bitchy | Mail: Sophie Chandauka’s consultant spending spree was done without board approval

The British Charity Commission has now opened up an investigation into what the hell is happening with Sentebale. Despite some drama in the earliest years of Sentebale, the charity had been in very good standing for about fifteen years. They brought in a few million a year, mostly from polo-game fundraisers, and they had steady donations. Things shifted in 2023 when Sophie Chandauka came on board as the chairwoman and immediately began butting heads with everyone. In March, the majority of the board of trustees resigned in protest of Chandauka, then Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso resigned in protest too. Chandauka has spent the past week and a half on a completely bonkers publicity campaign, throwing out every kind of royalist fan-fic accusation she can think of.

The Charity Commission seems to be gathering information from both sides – if Chandauka has evidence of all of the bonkers sh-t she’s claimed, she can provide it to the commission. It sounds like Prince Harry and the former trustees have already started providing their evidence to the commission. Harry and Seeiso’s statement this week included this: “On behalf of the former trustees and patrons, we share in the relief that the Charity Commission confirmed they will be conducting a robust inquiry. We fully expect it will unveil the truth that collectively forced us to resign. What has transpired over the last week has been heartbreaking to witness, especially when such blatant lies hurt those who have invested decades in this shared goal.” Blatant lies! Tell ‘em. Anyway, the mood within the British tabloids has really shifted over the course of the week. To the point where the Mail ran this exclusive in which sources question whether Chandauka really had the board’s authorization to go on that consultant spending spree:

Prince Harry fell out with the boss of his beloved charity Sentebale partly due to her high spending on business consultants, insiders have claimed. They claim the acrimonious boardroom battle that caused the Duke of Sussex, his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, and the charity’s trustees to mass resign from their roles was due to financial worries and disagreements.

The chair of Harry’s charity Dr Sophie Chandauka, 47, has spent more than £427,000 on consultant fees since she took on the post in July 2023, according to The Times.

Sentebale’s latest accounts show it only earned a total income of £3.41million, leaving some in the organisation concerned due to the high spending on consultants. The consultants were employed to pursue a strategy to get donations from wealthy individuals and foundations in the US, but sources close to former trustees told the BBC they had not delivered results. They claim that if the US fundraising strategy had worked this crisis in running the charity might have been averted. Although a spokesman for Sentebale told The Times that the board ‘acted collectively on major decisions’, a source close to the departed patrons suggested otherwise.

They told the paper: ‘It’s important to note that this decision was made unilaterally, without board approval.’

The highest bill on consultants was for £185,000, which was paid to Lebec, a ‘woman-led strategy firm’ founded by Alix Lebec, a former asset manager who has held leadership roles at the World Bank and Water.org. A spokeswoman for Sentebale told MailOnline the charity’s board was ‘aware of and approved the contract with Lebec’.

The charity said it hired US firm Lebec to help build a new fundraising strategy, and that by October 2024 a team of six consultants had set up 65 key relationships with potential Sentebale donors. It said the 12-month deal with Lebec, a women-led strategy firm, had successfully delivered ‘successfully delivered against every single deliverable’. The spokesman added: ‘Lebec provided the positioning strategy, the tools, and the insights to enter the US market successfully and with credibility.’

However, further analysis of Chandauka’s tenure in charge of the charity, which began in July 2023, are limited because the financial accounts for 2024 have not been published. The latest publicly available financial accounts date from August 2023, which means Chandauka had only been chairwoman for one month when they were released. When asked by MailOnline when the next accounts would be published, Sentebale stated it will be in the third quarter of 2025.

The charity said its fiscal year had been adjusted to align with the calendar year resulting in the 2023/2024 annual report covering 16 months to align with a fundraising cycle in the US. Prince Harry and his co-founder Prince Seeiso of Lesotho, 58, alongside all five of the charity’s trustees, resigned last week rather than remain involved with Chandauka as chair.

As someone who’s been following this story very closely, I find it very interesting that there’s no consensus on the issue of “did the board approve of Chandauka’s consultant expenditures.” The former trustees are clearly telling media outlets that no board approval was given, but the now Chandauka-controlled Sentebale comms office keeps insisting that the board approved all of her expenditures (and she’s also bizarrely claimed that she raised money specifically to pay consultants??). This should be an easy thing to prove, unless Chandauka is doctoring the Sentebale documents. But even then, the former trustees will have their own records and their own memories of what they voted on and when they learned of these expenditures. The excuse for why the 2024 financial records are not available is also pretty f–king shady, and I hope the Charity Commission gets into that as well. Still, I don’t believe that a British commission will investigate everything in good faith. I still believe that Seesio and Harry will eventually have to sue Chandauka.

Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Sky News screencaps.