Fashion for Relief: Three disqualified from being Trustees

The charity Fashion for Relief has been in the news lately for being ‘poorly governed.’ There was a plan put in place for the Trustees to manage the charity after a compliance visit in 2020, however after reviewing the response of the Trustees there was a statutory inquiry in November 2024, the findings from which have recently been published.

Fashion for Relief was registered in January 2015 – one of their charitable objectives was ‘the prevention or relief of poverty, sickness and distress of persons affected by natural or other kinds of disasters in any part of the world.’ They would provide grants and financial assistance to charities and other organisations.

On 26th September 2024, the Charity Commission announced that they disqualified three people from acting as Trustees – Naomi Campbell for 5 years, Bianka Hellmich for 9 years, and Veronica Chou for 4 years.

The Charity Commission found that between April 2016 and July 2022, only 8.5% of the charity’s overall expenditure was on charitable grants. They also made unauthorised payments of £290K to Bianka Hellmich and there was money also spent which did not seem ‘reasonable, appropriate and in the charity’s best interests.

Following this, it has also come out that UNICEF had filed a serious incident report in 2022 after disputing the alleged claim that it was the fundraising partner for an event held by the charity. There were two other charities, the Mayor’s Fund for London and Save the Children who were also owed proceeds by the Charity.

Tim Hopkins, the Deputy Director for Specialist Investigations and Standards from The Charity Commission said:

Trustees are legally required to make decisions that are in their charity’s best interests and to comply with their legal duties and responsibilities. Our inquiry has found that the trustees of this charity failed to do so, which has resulted in our action to disqualify them.