The founder of an animal rehoming charity has been banned from being a charity trustee for 15 years because of her role in serious mismanagement of the organisation.
Capricorn Animal Rescue and Sanctuary, which operated an animal rescue service in north Wales, was founded by Sheila Stewart in 1983.
The regulator opened a regulatory compliance case into the charity in January 2016 after public complaints about the charity, unfavourable media coverage and parliamentary interest.
The commission escalated the case to a statutory inquiry the following year and appointed an interim manager to run the charity in July 2018.
The regulator’s report of its inquiry into the charity said it had uncovered multiple incidents of misleading annual returns and high trustee turnover.
The commission said the charity had 18 different trustees between 2015 and 2018 and frequently did not have enough board members to operate properly.
The regulator’s report says the charity filed its accounts late with the commission for every one of the financial years from 2007 to 2015.
The commission concluded there had been “significant failings in the governance and management of the charity”.
This included a failure by trustees to manage the charity’s resources responsibly, exposing its assets and reputation to unnecessary risk through inappropriate banking and cash-handling practices, the regulator said.
It said the charity had “inappropriate banking and cash-handling procedures, which allowed a former trustee to make cheques out to a family member and to cash”, and cash to be taken from the charity’s shops prior to banking, breaching cash-handling policies.
There were also serious welfare concerns highlighted by the RSPCA about the charity’s management of its animal sanctuary.
The regulator concluded that Stewart “held a dominant position among the trustees and was a significant driving force in the operation of the charity” and she was disqualified from being a charity trustee or from holding a senior management position in a charity for 15 years.
But the regulator noted that the “failings detailed in this report may not have occurred had those other trustees in post over the period of the charity’s operation effectively fulfilled their statutory duties and been actively involved in the administration of the charity”.
The commission’s interim manager concluded that it was necessary to close the charity and in November 2018 the sanctuary it operated was shut down and about 140 animals were rehomed with the help of the RSPCA.