A letter to parents from Haberdashers' Aske's gave details of a £914,000 fraud and warned against speaking to the media - according to a report in the News Shopper newspaper. The letter said: 'In October 2012, we discovered that a serious financial fraud had been committed by an employee of the Haberdashers’ Aske’s Federation... over a period of seven years, during which time the perpetrator appears to have set up a large number of small fraudulent transactions in order to commit these crimes unnoticed.'
The paper said: 'The Met Police have confirmed an investigation is ongoing and that a 55-year-old man from Lambeth was arrested in October 2012. He remains on police bail and is due to return to a police station later this month.'
The fraud was mentioned in the trust's latest set of accounts (page 7).
Unlike the fraud at St Aldhelm's - where cash was stolen specifically from funds allocated for development - here it is not yet clear how each of the MAT's academies may have suffered from the fraud and whether the losses have been distributed fairly.
The News Shopper reported a spokesman for the federation saying: 'The civil case found in favour of the federation, and we are in the process of trying to recover the money that has been taken from us.'
The federation's accounts do not show a breakdown of central service charges or the funds held by each academy or the trust itself. The accounts mention this issue on page 9, saying that the conversion to a MAT only came into force on 16 Sept 2013, at the end of the last financial year. However I was not aware that multi-academy trusts or federations that have historically produced consolidated accounts would remain exempt from providing these details.
These issues have recently been put to Haberdashers' Askes' Federation but as there is a police investigation supplying answers may not be straight forward.
Mentioned:
Adrian Percival
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