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An investigation into Humana People-to-People. the Teachers Group and the international Tvind movement.

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DAPP / ADPP

Posted by admin On November - 28 - 2009

Development Aid from People to People

Ajuda de Desenvolvimento de Povo para Povo

Africa

Links have been restored



DAPP and ADPP are Humana’s African local ‘aid agencies’ that run schools, colleges, orphanages, aid projects, clothes and shoes shops on the Teachers Group’s behalf  in Angola, Botswana, Congo, Guinea Bissau, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

DAPP sign outside Ponesai Vanhu college

Teachers Group members are always in charge and administer budgets set by Humana People-to-People, disbursing money from clothes sales and donations.    Project leaders are employed by DAPP / ADPP offfices.


In 2007 the Teachers Group registered a new clothes charity, DAPP UK, in Britain. This is the first UK charity registered by the TG since the Charity Commission closed down Humana UK in 1997.

DAPP was also the name of a Teachers Group offshore company registered in the Cayman Islands.



HOT MONEY

How DAPP project leaders unwittingly finance the Teachers Group

An explanation



DAPP project leaders are all members of the Tvind Teachers Group. Originally they were mostly Scandinavians and other white people who trained with Tvind and were sent to work in Africa.  Recently Tvind has been recruiting many black people from poor African countries such as Cameroon and Tanzania into the Teachers Group, who serve the same purpose.

The purpose is to ‘externalise’ money from DAPP / ADPP  into offshore accounts, by using a simnple salary scam.

While volunteer ‘DIs’ (‘Development Instructors’ – who are not members of the Teachers Group) are unpaid, the permanent Teachers Group DAPP/ADPP project leaders are handsomely paid – often enormous salaries, we are told up to twice the normal value in hard currency that aid workers might expect to be paid, or similar to the wages paid to foreign staff by the United Nations and the very biggest NGOs.

These huge salaries give rise to a clever money transfer which over 30 years is thought to have raised millions of dollars for the Teachers Group’s offshore accounts and private businesses, in a ‘foreign salary scam.’

It works like this:   the Humana ‘charities’  and DAPP / ADPP raise hundreds of thousands of dollars from old clothes bins, shops, donations and fees, which is supposed to be distributed as foreign aid by DAPP / ADPP in Africa.   According to the books, the money should be used to pay ‘project leaders’.

But it isn’t.     Yes, according to the books, the project leaders get large salaries.      But as members of the Teachers Group, they have agreed to work for nothing.   And that’s what they get – nothing.     Instead, virtually all the salary money goes into special, secret bank accounts from where, we believe, it is almost certainly spirited out of Africa  into a Teachers Group offshore account or trust fund somewhere in the Caribbean, where it can be used for – well anything the Teachers Group leaders decide.

This could include financing commercial farms, buying property, purchasing the fleet of four-wheel-drive Mercedes commonly used by the most senior Teachers Group leaders, or servicing the debt on a luxury yacht.     Some of the money is undoubtedly used for the vehicles and comfortable homes enjoyed by the most senior (European) project leaders resident in Africa.  Yes, a few senior Teachers Group members may receive a reasonable reward, but the rest just get pocket money.

The UK Charity Commission investigation

During their 1997 investigation of Humana UK and DAPP Zambia, the UK Charity Commission discovered and reported on the Teachers Group salary scam.  As a result of their investigation, Humana UK and two schools in Britain were wound up.     Otherwise nothing has changed.    Why the Charity Commission closed down Humana UK


Danish police investigation

In their 2001 evidence for the fraud prosecution of Amdi Petersen and other Teachers Group leaders, the Danish police Department of Serious Economic Crime also refer to the salary scam method of creaming off money from Teachers Group projects.     Danish police evidence.




HOT MONEY

The Angola cashback

Britta Junge, a Teachers Group project leaderfor DAPP  in Zimbabwe and Angola during the 1990s, has described how part of her job was to smuggle large sums of cash secretly from Angola to Europe, apparently to help pay for secret Teachers Group land deals.

Much of the money had been donated to ADPP by multinational oil companies working in Angola for local project work.

ADPP Angola and the oil money

Britta Junge’s story




HOT MONEY

DAPP and the The USDA ‘Food for Progress’ grants

Since 2005 Planet Aid has received millions of dollars each year in funding from the USDA’s Food For Progress program. This is a programme by which U.S. agriculture commodities are provided for the benefit of developing countries. The USDA donates the produce directly to NGOs.    DAPP in Malawi and ADPP in Mozambique are responsible  for distributing it and using it effectively, or selling it to fund development.

In 2004 Planet Aid received only ’soya produce’ which it used in its ADPP soy restaurants in Africa.     Since 2005, USDA has made grants of wheat instead, which Planet Aid was told to sell in Mozambique and Malawi.   But since Planet Aid started receiving money and not produce, a strange thing has happened.     As the grant funding increased, the percentage of funds Planet Aid donated to the developing country projects from its used clothing proceeds has gone down.    Read more.




Last revised 26th February 2010

Do you have any ‘hot money’ information on DAPP?  Please tell us.

Humana People-to-People – accounts in Switzerland

Posted by admin On November - 28 - 2009

Humana People-to-People

Clothes collections and volunteering

Links have been restored





Humana People-to-People has placed tens of thousands of clothes bins throughout Europe.

  • In 1997, after a fraud investigation, Humana UK and two Tvind-run schools in Britain were closed down by the British Charity Commission.
  • Humana France ceased collections in 1996 after French authorities declared it was a cult, and removed its tax-exempt charity status.
  • In Belgium, Humana was placed on a parliamentary list of cults in 1996.
  • The German government and BER, a consortium of 70 Berlin aid charities, both declared in 2009 that Humana Germany was ‘not serious aid organisation‘ and should not be supported.

‘The Federation for the Associations Connected to the International Humana People to People Movement.’

This is a ‘federation’ of 36 constituent organisations. Member organisations are required to pay an annual ‘membership and program facilitation fee’ that we calculate to be around 5.5 per cent of their income from grants and donations.

Since around 2001 the ‘Federation’ has been based at an address in Switzerland which it shares with a mysterious trust called ‘Humana and Planet Aid Financial SA’.

Switzerland is of course a notorious centre for hot money transactions. See: Hot Money – Planet Aid Inc.


Humana Headquarters, Zimbabwe

Read about this expensive complex here


Do you have information on a TG company? Tell us.

Last updated: 25th February 2009

Gaia Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action

Posted by admin On November - 28 - 2009

‘Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action’

Clothes collections

Linke have been restored

Material needs updating


‘Gaia Movement Trust’ is a name attached by the Teachers Group to various ‘charity’ used clothing collection businesses. In the United States, it is a company based in Chicago which is putting out hundreds of clothes boxes throughout the USA.  In Britain, students are invited to take part in the ‘Gaia movement’, leafletting and sorting old clothes. Gaia advertises that it collects ‘for the environment’, but there is no evidence that it supports any actual environmental work and it is associated with a Swiss-based private trust.




TOP US MEDIA REPORTS


12th February 2004

The Green Bins of Gaia (Chicago Tribune special investigation)

By David Jackson and Monica Eng. A very well researched two-part special focusing on Chigaco’s Gaia recycling bins, that also provides a detailed analysis of the Teachers Group and exposes the links between Gaia and Planet Aid.   Gaia’s clothing collection business flourishes in Chicago, but its promises to promote the environment are questionable. Meanwhile, the organization’s leaders are under criminal indictment in Europe.

December 2006

Behind the Green Box (CBS 5, San Francisco)

TV report by Anna Werner.   In this season of giving, a new charity in the Bay Area is welcoming volunteers and clothing donations through its green-colred bins with the friendly Gaia label. But behind the green box, investigative reporter Anna Werner uncovers a Danish organization. (No longer online)




GAIA’S CLAIMS




This is the message that appeared on Gaia boxes when they began appearing in around 2000.

The Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action

What exactly is behind this strange name, and why is there a Swiss flag on the box?   When we investigated in 2000, we found the Gaia-Movement Trust to be located in a rented room at the World Trade Centre building in Geneva, Switzerland.   Switzerland is of course a notorious base for secret ‘hot money’ transactions, and the Teachers Group has several trusts and companies here.

We spoke then to a lawyer handling their affairs.  Mail was then being forwarded to a Humana address in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, also a mail box.   This man told us then there was no sign of any charity work. With one exception, all but one of the trustees were Teachers Group members.

The ‘environmental projects’

What are these environmental projects?  How much of Gaia’s profit is actually spent on them?    We are extremely sceptical of Gaia’s claims to be any kind of genuine environmental movement.

Recent postings on the Gaia-movement web site, for example, claim one of the beneficiaries is an environmental reserve in Brazil.    In fact, the property they refer to is commercial a fruit and eucalyptus plantation, Fazenda Jatoba, owned by the Teachers Group through its Jersey-based offshore company Fairbank, Cooper and Lyle.    As far as we know there has never been an independent audit of any of Gaia’s  ‘environmental projects’.  We feel it is likely that any money or ‘volunteers’ despatched to Brazil, for example, would simply contribute to running a commercial farm.

In the past, supposed environmental projects investigated by the police have turned out to be elaborate fronts for money laundering.   According to the 2001 Danish police report, the Teachers Group used  front companies and bogus ‘environmental charities’ (that did not exist at all) in Paris, Malaysia and Fiji to illegally transfer money out of charity funds to buy property.       According to this report, that the Brazilian plantation is simply a commercial enterprise.



THE SWISS TRUST


Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action is registered as “a private Swiss ‘association’, founded in May 1998 with an address in an office building near Geneva airport.

All but one of its ten founding trustees are senior Teachers Group members. They include two, Jonas Israel and Søren Sørensen, on our list of the top 30 Teachers Group members.    Israel runs a forestry company in Malaysia, McCorry Limited,  and Sørensen manages commercial plantations in Belize.

Hot money: In Britain, Gaia and Green World Recycling Ltd (both Teachers Group entities) pay royalties to the Swiss trust for the use of the Swiss flag logo.



PIRATING OF ‘GAME MANAGEMENT AFRICA’



Game Management Africa by Mike La Grange is a paperback manual on how to manage, feed and transport wild animals.  It is rather a practical volume, printed on cheap paper, full of photographs of elephants, wildebeest and hippopotami – the sort of reference book you might find in the office of a zoo.  Mike La Grange is (or in 2000, was) a well known safari park manager in Zimbabwe.

A copy of Game Management Africa was found by chance by a contact at one of the clothes recycling companies in the UK in 1999.    The striking thing about this copy of the book is that it is prominently badged on the front cover with the Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action logo and Swiss flag, with the words ‘A GAIA Movement Production’.   It gives the clear impression that the book is a joint production between Gaia and Mr La Grange.

The trouble is that it is not.     It now appears that the edition of the book is a ‘pirate copy’ – or at least that Gaia’s claims to joint authorship are misleading.     We managed to contact Mike La Grange.  Over a crackly mobile phone line from Zimbabwe, he confirmed that he is the suthor of the book.    But he had never heard of GAIA and he could not recall any agreement with anyone to publish a special copy of the book.     After a moment’s thought, however, he recalled having met ‘some Danes’ in Harare, who had paid him a certain amount of money to reproduce the material.

We do not know why Gaia-Movement Trust Living Earth Green World Action would want to claim authorship of a book on game management.   Being apparently joint authors of a scholarly work on game management would, of course, be a very useful tool for fundraising and gaining credibility for an organisation claiming to be an environmental and wildlife charity.

The only connection between wildlife in Zimbabwe and the Teachers Group that we are aware of are reports that there is a small animal park at the Humana People-to-People headquarters in Shamva, Zimbabwe.



GAIA IN THE USA


Who runs Gaia in the USA?



Eva Nielsen. When we last investigated, the CEO of Gaia in Chicago was Eva Nielsen, who has been with the Teachers Group for more than 30 years, and was one of the original signatories of the financial fund Faelleseje in 1977.  According to the records, she is a former teacher at Tvind schools and subsequently a project leader  in Honduras, Armenia, Africa and India.

Helle Lund. Another leading manager, Helle Lund, was the company secretary and a director of Humana UK in 1997, when it was closed down by the British Charity Commission.



GAIA IN THE UNITED KINGDOM


Links with Green World and other companies

Gaia in the UK does not appear to have a formal company registration and is not a registered charity. It is run in close association with other Teachers Group used clothes in the UK, Planet Aid, DAPP UK, and Green World Recycling, and the Teachers Group college CICD.
It is especially linked to a company called Green World Recycling Ltd. The Gaia logo and Swiss flag appear on Green World recycling Boxes on roadsides throughout England, and Green World was making exactly the same environmental claims as Gaia in the USA when its boxes started appearing in Britain in around 1998.
Volunteers attracted to volunteer for ‘the Gaia movement’ in the UK have described being made to work for long hours in terrible conditions putting out leaflets and collecting and sorting used clothes. At various times ‘Gaia’ has accommodated students in extremely basic conditions in houses in Stockton, Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham.

Linda’s story




OTHER REPORTS


Chico, California: The Gaia clothing bins may be easy to use, but their environmental impact has been questioned (News Review, Chico.com, 19th November 2009)

Sonoma Index-Tribune (14th Sept 2004)   Bins Fund Siskiyou Nonprofit. By Sarah Berkley. Story questioning link between Gaia clothes bins in California and CCTG.

Wisconsin State JournalRecycling Group Meets Resistance (7th April 2002)

The Independent on Sunday (UK):   Charity’s recycling claims mislead public (17th December 2000)



Do you have information on a TG company? Tell us.

Revised: 28th February 2010

Planet Aid

Posted by admin On November - 28 - 2009

Two Planet Aid organisations:


Planet Aid Inc, USA

501(c)3 based in Massachusetts


Planet Aid Ltd, UK

Limited company based in Corby




Last revised 26th February 2010

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