Kids Company’s Camila Batmanghelidjh to step down
3 July 2015
From the section UK Politics
David Cameron and Camila Batmanghelidjh
The chief executive of a charity whose government funding has been withheld over concerns about its ability to manage itself is to step down.
Kids Company had been told by government officials it would not get £3m of funding unless its leader Camila Batmanghelidjh was replaced.
Ms Batmanghelidjh told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme she had always planned to step down in her 20th year in 2016.
She denied the charity had been mismanaged.
Ms Batmanghelidjh said she would stay on at the charity in a clinical role.
‘Always the plan’
She told the Today programme: “What I was always going to do… As a founder I think it is very important to step down and hand an organisation over for other people to run it.
“I was always planning to do that in the 20th year, which would have been next year.
That was always my plan. We were going to appoint a chief executive to take over the role because that’s the right thing to do.”
The charity, which started in south London and supports deprived young people and their families, is one of the most high-profile in Britain and regularly hosts leading politicians.
It is synonymous with its charismatic leader and founder Ms Batmanghelidjh.
It relies heavily on public funding; in the last set of published accounts, for 2013, the government provided £4m, about one fifth of its annual £20m funding.
The Cabinet Office has concerns about the charity’s ability to run itself, a collaboration between BBC Newsnight and Buzzfeed has learned.
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Source:: BBC UK
