Three former trustees of a charitable school have been disqualified for a total of 32 years after the Charity Commission found “repeated and significant failings” at the charity.
The regulator said in a inquiry report that trustees of the now-defunct Albayan Education Foundation, which ran the former Birmingham Muslim School and provided aid to people in Syria and Turkey, had been responsible for mismanagement and/or misconduct.
The commission opened a statutory inquiry into the charity in 2018 after what the regulator said were “persistent failures by the trustees to carry out actions directed by the regulator to improve the governance and management of the charity over several years”.
The regulator said the school, which closed in December 2019, failed to comply with five separate directions from the Department for Education to improve the standard of education provided and several reports from the education regulator Ofsted, which rated the school as inadequate.
The commission said the trustees failed to adequately oversee the charity’s operations in Turkey or Syria.
“This was demonstrated when the commission’s investigation identified photos of an employee of the charity, who had travelled abroad on behalf of the organisation, assembling firearms at the Atma refugee camp in Syria,” the commission said.
“This finding led to significant concerns by the regulator around whom the charity partnered with to facilitate its work overseas.”
The commission also said the interim manager appointed by the regulator during the inquiry found that the charity had no list of its overseas partners or records of the due diligence checks completed on these partners, despite earlier advice and guidance from the regulator on those points.
The regulator said Janet Laws, who was chair of the charity and acted as headteacher of the school on a voluntary basis, was “particularly responsible for its failings in relation to the school and overseas operations, given her role in the charity”. She was given a 12-year disqualification from being a trustee or senior manager at any other charity.
The charity’s two other trustees, Ahmed Abdulhafeth and Ali Qasem, were each disqualified for 10 years.
Stephen Roake, head of compliance, visits and inspections at the Charity Commission, said: “The trustees of this charity did not carry out their legal duties – repeatedly failing to meet the standards required in their role in managing the charity’s school and showing a concerning lack of oversight in relation to the charity’s operations overseas.
“What we found here raised serious regulatory concerns about the charity’s operation and, in relation to its overseas work, affirms exactly why a charity must have robust controls in place, especially when it operates in high-risk areas of the world.”