Back of the envelope stuff

FakeCharity Fun

RR emailed me to ask whether Reprieve are a fakecharity.

Their website is absolutely textbook fakecharity template, with the tabs for "Home", "About us", "Our work" and "Get involved". It doesn't have the tabs for "Careers" or "Our partners" but hey. Interestingly, it doesn't show their registered charity number (so presumably they were using a beta version or something).

We can ignore the annual report on their website as it does not go into enough detail. Their full accounts are available on the Charities Commission website.

'Donations' (Note 2 on page 21), total £328,480, include an 'anoymous' donation of £200,000. Hmm. As the tax reclaim amounts to about 22% of the total income, that means the charity must be reasonably certain that said donor is an individual with a personal UK income tax liability of at least £56,410. Hmm. So either they play fast and loose with procedures, or he's not 'anonymous' at all.

'Incoming resources from charitable activities' (Note 4, page 22), total £633,388, include £30,000 from the Foreign Office (ker-ching!). However, the largest single source of income was £194,481 from the 'JEHT Foundation'. "Who are they?" you may ask, well, I've no idea, so let's a do a quick Google and find out...

Right. That source of income will have dried up, then.

Today's Q&A

Q - when will banks start lending again?
A - when they think they can make profits from doing so.

Q - will quantitative easing work?
A - no, it's just separate branches of the government shuffling bits of paper with numbers on them back and forth. The experience of Japan suggests that is won't even cause inflation, let alone get the economy moving.

Q - what's the main cause of child poverty?
A - poor parents.

Q - would you describe Sir Allen Stanford as a sophisticated fraudster?
A - no, he invested some of his money with Bernie Madoff and then tried to deny having done so. Sir Allen should have claimed that he invested all his money with Bernie Madoff and that he himself was the innocent victim of a fraud. Daft bastard, honestly.

Reader's letter of the day

From today's FT:

Sir,

A headline on your front page of December 17 read: "Falsified records hamper Madoff inquiry."

To paraphrase Claude Rains in Casablanca: "We are shocked ... shocked ... that there was falsification of records going on in this Ponzi scheme."

George J Grumbach Jr, New York.