It is two years to the day since Kids Company gave itself up to compulsory liquidation after a financial meltdown.
Now Camila Batmanghelidjh and the charity’s nine trustees all face potential bans from holding other company directorships for up to six years.
Yet according to the former boss, life is no less busy than it was and is filled with much the same kind of work.
“What we have been doing is running a food bank, handing out food,” she told The Times this week. “I have been working with a small team in the last two years, stabilising the kids we could reach after Kids Company closed, because the local authorities were not picking them up.”
As well as several distribution centres in London, including Harrow and Loughborough Junction, there is one in Bristol. Former staff members of Kids Company have also been directly working to connect children to solicitors who can pursue proceedings to help them.
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“It is a small team and one by one we connected to solicitors for a social work assessment so that there could be a judicial review of the local authority,” she said. “I dealt directly with about ten kids. Everything has been kept very discreet, I can’t share information. The Kids Company closure was so malicious, it is a very hostile climate.”
Two years ago as Kids Company closed, a leaked email from Ms Batmanghelidjh to her former staff detailed the boss’s desire to “save elements” of the charity by “getting different philanthropists to fund them”.
It was reported at the time that the replacement would be called Kids Dining Room yet Ms Batmanghelidjh said this week that project would only be launched after the release of her book, Kids, due at the end of the month.
“I am not taking any money from the book. The intention is to use the book for the Kids Dining Room. The kids miss that drop-in space they had,” she said.
The government deemed the charity worker unfit to lead Kids Company when it became concerned that the organisation was financially unsustainable. The charity has been accused of extravagance and chaotic management.
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The Insolvency Service announced this week that it would bring proceedings against Ms Batmanghelidjh and the nine trustees. But she said: “When the book comes out you will see the other story. I think right now there is a great injustice perpetrated against these trustees. People are not aware of what happened behind the scenes with the government.”
A number of trustees face their careers being ruined by the case, in particular Erica Bolton, who is director of four arts PR companies, Vincent O’Brien, an accountant who was made a director of Wimbledon Park Golf Club last year while running two businesses, and Francesca Robinson, who, according to Companies House, is director of nine recruitment businesses.
Ms Batmanghelidjh said life “had not changed that much” since the closure. “You do not have the structure of working for a company,” she said. “But I have been just as busy doing the direct work with kids and writing the book.”