The Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust has been granted permission to appeal against the agreed system of compensation for victims of the presenter, despite not being obliged to pay any money out itself.

The Trust stands to benefit from any money left over in the Savile estate once all the victims have been compensated.

A representative for the Trust said that it has challenged the compensation system for two reasons. First, the charity objects to the amount of legal fees incurred by NatWest, executor of the Savile estate, and as a result wants the bank removed as executors.

Secondly, the Trust does not believe the proposed compensation scheme to be fair.

The agreed scheme means that the Savile estate, which is separate to the Trust, the BBC and the NHS are liable to compensate victims.

The Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust’s application to replace Natwest as the executor of the Savile estate was dismissed by a High Court judge in February this year.

A statement submitted by Jo Summers of PWT Advice on behalf  of the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust to Civil Society News said that the trustees are “are particularly concerned that NatWest’s lawyers took their fees from the estate without having the authority to do so at the time”.

Summers added that the agreed compensation scheme gives the claimants’ lawyers an automatic right to claim fees of about £14,000 per claimant, irrespective of the amount the claimant receives. She added that this could mean a claimant receives “only a fraction of the amount paid to the lawyers”.

The trustees said: “It is our hope that we can protect the value of the estate by our application, so that more money is available to pay to those who have proper claims against the estate.

“As charity trustees, we also have an obligation to protect the funds that will go to charity, if there is anything left in the estate after paying the claims.”

However Liz Dux, from Slater and Gordon, who represents 176 of Savile’s victims, told Civil Society News that she does not know why the charitable trust is appealing the decision.

She said: “When we had the case before Mr Justice Sales, they were asked to give reasons why they objected to the scheme and they really couldn’t.”

She added that the charitable trust wants the NatWest executors sacked because it believes the bank is “too heavily biased to the victims” but said that that is “absolute nonsense” because “the settlement scheme is by no means that you just sign up and they pay out, it requires very strict evidential hurdles to climb and it has been drafted by very eminent QCs on all sides”.

Dux said that Savile’s victims are “gutted” by the charity’s decision to appeal.

She said: “They feel that every time we take one step forwards it is two steps back, and that this represents further delay and that the whole point about the settlement scheme is that it would be relatively quick.”

She added that the main point of the scheme was that it would limit how much is spent on legal costs and that the step taken by the charity will “involve massive increase legal costs and could result in the estate being diminished significantly”.

The challenge will be made at the Court of Appeal sometime between September and January. 

Savile is said to have abused more than 200 people over a 60-year period before his death in 2011.