Complaints by a former charity boss against The Sun newspaper have been rejected by the media watchdog.
The Independent Press Standards Organisation did not uphold any of the complaints brought by Wilson Chowdhry in response to a story published in the tabloid last year.
Chowdhry, who was director of the British Pakistani Christian Association until 2019, claimed that the story, headlined ‘Charity Chief Resigns Over Sex Slave Affair’, breached media rules on accuracy, privacy, harassment and the treatment of children. But Ipso did not uphold any of these complaints.
The regulator found that the Sun story did make an error when reporting the year in which the Charity Commission started investigating the BPCA but said this was not “significant” to the article as a whole.
A compliance case undertaken by the Charity Commission, which finished in 2022, found that the BPCA board lacked the expertise to “protect people who came into contact with the charity” but said that its safeguarding and governance had improved during the inquiry.
The commission later acknowledged that it “could have been clearer” in its communications with a whistleblower at the charity.
Chowdhry complained to Ipso about the Sun story on his own behalf and on behalf of his daughter, with whom the reporter spoke while preparing the article.
Chowdhry told Ipso that he quit the charity “of his own volition” and not because a whistleblower had complained to the commission about his behaviour.
IPSO found that the timeline of events in the Sun story were supported by both Companies House records and accounts given by the Charity Commission.
But The Sun did concede that “the article was inaccurate to report that the [commission] probe began ‘last year’, in 2021” when it started in 2019.
The report said the paper “amended the online version of the article to make this clear once the inaccuracy was brought to its attention via the Ipso process”. Ipso agreed that the error did not substantially impact the story.
Ipso also concluded that the reporter had not breached any rules when he phoned a number he believed belonged to Chowdhry and spoke instead to his 18-year-old daughter.
The Sun said that it had nothing to add to the Ipso judgment, which the paper said “speaks for itself”. The BPCA did not respond to a request for comment.
Editor’s note (24 February): Article amended to clarify that the Charity Commission opened a compliance case into the BPCA. It did not open a statutory inquiry