In this article you will understand…

• How the Insolvency Service’s behaviours can destroy your life if they illegitimately target you. 

• How the Insolvency Service attempted to destroy the lives of innocent executives at the Kids Company charity.

• Like the above, how the Insolvency Service tried to destroy the painstaking work of Lighthouse International Group (now Lighthouse Global), in particular through not investigating the provable lies of predatory trolls against us but instead outright accepting those lies as fact.

• The scathing judgements from the judge that arose from the Insolvency Service’s attempt to disqualify the executives at Kids Company at a cost to the taxpayer of over £8.6m. Ironically, this should be grounds to wind up the Insolvency Service themselves!

• How we are responding and holding the Insolvency Service accountable for their corruption and attempts to cover this up!

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the tyrannical modus operandi of the Insolvency Service and how the public is at the mercy of such unscrupulous behaviour. As a public institution, the Insolvency Service’s existence is to serve the public. However we will show how they serve themselves and prey on innocent people and businesses without the resources, expertise and reach needed to adequately defend themselves. This tyranny operates through being predisposed to making decisions that suit their institutional agenda and targets and, as a result, they are tyrannical, oppressive, unfair and unbalanced in their dealings.

A Brief Overview Of Kids Company Case

It is likely that Kids Company never expected, after more than 20 years of doing vital work helping the most vulnerable children, that they would be subjected to unfounded allegations of sexual assault within the organisation. These unfounded allegations led to a media witch hunt, which we are only too aware of given our experience at Lighthouse. In our case, provable and malicious lies by ex-clients insinuating to be creditors and investors in the company Lighthouse International Group, rather than the straight forward customers that they were.

This greatly valued charity was suddenly put under immense financial strain due to the depth of the negative publicity which led to donors withdrawing financial support and the charity struggling to meet its obligations. The Insolvency Service then stepped in, inexplicably and ridiculously arguing that the CEO and its trustees were to blame for the charity’s precarious financial position, despite them being commended for over two decades of life-saving work as a charity. 

The Insolvency Service took the CEO and Trustees of Kids Company to court in order to disqualify them from being able to have similar positions in the future. The CEO was the late Camilla Batmanghelidjh and the trustees included senior public figures such as Alan Yentob, who had previously been Creative Director of the BBC. Do you think that Camilla Batmanghelidjh, who was seen as a national treasure, ever expected for the media machine that had supported her to turn on her so viciously overnight as they did? It is highly likely that the stress of being turned into a pariah when she was trying her best to help children contributed to her death. Just as sad is that, when she won this case and was exonerated, the legacy media did not turn around and apologise to her. As can be seen here, she tragically passed away having had her reputation destroyed. 

One rule for them, another rule for others. One consequence for them, severe consequences for others.

At the end of the court case, the Insolvency Service were severely criticised by the judge that presided over the trial. Mrs Justice Falk found numerous areas where she was deeply concerned as to their conduct. In particular, the judge highlighted in detail their actions that demonstrated their lack of character and competence, which therefore led to a massive degree of unfairness, imbalance and bias in relation to their investigation. Especially in relation to the evidence they presented to the courts.

One such example from the judge (and there are more throughout this article) is as follows…

“I was not persuaded that sufficient regard had been paid to the duties not to overstate the case against the defendants, to put it in a balanced way, and not to omit significant evidence in their favour. I should emphasise that this is not intended to be a criticism of Mr Hannon [The Official Receiver] for the Insolvency Service as an individual – for example, as mentioned above, the investigation was not all conducted under his leadership – but of what I infer is a broader issue of training and understanding within the Department.”

Remember…this article is not just about the injustices that Lighthouse and Kids Company have faced! It’s about what can happen to any organisation that finds itself at the end of false allegations from those with a sinister motive, or even those making mistakes in good faith that suddenly gain unwanted negative traction online. Just as viral news can be positive, it can be destructive too! Therefore everyone needs to protect themselves from this threat, which is why we are building a groundswell movement and community. The express purpose of this groundswell is to hold public institutions accountable where they are refusing to take responsibility, to protect ourselves as everyday men and women from their bureaucratic tyranny and malpractice and to support other victims of such tyranny.

As you will find below, we demonstrate the wickedness of the Insolvency Service and how they attempted to destroy over 20 years of our groundbreaking research into the realisation of human potential.

Why Does The Case Of Kids Company And The Case Of Lighthouse International Group Matter To You?

As we will show, the Insolvency Service has now set a precedent as to how they will act with extensive bias and prejudice towards those they want to investigate. 

One day you could be going about your everyday business, working hard to achieve your dreams and then out of the blue, you receive a letter from the Insolvency Service that turns your life, literally, upside down.

How much emotional strain and pressure could you handle if you were ever subject to a malicious and unfounded investigation based on severe inaccuracies, distortions of truth and outright falsehoods? Your family? Do you have the financial, material and time resources to deal with it? 

That’s what happened to us at Lighthouse International Group (now Lighthouse Global), provably innocent people. What we are about to present throughout this article is something that could happen to anyone with a business, especially a small to medium size business with stretched resources. Because anyone can maliciously report false accusations and allegations against you which can trigger an investigation. 

We at Lighthouse, a micro-entity, never thought we would be in a situation where, after nearly 20 years of mostly uneventful operations, we would be in front of a judge having to defend our accounts and accounting procedures as a Micro-LLP of 20 or so Associate Partners. A company so small, that in some years we had less than £10,000 go through our accounts as a whole because we were operating as a research and development organisation, or what we would term, a pre-startup company! 

We have learnt the hard way through our experiences with this so that you don’t have to. As we will show you through the 4 points below, when the Insolvency Service comes for you arbitrarily and prejudicially, unless you have the expertise, the support and the resources to defend yourself, they know the court processes and procedures expertly enough to manipulate the system to your extreme detriment.

Don’t let this happen to you…join the Groundswell to protect yourself and take a stand!

The 4 points are as follows..

I. The Insolvency Service has a culture of being institutionally oppressive and as a result, they display a severe lack of humanity. This results in a lack of balance and fairness towards those they target and treated them as guilty until proven innocent. This is reflected in how they present evidence to the court which then affects the legal process of how the case will be dealt with. Given most defendants don’t have the resources and expertise to defend themselves (usually costing millions) they are at the mercy of a complex system of rules and regulation that they are unable to fight against.  

II. The Insolvency Service distorts the reality of the cases they present to the courts in line with their institutional agenda by manipulating the evidence. They do this through being deliberately selective in the information they present as well as describing the context of this information in the most sinister way possible. This leaves those without the resources to employ expert advisors costing millions, virtually no chance to defend themselves and places a great deal of pressure on all areas of their life.

III. The Insolvency Service lacks a pragmatic understanding of how the organisation that they are targeting operates. Therefore they struggle to empathise with those in charge of making decisions in these organisations and the commercial realities and pressures that give context to these decisions. In effect the Insolvency Service operates within an ivory castle.

IV. Even when it is demonstrated that there are reasonable, pragmatic commercial reasons for the decisions taken in an organisation, the Insolvency Service refuse to listen. Because of their institutional oppression, the Insolvency Service are predisposed to the agenda they have and won’t accept any facts or evidence that contravene this. As a result they often act with a great deal of incompetence.

Point 1 – The Insolvency Service is institutionally oppressive and as a result lacks balance and fairness. The evidence it presents to the court will affect the outcome of the case especially when the defendants don’t have the resources and expertise to defend themselves (usually costing millions).

This type of behaviour from the Insolvency Service was clearly seen in the case of Kids Company, where Mrs Justice Falk explicitly stated that the evidence collated by those at the Insolvency Service was deliberately presented in a biased way, in order to launch legal proceedings against Kids Company. Everything was presented to make the actions of Kids Company executives and employees seem more deliberate and sinister than they actually were. This was an institutional and systemic problem that is widespread within the Insolvency Service, not because of a few rogue employees! The judge criticised the lack of care shown by the Insolvency Service to be fair and balanced towards those organisations they are targeting, which was mentioned numerous times in her report.

In the case of Lighthouse International Group, we have witnessed and experienced first hand just how unfair, unbalanced and oppressive the Insolvency Service can be. Like most bureaucracies they don’t practise any empathy to genuinely understand the individual situations and circumstances that the human beings they’re dealing with are going through. 

What makes the Insolvency Service’s oppressive regime even worse is that they are predisposed to making decisions without investigating the facts. We told them explicitly that the complaints against us were lies from mostly vindictive ex-client predatory trolls (that we could identify and show evidence for) who wanted to abuse and freeride on state resources in order to avoid having to use their own time, money and effort to go down the appropriate legal channels. As a result, the Insolvency Service spent millions just trying to find out whether we have done something wrong or not. Yet they didn’t spend even 1% of that on checking the validity of the accusations and their sources, which would have been a lot cheaper. In fact, in court the legal counsel for the Secretary of State mentioned several times that he and they still did not really know what they were looking at in regards to Lighthouse International Group. This is why they had to seek a judgement purely based on a technicality.  

As will be shown through what Mrs Justice Falk said, the Insolvency Service will find a way to place the blame for their mistakes on someone else and scapegoat them, rather than take responsibility. The Insolvency Service will do this regardless of the consequences that will have on their scapegoat and the price those like Lighthouse and Kids Company will have to pay because of that! Their modus operandi is to do whatever it takes to justify their expensive resources, even if that’s just to find a technicality to achieve this. 

In Lighthouse’s case what we suffered was not the result of a legitimate ‘investigation’ by the Insolvency Service into Lighthouse International Group. Instead it was, as stated above, a bureaucratic governmental process that had been falsely and maliciously triggered by a small group of vindictive ex-clients trying to force undue and unlawful refunds out of Lighthouse. It also involved malignantly toxic family members trying to keep narcissistic control of a sibling / their adult children involved with Lighthouse, by destroying the support Lighthouse was giving them.

Despite us telling the Insolvency Service’s investigators how much pressure we were under because of the malicious smear campaign decimating our business, including the fact that two Associates had attempted suicide because of the pressure from these attacks, the Insolvency Service psychopathically did not care. 

This is the kind of bureaucratic inhumanity that the public are growing increasingly sick of. The Insolvency Service had their organisational targets and were not going to let up, however much pain and pressure we were under. They knew all the processes and the tricks of a legal system they could leverage and therefore abuse in order to ‘win’ at our expense. That included the particular way they presented information to the judge on the first hearing so that key evidence would be ‘put aside’ (ie. ignored) by the judge for a further hearing, thus sidestepping the very grounds for the case even being brought in the first place. Their targets and justifying their very expensive actions were what motivated them, not justice, truth and fairness!

Do not find yourself being at the mercy of governmental agency targets and legalism without the groundswell of support, resources, expertise and reach. Join the Groundswell. 

Evidence from Mrs Judge Falk in relation to Insolvency Service Tyranny 

You can see in the judge’s own words how the Insolvency Service manipulated evidence to suit their own oppressive agenda. We ourselves were shocked to read her words on this because we didn’t realise how prevalent the abuse of process from the Insolvency Service actually is!

The extracts from Mrs Justice Falk in the trial of the Insolvency Service v Kids Company CEO Camilla Batmanghelidjh and its trustees on 12th February 2021 that prove the points above are:

“My perception is that more emphasis needs to be placed on the requirements of balance and fairness in assembling reports and other evidence. This affects the investigation process – for example the choice of whom to interview and the questions asked – as well as the content of the documentary evidence.”

“I was left with a strong impression from Mr Hannon’s evidence that his report had been produced, and reworked, very much with an eye on the team within the Insolvency Service that would (at the direction of the Secretary of State) authorise him to launch proceedings, and would approve what period of disqualification should be recommended.”

“Mr Tatham [The Deputy Official Receiver] was aware of the requirement for fair presentation of evidence, but appeared not to have a full grasp of what this involved, for example the need to avoid selective quotations which could risk giving the reader a misleading impression. More significantly, the narrow focus on adherence to keeping Kids Company Approved Judgment Company’s policies for distributing financial assistance did not in my view result in a balanced representation in Mr Tatham’s report of the findings of various external reports about the charity’s operations that had been undertaken during or close to the period in question, and in particular what the Trustees might reasonably have derived from those reports. 

“Mr Hannon’s first report and Mr Tatham’s [for the Insolvency Service] report ran to over 600 pages in total, with over 18,000 pages of exhibits. There is a risk that the overall length and structure of reports and exhibits, and thus the presentation and conduct of the case overall, can amount to oppression. Real care is needed to minimise the risk of that occurring. An obvious example in this case is the significant proportion of Mr Tatham’s report dealing with individual clients, in a way that was at best disproportionate to the very limited role that that evidence properly played.”  

In relation to the Insolvency Service analysing the costs of Kids Company “Although the Official Receiver strongly disputed that this was the case, it is frankly very hard to resist the conclusion that the conduct of this part of the case was oppressive.” 

“Generally, I was concerned that both Mr Hannon and Mr Tatham appeared to have had insufficient appreciation of the importance of the duty to present the case in a balanced way. There is no reason to doubt that this reflects a wider issue within the Department, rather than individual failings.” 

“This point is not simply a matter for the court. The content of the Official Receiver’s reports determined the decision by the relevant team to permit the proceedings to be brought, and the decision about the period of disqualification to seek. It must be borne in mind that, for proceedings of this nature with potentially penal consequences, the existence of the proceedings themselves can have extremely significant consequences for defendants. In many cases there will also be no review by the court, because the defendant chooses to accept a disqualification undertaking.” 

“The decision whether to bring disqualification proceedings should be reached with real care, with proper regard to all relevant issues. The information presented to enable that decision to be made should be presented “warts and all” to ensure that the decision to proceed, which requires a conclusion that a disqualification order is “expedient in the public interest, is fully informed.”

Camila Batmanghelidjh founder and former CEO of Kids Company, speaking to press after being questioned by the Commons public administration committee. The committee questioned her about how taxpayers’ money was used. Outside Portcullis House, Westminster, London in October 2015.

Point 2 – The Insolvency Service distorts the reality of the cases they present to the courts in line with their institutional agenda by manipulating their evidence. They do this by being deliberately selective in the information they present. This leaves those without the resources to employ expert advisors costing millions, no chance to defend themselves because the legal system is so complex.

How did this apply to Kids Company?

In the case of Kids company, the judge noted that the Insolvency Service was deliberately selective with the information they gave to the courts. She also noted that the CEO and Trustees of Kids Company were in the fortunate position to have had expert advisors (which cost a collective total of £8.2 million) and even then, they and the courts struggled to understand the evidence presented by the Insolvency Service, such was the bias involved from them. We at Lighthouse were in a far worse position as we had no resources to employ specialist expertise and so we were already playing on a very losing wicket before we even got to court!!

How does this apply to Lighthouse?

Once the Insolvency Service believes something, no matter how much logic and valid counter evidence they are presented with, they have shown consistently that they will deliberately ignore truth-based evidence, simply because it doesn’t suit their agenda. What exacerbates this fact, is the extent they will go to in order to preserve their bias and prejudice, including how they portray their evidence and manipulate it to seem like they are being fair. It really is shocking!

For example the Insolvency Service’s investigators took the payments that  Lighthouse’s clients had made for services they had received and said that this constituted them being shareholders in Lighthouse itself! That is despite us telling them that we had evidence where we told these ex-clients in writing that they were paying for mentoring services only and where the ex-clients themselves have no evidence to back up any status as a shareholder or creditor too.

If you do not have the expertise, the resources, the support, the reach – you are at the mercy of their corruption and abuse of power!

In the case of Lighthouse International Group they deliberately didn’t interview our predatory trolls despite the extensive evidence (over 600 pages) we gave them categorically disproving the lies of the predatory trolls that their entire investigation was based on! This is because they weren’t prepared to be fair and unbiased. Their individual investigators subjectively fell for the lies and weren’t open to the truth. They played judge, jury and executioner. The chief investigator, Gary Seymour, even factually referred to the ‘complainants’ in his witness statement as ‘victims’, without any objective corroboration of this, him having seen zero counter evidence. All the investigator had to work on against Lighthouse was a handful of similar hearsay claims and some very weak and manipulated supporting material that, as one complainant Jeffrey Jones even stated, was deliberately missing context. 

The extracts from Mrs Justice Falk in the trial of the Insolvency Service v Kids Company CEO Camilla Batmanghelidjh and its trustees on 12th February 2021 that prove the points above are:

“The requirement for the Official Receiver to present a balanced case extends to submissions on his behalf. Whilst this group of defendants were fortunate enough to be well advised, I think it would have been difficult for many defendants to ensure that sufficient context was provided in connection with individual criticisms, and to ensure that other relevant documents were identified which could cast a different light on documents on which the Official Receiver placed particular emphasis. Even with assistance from the defendants’ advisers, it was frequently a challenge for the court to seek to ensure that, overall, it had a balanced and fair understanding of the overall position in this case.” 

“The [evidence] reports also included a significant number of quotations, which contributed to length. Two difficulties with these were, first, that they showed a tendency to be selective, such that a reader who did not consult the underlying document could well be left with the wrong impression, and secondly that it was often not possible for the reader (including in particular the defendants) to determine without further enquiry whether the Official Receiver was asserting the truth of the content of all or part of the quotation. Both aspects are unsatisfactory”

“Mr Tatham’s key criticisms about missing records in relation to clients appear to have been made without the benefit of interviews with staff members who might have been best able to assist in relation to that topic, and with what seems to have been insufficient weight placed on Mr Kerman’s views. Ms Jenkins was also not interviewed, which given her role during key periods and in respect of key events (including the 2012 statutory accounts, the 2014 Budget and the cash forecast produced for the July 2015 restructuring) appears to be a surprising omission.”

Point 3 – The Insolvency Service lacks a pragmatic understanding of how the organisation that they are targeting operates. Therefore they struggle to empathise with those in charge of making decisions in these organisations and the commercial realities and pressures that give context to these decisions. In effect the Insolvency Service operates within an ivory castle.

How did this apply to Kids Company?

In the case of Kids Company, the Insolvency Service had an obsession that the charity ought to be treated as a normal company, despite not being one! They made false assumptions and never questioned themselves or their paradigms because of their institutional arrogance.They completely ignored the commercial realities and challenges that Kids Company had needed to deal with as vital factors in the case, especially when children’s wellbeing, not to mention lives were at risk.

How does this apply to Lighthouse?

Despite this belligerent lack of understanding, the Insolvency Service still inappropriately, unreasonably and arrogantly have the confidence to believe that the Directors/Trustees of an organisation they are targeting are doing something wrong. As a result they don’t question whether they have made a mistake or aren’t considering/aware of something they ought to be.  

In the case of Lighthouse International Group they continually told judges for both hearings that they didn’t understand our business, despite us giving numerous explanations and analogies of what was a fairly simple and straightforward structure. The truth is they were either playing dumb on purpose, or they obtusely didn’t want to understand our organisation. The latter would be because they had a preconceived notion they had derived from the lies our predatory trolls had told them and whom they wanted to believe. In fact, they needed to believe them in order to justify the great expense they had been to in ‘investigating’ us and to avoid accountability for a huge mistake. Allowing themselves to effectively be weaponised by lying and vindictive individuals is a very serious, costly and embarrassing blunder by the Insolvency Service, but that is exactly what they have done.  

Lighthouse sent the Insolvency Service 600+ pages of evidence and information on how our organisation is run and its aims. All of this was consistent with such a small entity as ours and the information they had. However, this extensive evidence was conveniently ignored by the Insolvency Service so they could falsely portray to the judge that our business was operating in an underhanded and somehow sinister way! The reality is that we have been slogging our guts out for years and years, making incredible levels of sacrifice, trying to operate at cost and mostly running at a loss. Sound familiar? Anyone in business would relate to this.

The extracts from Mrs Justice Falk in the trial of the Insolvency Service v Kids Company CEO Camilla Batmanghelidjh and its trustees on 12th February 2021 that prove the points above are:

“I was struck by the lack of experience that the Official Receiver had in relation to charities, in particular the failure to give full recognition to the fact that it is common for charities to be heavily dependent on donations, and the apparent difficulties that both Mr Hannon and Mr Tatham had with the concept of wholly non-executive boards of directors. I think this affected their approach and, for example, contributed to some inappropriate assumptions being made as to what should have been done by the Trustees.”

“As already indicated, it is the responsibility of the Official Receiver to adduce evidence on which the court may rely in determining both whether each individual director is unfit and the length of disqualification that is appropriate to that individual. More should have been done to reflect the requirement for the court to consider the position of each director individually and determine whether the conduct of that person makes him or her unfit, and the length of any disqualification order that is appropriate for that individual.”

Point 4 –  Even when it is demonstrated that there are reasonable and pragmatic commercial reasons for the decisions taken in an organisation, the Insolvency Service refuse to listen because of their institutional oppression, as a result the Insolvency Service are predisposed to their agenda and won’t accept any facts or evidence that contravene this. They often act with a great deal of incompetence as a result.

How did this apply to Kids Company?

In the case of Kids Company, they tried to suggest it was unreasonable for the CEO, who was a very well known and trusted public figure, to fundraise for the charity. That is like saying that a Premier League football team should not play their star striker now, because he may become injured one day in the future. It lacks complete logic and lacks commercial understanding that business and organisations have to operate within. Yet despite their lack of competence they have the audacity to think they know better and are in the right.  

Much of Mrs Justice Falk’s damning judgements were focused on the overall incompetence of the Insolvency service and a number of specialist technical areas with related jargon. Hence they are not appropriate for a general article like this. Nevertheless, even the layman can understand in principle that a charity relying on their audited accounts that they pay for financial assurance on, is not an incompetent offence! Yet once again the Insolvency Service tried to portray this as incompetence on the behalf of Kids Company. Their lack of common sense is truly bewildering.

How does this apply to Lighthouse?

In the case of Lighthouse International Group, the Insolvency Service is obsessed in their belief that we have creditors and shareholders we are withholding funds from. This is despite us showing them that this is certainly not the case and is also completely illogical. It would be like saying that a customer of a restaurant is also a shareholder of the restaurant just because they have bought a meal there! Yet the Insolvency Service refuses to listen and see the reality and the rationale behind this too. The likely reason is because to concede a significant error of judgment will unravel their litany of errors and failures in our case and the inevitable compensation and job losses that will result from that. 

The extracts from Mrs Justice Falk in the trial of the Insolvency Service v Kids Company CEO Camilla Batmanghelidjh and its trustees on 12th February 2021 proving the points made above are:

“Mr Hannon was also unable to assist the court in understanding the distinctions drawn between the length of disqualification sought for each defendant. I accept that the length of disqualification is a matter for the court (and therefore for submissions) rather than the Official Receiver’s report, but it must be the responsibility of the Official Receiver to adduce evidence on which the court may rely in determining both whether each individual director is unfit and the length of disqualification that is appropriate to that individual. In any event I would expect the Official Receiver to be able to explain the different lengths of disqualification that he had sought when asked. It is, after all, his case.”

“When challenged about the rationale for much of the content of his report, particularly that in relation to individual clients, Mr Tatham’s consistent response was that he had been instructed to investigate whether the charity had adhered to its policy and processes for distributing financial assistance. His report was therefore directed at that issue. In fact, much of the content of Mr Tatham’s report, which includes over 100 pages and extensive exhibits relating to specific clients, does not sit comfortably with the single allegation as put to the defendants, and the confirmation at the PTR that individual items of expenditure were not being challenged” 

“The Official Receiver specifically criticised dependence on Ms Batmanghelidjh’s fund-raising abilities. That is rather unreal. This was someone who, even on Ms Lloyd’s evidence, was a phenomenal fundraiser. It was fully recognised both by Ms Batmanghelidjh and by the Trustees that she could not carry on fundraising as she had indefinitely, but the charity can hardly be criticised for making full use of her fundraising skills while they were available, at least provided appropriate consideration was given to plans for the future (as I conclude that the Trustees were attempting to do).”

“First, it was apparent that Mr Hannon had never dealt with the failure of a substantial charity. His only experience was of charities where the directors also had significant executive functions. He was evidently not familiar with the concept of a charity board being comprised entirely of non-executives.”

“More generally, it was unsatisfactory that Mr Hannon was unable to give a proper explanation in oral evidence of the basis on which different periods of disqualification were being sought for the Trustee defendants.”

Why Is Groundswell So Desperately Needed For You, For Us, For The Public?

Everyday men and women are at the mercy of a bias, highly resourced, powerful governmental agency that has the ability to shut them down, or at least destroy their reputation at will. With most businesses struggling to make ends meet, the prospect of fighting a legal battle alone would decimate the vast majority of businesses. This is exactly why we need to build strength in numbers, to ensure these tyrannical agencies know there are no more easy targets.

It’s vital that we build the resources and influence necessary to hold these institutions accountable when they wield such power so tyrannically that innocent members of the public end up paying dearly for their institutionalised mistakes; unrighteously, immorally, unethically and unjustly. These institutions, like the Insolvency Service, have gotten away with such immoral and unethical practices for so long because of their faceless size and nature. There are thousands of people who work for them and so the chances of individuals being held personally accountable as an example for the rest, is remote!

Occasionally the odd person may be held accountable, as in the case of Kids Company, where the Official and Deputy Receivers were held thoroughly accountable for the bias of their work. Not anymore! This is changing under our campaign to change this and bring about reform. Groundswell is about both helping keep these institutions accountable, ensuring they undergo healthy levels of reform where necessary and also, most importantly, supporting those people who are or have been victims of those tyrants. 

No one ought to not have the resources to be able to defend themselves and where they do not, as in Lighthouse’s case, that ought to be supplied by the state. Putting someone through an investigation, simply because someone else (who goes unscrutinised and unchecked) has pointed a finger and accused you is totally unjust. Whether such claims are false or not, the process they go through will put any individual, family, small business, or a small community through hell, just in order to find out whether those people who pointed the finger are lying or not. That is DESPOTIC! It is a demonic and heinous act of so-called punishment in itself. Such sources and accusers must be investigated first and their claims and motives verified before any further action is taken against a company, especially in the cancel-culture society we are now living in.

The people in institutions like the Insolvency Service have consistently demonstrated they are blind to this and so far, no one has stepped up to hold them accountable. That is until we came along and now many others will be joining us in this and the more we pull at this thread the more it is only going to unravel and reveal more.

Together we will have a voice loud and strong enough to make a difference and through the Groundswell community we are growing this worldwide.

Conclusion

It can clearly be seen through the pages and pages of scathing commentary by the judge in the Kids Company case that the Insolvency Service has a real problem with not being oppressive in their intentions and actions and hence fair and balanced, right from the start of an investigation. From our experience they will immediately take a position because of their biases in order to achieve their organisational targets and goals and then become subjectively fixated on that position, no matter what alternative objective evidence is given that refutes this. The Insolvency Service also really lacks the ability to understand the context that commercial decisions are being made within. That’s why they will zoom in on technical rules that they know virtually every business and organisation won’t be able to comply with.  

As you can see with the case of Kids Company, the individual directors collectively had the means to afford lawyers and advisors which cost them collectively over £8m! However, very very few people have these kinds of resources. Indeed many of the Kids Company Trustees had very senior business positions and some had even been CEOs of FTSE100 companies. Yet even these people struggled with the trauma of such an oppressive ‘investigation’ – for example, Alan Yentob’s involvement with this investigation effectively ended his career at the BBC. What hope is there then for the rest of us?!?

We urge you to understand from this just how easy it is for tyrannical institutions like the Insolvency Service to attack you, your reputation and your organisation too. The Insolvency Service has the apparatus and resources of the state behind them with which to investigate you. There is virtually nothing you can do about it once they begin. The trustees of Kids Company were senior and respected people in their industries and, as we’ve said, even they struggled. Indeed many believe the death of Camilla Batmanghelidjh, who died recently, was tragically because of the immense stress in dealing with the Insolvency Service witch hunt against her and the media storm that then surrounded and exacerbated that.

While the Insolvency Service is very much a needed public service, it must be reformed. Clearly there is a very real problem with the character and competence of many of those involved which is clearly demonstrated through their biased and prejudiced belligerent attempts at the disqualification of Kids Company Executives, as we have shown.

Would you trust them to be fair and balanced with you?

We implore you to protect yourself by joining our groundswell. Give yourself the insurance and assurance of having a whole community behind you ready to fight back against such agencies when they use you as the next easy victim. Don’t become another case for them to tick off as a statistic on their yearly targets!