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Commission-appointed interims earn £1.9m over ten years 1

Finance | Tania Mason | 28 Sep 2009

The Charity Commission has appointed interim managers at 35 charities over the last ten years, safeguarding £40.8m of charitable funds at a total cost to the charities involved of more than £1.9m.

Figures released to Charity News Alert under the Freedom of Information Act show that there are six interim managers still in place, and the professional fees for the managers involved are not included in the above figure because their tenure has not concluded.

Those still being managed by a Commission-appointed administrator are Cancer Care Foundation, Brent Education & Recreation Support Youth Challenge, Nottinghamshire Miners Home, Saint Stephen the Great, Brotherhood of the Cross and Star, and Relief for Distressed Children and Young People.

Professional fees

Several professional accountancy firms have profited from the process of appointing interim managers.  The highest fee paid was £226,239 to KPMG, whose employee Richard Hill spent five and a half years sorting out the McLaren Foundation from 2000 until 2006.  More than £2.6m of charitable funds was protected.

The worst-value appointment also involved Richard Hill at KPMG – he and Barry Jones spent nine months at the Care and Action Trust for Children with Handicaps (CATCH) in 2002 and protected no funds but earned £90,000 for their efforts.

KPMG also did well out of the King’s Ministries (pictured) – over two and a half years from 2002 to 2005 Richard Hill and Finbar O’Connell earned £198,220 while safeguarding £19.5m of charitable funds.

Other lucrative appointments included £125,422 for Baker Tilly, whose John Ariel and Cedric Clapp protected £2.1m at the Bath Recreation Ground over nearly four years from 2003 to 2007, and £112,280 for Baker Tilly after John Ariel protected £84,000 at the Horse Rangers Association Ltd in two and a half years from 2002 to 2005.

Six-year appointment still ongoing 

But all these may yet be eclipsed by the cost of appointing Adrian Stanway and Ian Oakley Smith of PriceWaterhouseCoopers to manage the Cancer Care Foundation.  PwC was appointed to the task in September 2003 and the inquiry is still ongoing.

The other five open cases were opened two years ago or less.

The Charity Commission said that appointments of interim managers are usually made under a two-stage tender process which seeks to find a manager with “the right skills and experience at a cost that will provide the charity with value for money”.

It added that it is “not generally the case that the appointment of an interim manager is related to solvency issues, but rather to the circumstances of a statutory inquiry which may warrant such a use of our powers”.

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