Timing

Seven Directors of Kids Company and its CEO are being pursued by The Insolvency Service, who think they should be disqualified as company directors for a period, for not paying attention to the way the charity was being run. 

Lesley Anderson QC (LL.B Manchester University) is acting for the Insolvency Service, and says the charity had an unsustainable business model. “From 2013 the warning signs were there that, without intervention, this model would lead the company to fail. Those warning signs gradually increased in frequency and seriousness and were or ought to have been known to the defendants. The company is no longer around to do its important work precisely because it was run in an unsustainable way. Adopting such a model, and not doing enough to change it once it was apparent the company was unsustainable makes the defendants unfit and for that they should be disqualified.”

In 2013, Alan Yentob, the chair of trustees at Kids Company, made films for Imagine about Rod Stewart, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Judith Kerr, Edmund de Waal, Machiavelli and 'Outsider Art', as well as revisiting his 1975 documentary about David Bowie. In that year it was revealed that Alan earned £183k as the BBCs Creative Director, but that didn't include his editor/presenter fee for Imagine; it was also possible that, then aged 66, he was able to draw down his BBC pension. 

In December 2013, Alan hosted a private viewing of the Kids Company exhibition, Holding Up Childhood, at the Royal Academy.