Bringing Home The Bacon

A Charity a Chanel Clad Lady Meyer a Scandal

A charity, a lady, a scandal
By Michael Ezra,
May 31st 2011

A charity is often a very good cause. Whether it be assisting the aged, abused children, mentally handicapped, a repair for a local place of worship, cancer research, starving kids in Africa, or a plethora of other causes, we can understand why someone is shaking a tin for loose coins or requesting a cheque, a standing order payment or a prize to be auctioned or raffled to raise funds for the charity. If we have not heard of the charity, possibly because it is small, but the cause sounds reasonable and those associated with it include the great and good, then we may make a donation without much further investigation. This could be a big mistake.

I bring to your attention the charity PACT: Parents & Abducted Children Together. The website of the charity informs us that PACT “works with the government, the police and other NGOs to improve the way in which missing childrenís [sic] cases are handled, so that they can be rapidly located and retrieved unharmed.” Abducted children: a fine charitable cause. Tesco is associated with the charity. Among others, the trustees of the charity include the author Barbara Taylor Bradford, a former head of Special Branch in Northern Ireland and Sir Christopher Meyer, former British Ambassador to the United States. This is not all because the patrons include both Cherie Blair, wife of a former British Prime Minister and Laura Bush, wife of the former American president. A very credible selection of people.

Those that donate money to charity, however wealthy they are, have limited funds to donate. A donation to one charity means a smaller or no donation to another. If asked by a friend or acquaintance for a donation to PACT, a charity founded in 1999 by Lady Meyer, the wife of Sir Christopher Meyer, one might have done so in the belief that their donation was doing good. But was this really the case?

As the accounts of the charity show . . . more

Flouting the Telegraph's Memory Hole

The article the Telegraph tried so hard to make disappear.

Cherie Blair steps down as a patron of Lady Meyer's charity

Cherie Blair steps down as a patron of Pact after figures showed the lion's share of its income was going to its employees
By Tim Walker
09 Jan 2012

Without any fanfare, Cherie Blair has stepped down as a patron of the charity Pact which is presided over by Lady Meyer, the wife of Sir Christopher Meyer, formerly Our Man in Washington.

Mrs Blair’s name is no longer on the list of patrons on the charity’s website and Catherine Meyer tells Mandrake: “There is no comment I wish to make about this”.

The former prime minister’s wife chose not to speak out in defence of Pact when Mandrake disclosed last year that all but £9,500 of the money received in donations by Pact, which stands for Parents & Abducted Children Together, was paid to Lady Meyer, who is the chief executive, and to one member of staff. The latest figures from the charity showed that Lady Meyer, who is also its president, and her employee were paid a total of £49,586. Lady Meyer received almost 70 per cent of that sum. Pact’s income from donations was £59,056 and it received a further £38,234 in grants.

The Meyers and the Blairs had enjoyed a close relationship, but it had become strained after the publication of DC Confidential, a memoir by Sir Christopher which was less than flatttering about Tony Blair’s government. Sir Christopher’s appearance at the Chilcot Inquiry, when he said that a year before the Iraq war Blair had “signed in blood” a deal with President Bush to overthrow Saddam Hussein — a charge that the former prime minister denied — led to a greater froideur.

“We are doing a huge amount of work for very little salary,” Lady Meyer said in response to my story last year. “I used to work in the City and earned much more.”

H/T Maren. Courtesy of http://themaddiecasefiles.com/topic17499.html

Original Telegraph article - the Wayback Macine.

Meyer now has its own tag. Please see previous posts for relevance.





Follow on

Cherie Blair is in no hurry to speak up for charity boss Lady Meyer

Cherie Blair, a patron of Lady Meyer's charity, Pact, has failed to make a public show of support after questions were raised about the charity's finances.

By Tim Walker
25 May 2011

When Mandrake disclosed that Lady Meyer faced searching questions about the finances of her charity, Pact, she might have expected its patron Cherie Blair to issue a fulsome statement in her support.

Fourteen days later, however, the wife of the former British ambassador to Washington Sir Christopher Meyer is still waiting for a public endorsement from her.

“Cherie is very proud of her charitable work and takes it very seriously,” says a friend of the wife of Tony Blair. “She wouldn’t dream of being paid by her own charity.”

As I reported, all but £9,500 of the money received in donations by Pact, which stands for Parents & Abducted Children Together, was paid to the Chanel-clad Catherine Meyer, who is the chief executive, and to one member of staff.

Lady Meyer, who is also its president, and her employee were paid a total of £49,586. Lady Meyer received almost 70 per cent of that sum. Pact’s income from donations was £59,056 and it received a further £38,234 in grants.

The previous year, Lady Meyer and the employee were paid £63,877, even though the income from donations was a mere £6,036. That year, the charity, of which Sir Christopher is a trustee and a member of the management committee, received £20,823 from the City Bridge Trust.

“We are doing a huge amount of work for very little salary,” she said. “I used to work in the City and earned much more.”

Her husband, and six of Pact’s 11 trustees, added in a letter: “We consider it to be at the low end of the pay scale for chief executives of charities with a demanding brief.

“She recommended reducing her salary in 2010 because of the difficulty of fund-raising in the harsh economic times.”

On Tuesday, Mrs Blair’s spokesman said she was still unavailable for comment.

The Wayback Machine

Lady Meyer Kate McCann Now I See

'Twould appear that Lady Meyer's chum, newly appointed Ambassador for Missing Children, Kate McCann, have one or two things in common, not least, lining their pockets with other peoples' money. One without a doubt fraudulently, and t'other, how shall a describe it? Perhaps I don't need to, you might glean your own description after reading the text.

But the "now I see" certainly seems to ring a bell, could it be . . . . ah yes! I remember now, I have employed that phrase before, let me go and seek it out.

Here you go, The McCann Connection: Now I See

PACT: Matthew Steeples Exposes PACT - LADY MYER And Her Charity - Nothing More Than A Sham.

Published BY Matthew Steeples. 2011

I am Matthew Steeples and having seen this I thought I should explain how I came to be involved with a charity that turns out to be a sham. I met Lady Meyer with mutual friends in 2004. She was charming and polite and I had no reason to doubt her or her motives. She had just returned from Washington, where her husband had been an ambassador at a most interesting time in history. She was a good conversationalist and well versed. He had interesting tales to tell. She told of the problems she’d had “recovering” her children. When she explained what, she claimed, happened, I thought “how awful” and felt her plight. She mentioned she was having a fundraising ball at The Dorchester and asked if I would like to come. I attended along with friends. Between us we spent £1500 on a table.

I now cannot comprehend why I then continued to believe this lady and her nonsense for six years, but sadly I did. I supported Lady Meyer’s events initially just by attending, but invited her to a dinner I gave above the Ferragamo showroom in 2005 and at this point she persuaded me that I should become more involved.

She asked me to get involved in fund raising for PACT. I should have asked to see PACT’s accounts. I did not and there is no excuse for that. It is a lesson I will take forward with me and I urge others to do the same. Do NOT donate to a charity without knowing that the majority of funds raised actually goes to the cause rather than on salaries. Over the following years I, without charging the charity a single penny and believing that Lady Meyer did the same, I helped organise:

PACT with STARS, Ralph Lauren, 25th May 2010; PACT Barbecue, Firehouse, 10th July 2010; PACT Emilia Wickstead Fashion Show, Papillon, 23rd April 2009; PACT Speed Dating, Firehouse, 20th November 2008; PACT Speed Dating, Stanza, 7th February 2008

At most of these events, the majority of attendees came from my address book and those of my friends and so to did the majority of donations. My friends were also duped by the supposedly charming Lady Meyer and her infectiously enthusiastic manner. They handed over cash, paintings, prizes and gave time to create drawings for another fundraiser. They gave up their time, they wrote letters supporting PACT and most of all they believed in Lady Meyer and her cause. They, like me, wanted to support missing children. In addition, Lady Meyer took advantage of my personal connections to help her in other ways. She was determined to forge herself a new career and I involved her in a project I had been approached about. Strangely the people who I was dealing with pulled out after meeting her. I think I now know why. Though she now states “I used to earn a whole lot more in the city”, in relation to her charitable salary, this successful company didn’t want anything to do with her.

At Christmas in 2009, the Meyer pair had nowhere to go as the Eurostar was cancelled and their planned trip to Paris couldn’t happen. I invited them into my home for the day. In the six years I knew them, never did they invite me to dinner in their home and I can only think of a couple of occasions where I was a guest at a lunch or dinner – and I wonder now who really picked up the bill.
The first cracks came in April 2009 when a good friend had a very public row with Lady Meyer. Letters were exchanged and I told this individual how wrong he was. It was me that got it wrong though and for that I again apologise to my friend.

……Cont

Something previous, only an hour or two ago as it happens. Down The Telegraph's Memory Hole

Matthew Steeples blog

Down The Telegraph's Memory Hole

Update below

Three pages from the Daily Telegraph, appear to have vanished without trace.

Odd that.

And I did, to no avail, try a direct search of the Telegraph's Website. Even odder

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9000854/Cherie-Blair-steps-down-as-a-patron-of-Lady-Meyers-charity.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8505534/Ambassadors-wife-faces-questions-over-Bush-and-Blairs-charity.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/8534133/Cherie-Blair-is-in-no-hurry-to-speak-up-for-charity-boss-Lady-Meyer.html


Links were posted here.

http://jillhavern.forumotion.net/t4168-cherie-blair-steps-down-as-a-patron-of-lady-meyer-s-charity

I shall be more than prepared to remove this post, if it me that is in error.

A tweet from researcher extraordinaire Win @Winnower1 - http://newsoutlines.blogspot.com/

Telegraph articles whooshed- 2 verifiable: journalisted.com/article/2xtzj / journalisted.com/article/1z83j / Last one effectively wiped from net

I can't even find the last one in Proquest or elibrary. Still looking. Good censorship effort

Kate McCann Becomes Ambassador For The Charity Missing People. Odd Choice That

How to get your message across without getting wound up. Not something I manage to do in the main.

Kate McCann Becomes Ambassador For The Charity Missing People. Odd Choice That
July 12, 2012

R.F.Wilson writes from London: Pardon me for asking but what exactly was Kate McCann thinking when she agreed to become the ambassador for the charity Missing People that deals with issues concerning people going missing. How did it actually play out between her and her public relations advisors? And what was the charity itself thinking when it offered Kate the position of its ambassador? Because let’s face it, she’s not exactly the best person by far to advice anyone on missing people, having left her own kids without supervision when one of them, 4-year-old Madeleine, went missing.

The whole point of preventing people, especially children, from disappearing is to keep an eye on them or, failing that, hiring someone to do that. Kate and her husband Gerry failed to do both of these thing when on a sunny day in May 2007 they decided to leave their children all by themselves in their holiday apartment in a Portuguese sea resort to have dinner with friends.

The McCanns seem not to understand that they are coming across as pretty unpleasant people, having joined the celeb circuit with the help of some dodgy public relations weasels, who obviously had good contacts in the media. Luckily for them Rebekah Brooks, the vain and unintelligent editor of the Sun newspaper, decided that Madeleine’s disappearance would be a great story to run, for weeks and months, with the two parents sharing their grief with the world but never mentioning the fact that they were the main cause of it. It was only a matter of time before the search for Maddy turned into some sort of international public relations campaign, with McCanns getting all offended if anyone dared to point out to them that they should really start grieving in private and raise money to fund their search in a less obvious way.

But encouraged by their advisors the couple pressed onwards, irritating more and more people for obvious reasons. It became pretty clear at some point that Madeleine was dead and that efforts by her parents to keep the interest in her fate alive smacked more of a publicity campaign than of a proper search. And when Prime Minister David Cameron decided to intervene, probably pushed to it by his friend, Rebekah, and ordered a full blown investigation by Scotland Yard into Madeleine’s disappearance, it all started to look distinctly unpleasant. Why should 40 odd investigators be spending their time looking for a child who had disappeared because her parents decided to have some fun and not spend any money on a nanny who was available at their holiday home? It actually looked bizarre, this decision to reopen the case at a cost of millions. It smacked of some perverted sense of justice, if justice is a proper word here.

The McCanns, who are obviously not very intelligent people, can’t seem to understand that their behaviour is offensive to people, who have lost their children through no fault of their own and yet didn’t make a huge fuss of it in public. And both Kate and Gerry should realise that under the circumstance they should be blaming themselves and calling on others never to leave their kids alone. Instead, they pretend to be victims of tragic circumstances rather than accept that they are the ones who are responsible for what had happened on that day. stirringtroubleinternationally