Two charities that received a combined total of more than £1.1m from the British charitable trust run by the Sackler family were kept out of its latest accounts to protect their reputations from “serious prejudice”.
The trust, which draws on the Sackler fortune that came out of the US opioid crisis, gave £3.8m to arts, eduction and science bodies in 2024, according to its latest accounts, filed on New Year’s Eve.
The largest named recipients – each receiving £250,000 – were Veterans Aid, which tackles homelessness in the ex-service community, and the Belvoir Cricket and Countryside Trust, which works to develop an appreciation for the British countryside and promotes a love of sport, especially cricket.
The Sackler Trust is shunned by leading arts bodies and others who have refused donations or stopped accepting them because of the Sackler family’s links to the US opioid crisis and the painkiller OxyContin.
The National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House, Shakespeare’s Globe and Tate were among the institutions to cut ties or drop grants in the face of pressure over the family’s ownership and control of Purdue Pharma, the company that developed and aggressively marketed the addictive painkiller OxyContin.
The trust announced in 2019 it was pausing all new donations, but quietly resumed doing so in 2020. Its latest accounts, as has been the case in recent years, exempts the names of a number of entities receiving grants.
The accounts state: “The trust considers that further reporting will expose the recipients to serious prejudice and impair the furtherance of their charitable activities.”
Recipients who were named and who received £60,000 or more include Happy Day Ministries, Peterborough Asylum and Refugee Community Association, Waterlife Recovery Trust, Cliftonville Community Centre, Inside Job/Beating Time, Living Room, Mustard Tree and Not Beyond Redemption.
Two recipients of grants – totalling £1,150,000 – were exempted from disclosure in the accounts filed to Companies House. A total of 98 grants were issued in 2024, compared with 69 in the previous year.
The trust was committed to £7.4m of grants at the end of 2024, which included some carrying over from the previous year. The trust gave £5.27m in grants in 2022.
The Sackler Trust continues to be chaired by Dame Theresa Sackler, a former trustee of the V&A who sat on the Purdue board from 1993-2018. She is the widow of Mortimer Sackler, one of the three brothers who ran Purdue Pharma.
Dame Theresa’s children – Michael, Marissa and Sophia – are trustees of the family charity, which has assets totalling £50m.
A US judge said in November he would approve Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.
The deal, overseen by the US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane, would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn (£5bn) and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based company.
Members of the Sackler family who own the privately held Purdue, which now-deceased members of the family grew into a specialist in pain treatment in the early 1990s, became philanthropists using the huge profits generated by sales of OxyContin.
The Sackler family’s reputation took a dive when investigative journalism and activism exposed the company’s expansionist drive to increase prescriptions of the opioid despite growing addiction and deaths across the US. While the Sacklers have donated millions over the years to charitable interests, some have accused them of using the giving of money as a means of “reputation laundering”.
The Sackler Trust has been approached for comment.
At the time of its move to pause the trust’s giving, Dame Theresa said in a statement issued on behalf of the trustees: “I am deeply saddened by the addiction crisis in America and support the actions Purdue Pharma is taking to help tackle the situation, whilst still rejecting the false allegations made against the company and several members of the Sackler family.”
