Sunday 4 August 2013

Fake charity of the day

Bob E's post of earlier mentions "the campaign group Sustain, which leads a consortium of organisations campaigning for legislative action on children and sugar, [who] told the Observer that the government had shown no interest."

Ho hum.

Sustain's own website shows their charity number at the bottom of the page, which clicks straight through to a Page Not Found page on the Charity Commission website.

Well done lads!

But their 2012 accounts are available in the Charity Commission website here. The list of "membership organisations" on page 4 is a hoot. See how many you can guess before you click through and scroll down.

From page 36, notes 2 and 3, their total income of £2.3 million includes £53,377 donations and £2,256,582 income from charitable activities (whatever they are).

And who are their biggest "customers"?

Greater London Authority - £559,498
Plunkett Foundation (Big Lottery) - £512,327
Big Lottery Local Food Fund - £281,894
Rural Payments Agency (EC) - £186,925
British Heart Foundation - £70,666
BBC Wildlife Fund - £12,500
Other grants and income - £16,810


Righty-ho, there must be plenty of other businesses who wished that the government showed "no interest" in them.

5 comments:

Bob E said...

CASH is there, of course, but somewhat surprisingly given that "sugar [one assumes in all its forms] is toxic" line they've adopted, are lots of "farming" bodies - so none of those farmers they represent will be growing sugar beet or "sugar laden fruits" that the likes of Innocent turn into "smoothies" and so is The Natural Beekeeping Trust - who presumably, in keeping to the party line, destroy any Honey their Bees produce, rather than filter, bottle and sell it - and those that don't, hoping I guess that no other Sustain member notices, surely play safe by having a skull and crossbones and "Poison" clearly marked on the bottles.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BE, yes, for example.

I must admit I didn't know that sugar was toxic. Does that mean that most people are dead?

Bob E said...

Well I think the French have accepted the "Professor Lustig" hypothesis, and acknowledged that unfortunately most people are dead, but don't know it - Channel 4 broadcast a multi-part French documentary about it recently ...

JuliaM said...

I just had a bowl of rice crispies with sugar! How long have I got to l....

PJH said...

It appears that the Charity Commission has changed the search URL's on their site (their doing so also broke all the fake-charity links on my site) without doing any redirection for older URL's (a fairly simple operation if you're in the business of writing websites.)

You can find Sustain's accounts here.