spent a penny of it.

This whole episode raises key questions about the media. We were contacted by the journalist on more than one occasion, and given the chance to comment on the various accusations/issues. We politely and in a timely manner gave full responses to each of the points. Naively perhaps, we thought that our responses would persuade the journalist to drop the story – after all, there wasn’t a story. We hadn’t done anything wrong.

The story then came out. All the accusations were included, with hardly any prominence given to our responses. It was basically what is known as a 'hatchet job’.

It didn’t end there – similar stories appeared in The Times on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday’s was about our former chief executive who was involved in a fight – a story that appeared in a rival newspaper several months ago. The charity paid his legal bills because trustees felt he had been attacked due to his position with the League.

Finally, the journalist found something we’d done wrong – not the fact that we’d paid the legal bills, but because we told him that we had informed the Charity Commission of this fact. It turns out we hadn’t told them, but this mistake was made in good faith and was down to some minor – but genuine - factors:  the incident happened in 2014, the key people involved had left the charity so we were unable to check with them and we were given very little time by the journalist to research a large number of issues.

When we discovered our mistake we promptly got on the phone to the Charity Commission and are meeting with them to discuss the issue.

I guess if you throw enough mud, something will stick. But this doesn’t change the fact that a substantial, damaging and completely incorrect story has been written by a renowned national newspaper.

What right of redress do we have? We contacted the paper and their lawyers, but are still waiting for a reply. We will take formal action through IPSO. But what will this achieve? Possibly a 10 word correction out of sight in the paper? Meanwhile, for many casual readers, we are, and will remain, a charity that squanders money. The damage has been done. And without wishing to sound like a four year old – it’s simply not fair.

Newspapers have a very important role to play. Investigative journalists are often seen as the heroes of the journalism world, getting stuck in to right the wrongs – think of All the President’s Men and the recent Spotlight film. But if an investigative journalist digs around and finds nothing wrong, should the story be printed?

We believe that the attack on us is politically motivated. People who go hunting or shooting really don’t like us, and they know that because we run high profile and successful, fact-based campaigns against them, we are dangerous. Some of these people are in high places in the political and media world. Other high profile animal welfare charities like the RSPCA have also come under regular attack.

Or is the charity sector and/or Charity Commission another target? Are some charities seen to be ‘on the left’ of politics and thus an enemy of some media? The Times story mentioned that a League trustee is a former Labour MP, and Shadow Defra Minister Kerry McCarthy is a former Vice President. (It didn’t mention that another of our trustees is a Conservative.)

I know people who have worked at a national level as journalists, and they tell me that if they presented an editor with this story, and the facts provided by the charity involved, they would be laughed out of the office. Their professional integrity would have been at risk.

Yet here we are. Something’s going on. Watch this space.