\n<\/p>\n
Naomi Campbell has won a legal challenge to overturn a five-year ban on being a charity trustee after judges found she was unaware of serious misconduct at the charity she set up and helped oversee for several years.<\/p>\n
In 2024, the 56-year-old supermodel was disqualified from being a charity trustee for five years after the Charity Commission \u2013 which regulates charities in England and Wales \u2013 found mismanagement of funds at Fashion for Relief, which she founded.<\/p>\n
Campbell brought a case to the first tier tribunal to overturn the ban earlier this year, saying she had been \u201cdeceived\u201d by fellow trustee Bianka Hellmich, who had forged documents and lied about her credentials as a charity lawyer.<\/p>\n
The commission argued Campbell had \u201ccompletely abdicated\u201d her responsibilities as a trustee and was \u201chighly culpable\u201d for failures of governance and misuse of funds.<\/p>\n
This included use of charity funds to pay for Campbell\u2019s stay at a five-star hotel in Cannes, France, as well as spa treatments, room service and cigarettes, and paying a trustee \u00a3316,000 in unauthorised fees and travel expenses.<\/p>\n
However, in a judgment on Thursday a tribunal ruled in the model\u2019s favour. The judges Joe Neville and James Armstrong-Holmes, sitting with a third member, said: \u201cThere was serious misconduct and mismanagement in the administration of the charity she founded, Fashion for Relief.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe tribunal has found, however, that its most serious features, including unauthorised payments to Ms Campbell\u2019s co-trustee, Bianka Hellmich, failures in the management of the charity\u2019s finances and the misuse of its funds, resulted from Ms Hellmich\u2019s conduct and were concealed from Ms Campbell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Campbell was one of three of the charity\u2019s trustees to be disqualified as a result of the investigation, with Hellmich disqualified for nine years, and Veronica Chou for four years.<\/p>\n
The judges said Hellmich \u201cused forged documents\u201d and also deceived professional advisers and the Charity Commission.<\/p>\n
They added: \u201cMs Campbell was not involved in, and did not know of, that conduct.\u201d<\/p>\n
The judges also said while Campbell shared responsibility for the charity failing to file its accounts on time, this did not mean she was unfit to be a charity trustee in the circumstances of the case \u201cincluding the sustained deception\u201d she had faced.<\/p>\n
It is understood to be the second time a court has overturned a trustee disqualification order made by the commission.<\/p>\n
During a four-day hearing in June, Campbell said her \u201conly mistake\u201d was trusting Hellmich, whom she alleged forged her signature and lied about her credentials.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t look at it as a failure, I look at it as me trusting someone that I knew, someone that was a lawyer,\u201d Campbell said, telling the London tribunal that she and the Charity Commission had been deceived.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Guardian, Hellmich previously said there was \u201cabsolutely no truth\u201d to Campbell\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n
The judges rejected criticisms made by lawyers for the commission about Campbell\u2019s evidence, including that the supermodel was focused on \u201ccontrolling the media narrative\u201d.<\/p>\n
They said: \u201cIn our assessment, none of Ms Campbell\u2019s answers were capable of being taken as doing any such thing,\u201d adding that her evidence and conduct while the charity operated \u201cwas entirely honest\u201d.<\/p>\n
An investigation into Fashion for Relief was opened by the commission in 2021, after partner charities, including Save the Children and the Mayor\u2019s Fund for London, received just a tiny fraction of the proceeds of events organised by Fashion for Relief for their benefit.<\/p>\n
The charity was dissolved and removed from the register of charities in 2024. It had been set up with the aim of uniting the fashion industry to relieve poverty and advance health and education by providing grants to other organisations and giving resources towards global disasters.<\/p>\n
A Charity Commission spokesperson said its intervention had ensured \u00a3250,000 of funds raised for charities including Save the Children and the Mayor\u2019s Fund for London was passed on to the organisations.<\/p>\n
They added: \u201cWe made the disqualification order for Ms Campbell based on the evidence available to us at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe court recognised that Ms Campbell, the commission and the law firm concerned were subject to sophisticated deception by one of the other trustees. This was referred to the Metropolitan police when we became aware.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe acknowledge and will reflect on the court\u2019s decision and are considering any wider implications for our work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Naomi Campbell has won a legal challenge to overturn a five-year ban on being a charity trustee after judges found she was unaware of serious misconduct at the charity she set up and helped oversee for several years. In 2024, the 56-year-old supermodel was disqualified from being a charity trustee for five years after the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52386,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[163,341,662,983,1554,324,7251,12475,1975],"class_list":{"0":"post-52385","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-ban","9":"tag-campbell","10":"tag-challenge","11":"tag-charities","12":"tag-charity","13":"tag-legal","14":"tag-naomi","15":"tag-trustee","16":"tag-wins"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}