The Sackler Trust, a British charitable trust run by the American Sackler family, removed the name of a health charity it paid £1m from its revised accounting information, it has emerged.
CW+, the charity of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, was the trust’s highest grant recipient in 2024 but was not mentioned in recently filed documents, which descibe protecting charities’ reputations from “serious prejudice”.
The trust “temporarily paused” its philanthropic giving to UK institutions in 2019 after allegations were widely reported that the Sackler family fortune had been linked to the US opioid crisis.
However, the trust has since resumed grantmaking, giving £3.8m to various institutions in the fields of art, education and science according to its accounts for the 2024 calendar year.
The latest accounts filed by the trust on Companies House last month, and reported by the Guardian, exempt two grant recipients who received a combined total of £1.15m from disclosure.
It wrote that it “considers that further reporting will expose the recipients to serious prejudice and impair the furtherance of their charitable activities”.
However, the same accounts filed on the Charity Commission website last October name the two redacted charities.
The earlier filed accounts show that CW+ received £1m in 2024 while L’Arche, a charity supporting adults with learning disabilities, was paid £150,000.
Charity unaware of name removal
No institutions are listed as being exempted from disclosure in the accounts filed with the commission.
Other charities which received grants from the trust in 2024 and were named in both the Companies House and Charity Commission sets of accounts included Veterans Aid and Belvoir Cricket & Countryside Trust, which received £250,000 each respectively.
A CW+ spokesperson told Civil Society: “We were not aware that the Sackler Trust was removing CW+ from its Companies House accounts.
“The donation we received has been in the public domain since the original accounts were published on the Charity Commission website in October 2025.”
L’Arche and the Sackler Trust have been approached for comment.
