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Widower arrested for £700,000 charity raffle fraud

Fundraising | Jonathan Last | 24 Aug 2012

A widowed man has been arrested under fraud charges after allegedly  revoking an offer to give away his £700,000 home and luxury car in a charity raffle once significant proceeds were raised, and donating only £1,000 to charity.

According to national media reports, Mel Yates organised a raffle following the death of his wife to cancer in order to raise funds to donate to Marie Curie Cancer Care and the Injured Jockeys Fund, a charity dear to his wife. He charged £25 per ticket and sold a reported 2,500, which would have totalled £62,500.

When the raffle was drawn – won by a woman from Malaga – the glamorous prizes had been downgraded to just £11,000 in cash. Yates was reportedly arrested and his home raided last week after complaints from local ticket-buyers.

Only £500 to Marie Curie

Marie Curie Cancer Care looked after Yates’ wife Tessa until she died of a brain tumour in 2009.

A spokesperson for the charity told civilsociety.co.uk: "We can confirm the charity received £500 from Mel Yates on 8 Feb 2011. The raffle was not organised in partnership with Marie Curie and the charity did not sell any tickets. The investigating authorities have our full cooperation.”

No-one from the Injured Jockeys Fund was available to confirm whether the Fund received the remaining £500 of the £1,000 reported to be donated by Yates.

Yates used the website winourprize.com for his raffle, which has since been closed down.

Motivation ‘was not to profit’

“The object is to try to raise as much money as I can for the two charities that were near and dear to us,” Yates told the Telegraph in June 2010. “I thought I could do something on behalf of Tessa's memory, and throw my life into it.

“I am comfortable financially, so the motivation is not to profit.”

Yates had outlined in the article his plans for the ticket sales, which included provisions to downgrade the prize if not enough tickets were sold.

He had hoped to sell enough tickets at £25 each to cover the cost of his four-acre property in Herefordshire, the newspaper reported – £1 from each sale was to be donated to charity until sales reached the break-even figure of 35,000 tickets.

The plan was that the total income from any extra tickets sold would also be given to the charities, and Yates ultimately hoped to raise £285,000 to donate.

But, the article outlined, the house would not be raffled if sales fell short of the 35,000 target, and the money raised would instead be converted into a cash draw.

Directory: Marie Curie Cancer Care