Girl Power
Article published: Sunday, October 26th 2008
A few months ago we noted the difficulties the good people at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation seemed to be having meeting basic standards of charity oversight – like filing their company returns, or finding human beings as trustees rather than off-the-shelf companies. Some good news here: they’ve now managed to send in their company return, although they still seem to be having problems finding a full complement of human, not paper, trustees. (Note to TB – I’m sure Mule would happily print a job advert in the next issue…)
Meanwhile, it seems the Blairs have still more charidee in their hearts to give. Just last month, papers for a new Blair give-fest hit the Charity Commission’s inbox: the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. Happily, the CBFW are up to date at both Companies House and the Charity Commission, although things are still spartan on the trustee front: they’re sharing two of their trustees (including a paper one, Tyrolese (Directors) Ltd), with the TBFF. They’ve got one of their own, though, and he’s a cracker: one Martin Wallace Kaye. Could this be Martin Kaye, partner at tax advisers BDO Stoy Hayward, and Cherie Blair’s erstwhile financial adviser? If so, Martin knows a thing or two about getting your returns in on time, as he advised in a 2000 interview about late tax returns:
“We would never encourage clients to do other than file their returns. However, in practice, if someone is prepared to pay interest, a fine of £100, a 5 per cent surcharge and risk a detailed enquiry into their return they can probably defer payment by not filing until July.”
Surely not advice to, er, break the Income Tax Act?
Let’s hope Mr Kaye will also be bringing that gold-standard BDO Stoy financial oversight to the board. In May this year Stoy audited the 2007 accounts of crumbling holiday and airline company XL Leisure Group. Interestingly, XL’s Companies House filings show that Stoy took up the auditor’s reins from KPMG, after they resigned in 2006. In their resignation letter to the XL board, KPMG stated that they had detected "potential accounting irregularities" with the Group’s UK subsidiaries, found a relationship with a supplier which "might not have commercial substance…[and] had been misrepresented to us by certain directors", and had concluded that the company’s "financial statements were likely to contain material errors as a result". KPMG’s letter alleges that the parent company had undertaken a preliminary internal investigation, which concluded that the supplier relationship did indeed have no commercial substance, and that the company’s financial statements needed to be revised. Yet the company refused to undertake the full investigation which KPMG deemed necessary to address its concerns, and "refused to permit us [KPMG] to undertake the programme of additional audit and investigative work" which would allow them to sign off the revised financial statements, citing excessive cost. 
Stoy happily stepped into KPMG’s shoes instead, and signed off the latest accounts in May 2008 without reservation, and with no mention of these irregularities. Four months later, XL went into administration, stranding 90,000 holiday and airline customers around the world. Last week, the accountancy watchdog the Financial Reporting Council announced it was launching an investigation “into the conduct of BDO Stoy Hayward LLP as auditors to XL Leisure Group plc.”
More importantly than its sterling overight team, though, what are the CBFW going to be up to? Since the Foundation doesn’t have a website yet, it’s a little hard to tell – but we do know through an even more ambitious NGO oligarch, the Clinton Global Initiative, that the Foundation will be using ICT, and particularly mobile communications, to "[support] widespread social and economic development by promoting women’s role and leadership in the global economy" through pilot projects in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. This may well prove excellent work, of course. Especially with ‘project partners’ like PepsiCo. Mule wonders whether the projects will be replicating the women’s economic rights standards reported at PepsiCo’s Fritz Lay potato crisp plant in Poland, where in December 2004, according to international food workers’ union IUF, six women were either sacked or forced to resign after a break-time discussion in which they disclosed long-running sexual harassment by a supervisor.
Since we all know how keen the Blairs are on giving people choice, they’ll be heartened by the IUF’s description of the choice that the factory’s management gave to each worker:
On the table in front of her are two documents that she can choose to sign. The first says she is resigning at her own request, with a certain compensation. The second is a note of dismissal on grounds of negligence at work.”
The union backed the dismissed workers in filing charges of sexual harassment against the company in January 2005. IUF claims PepsiCo management then brought in a team of interviewers to take statements from all employees confirming their membership in the local union, sacked full-time union representative Slawomir Zaagrajek for allegedly inflating the number of union members (the union countered that management intimidation prevented them from keeping full membership lists, instead collecting dues anonymously), and then distributed a statement to all employees stating that the employees were withdrawing from the union, instructing them to sign and return it within five days.
PepsiCo deny that such a letter was sent, and insist that sacking the union organiser was entirely lawful. No doubt Cherie will have taken steps to fully investigate the claim before signing PepsiCo up to help, er, empower women workers and entrepreneurs across the Majority World. Just as she’s carefully crafted an active, diligent board to oversee the Foundation’s work – and the $35 million it’s slated to spend in the next three years. Who’d expect anything less from Blair Towers?
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