A judge will decide this week whether to allow a judicial review into the way the Charity Commission handled its report into Kids Company.
Kids Company closed abruptly in 2015 after a series of media reports alleging financial mismanagement and safeguarding failures.
In February this year, the commission published a long-awaited inquiry report into the charity, which found that Kids Company collapsed in part because of its reliance on a “high-risk” business model.
Founder Camila Batmanghelidjh has always denied claims that the charity, which received £46m in public money over 20 years, was mismanaged. Her lawyers started legal proceedings against the commission in March.
She told Third Sector that a hearing on whether to grant permission for the judicial review had been scheduled for Thursday 8 December, at which a judge will hear arguments from representatives of Batmanghelidjh and the commission.
Judicial reviews examine the lawfulness of decisions made by public bodies but do not consider whether or not those decisions were right or wrong.
She said that she was bringing legal action because she wanted to ensure the regulator was “transparent, fair and is not swayed by political drivers”.
The commission’s inquiry into Kids Company concluded that the charity was reliant on a “high-risk” business model and may have survived the media storm, or wound down its services in a more orderly way, if it had built up financial reserves.
The inquiry report was published after the High Court dismissed a bid by the government to disqualify Batmanghelidjh and Kids Company’s trustees from holding senior roles in the charity sector in the future.
That judgment found the charity’s finances were not unsustainable and that it had collapsed because of “unfounded allegations” against Kids Company.
Batmanghelidjh told Third Sector that the commission’s inquiry “did not do a proper or fair investigation of what happened at Kids Company” and “dishonoured” the work of her staff.
She also claimed that her lawyers had not been given access to all of the documents they requested from the commission ahead of the hearing.
“We are completely in the dark. We are asking for the paper and they are not being released,” Batmanghelidjh said.
She repeated her belief that Kids Company had been victim of a “smear campaign” while it was still open and added: “I believe that the [charity] sector needs a commission that is transparent, fair and is not swayed by political drivers.”
The commission did not comment on the details of the case but confirmed that the hearing would start on Thursday.