November 27-2015
Camila Batmanghelidjh, the founder of the scandal-hit British charity Kids Company, has admitted she cheated to gain entry to a prestigious private school in England, the Sherborne School for Girls.
She said her mother took the exam, which got her into the school in Dorset, which she attended from the mid-1970s to the 1980s.
Her extraordinary confession follows repeated reports that Batmanghelidjh made grossly exaggerated claims about Kids Company’s achievements.
According to Batmanghel-idjh, the Sherborne School sent the Common Entrance exam to her in Iran, where her family lived at the time. But instead of sitting the exam herself, her mother wrote it out for her 12-year-old daughter. Batmanghelidjh justified it in a newspaper article Sunday by saying: “I would never have passed it myself.”
Sherborne was a major financial donor to Kids Company—which is being investigated by Parliament, the Charity Commission and the police—before the charity collapsed insolvent in August amid allegations of sex abuse on its premises.
Some of Kids Company’s clients have also been given free and reduced-cost places at the Sherborne School, where fees reach $50,000 a year.
This month The Mail on Sunday revealed that Kids Company’s number one cheerleader in the cabinet, Oliver Letwin, is a governor and former trustee of the Sherborne School.
Letwin insisted on giving $4.5 million of public money to Kids Company in July, against the advice of civil servants.
